The pollsters and the pundits have all rated the Missouri Senate race as safe Republican. But that hasn’t discouraged Democratic Senate nominee Trudy Busch Valentine from mounting an energetic uphill campaign to become the first nurse ever elected to the Senate.
Busch Valentine has crisscrossed the state in her campaign RV emblazoned with her campaign slogan, “Nobody's Senator But Yours.” She has refused to accept any corporate PAC money and is not beholden to any special interests. She's visited small towns and big cities, labor union halls, family farms, churches, marched in homecoming parades, and canvassed with downballot Democrats.
If Roevember is for real, Busch Valentine might have a shot at pulling off an upset on Tuesday if Missouri is anything like neighboring Kansas. On Aug. 2, Kansans voted by a 59%-41% margin against a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have ended protections for abortions. Before the referendum, one poll showed the anti-abortion amendment with 47% support, 43% against the amendment, and the remaining 10% undecided.
Missouri’s Republican Senate candidate, anti-abortion zealot Attorney General Eric Schmitt, won the 2020 race for his current position by a margin of 59% to 38% for his Democratic opponent Rich Finneran.
A Survey USA poll conducted on Nov. 2 showed a drop-off in support for Schmitt, who led Busch Valentine by by 50% to 41% with 6% undecided and 3% supporting another candidate. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. And that doesn’t account for any potential boost in turnout by women and young voters.
Many Daily Kos readers probably only know Busch Valentine as the beer heiress who defeated populist Marine veteran Lucas Kunce in the Democratic primary. But Busch Valentine, a Roman Catholic mother of six, also has a compelling backstory. She has devoted herself to a life of service. She graduated from St. Louis University in 1980 with a degree in nursing, worked as a nurse at a Salvation Army residence for abused and neglected babies and toddlers and as a hospice nurse for the Visiting Nurse Service, and earned an masters degree in pastoral studies from the Aquinas Institute of Theology.
As a philanthropist, she has been an advocate for children’s causes and the nursing profession. She donated $4 million to St. Louis University, which renamed its nursing school after her in 2019.
Her first husband, John Valentine, died of cancer when he was 49. She lost her oldest son Matthew to opioid abuse in 2020. In an op-ed piece for the Columbia Daily Tribune, she said one of the reasons she entered the race was “to bring a message of hope to families devastated by addiction.” Her first policy statement was a plan to combat the opioid epidemic.
Both Kunce and Rep. Cori Bush, also a registered nurse, are actively supporting her campaign to flip the Senate seat held by retiring Sen. Roy Blunt.
Kunce is well positioned to be the Democratic Senate nominee in 2024 when insurrectionist Sen. Josh “The Running Man” Hawley is up for reelection. It remains quite likely that Busch Valentine will lose on Tuesday. But at least she and Kunce are working to help Democrats make a comeback in this red state.
When it comes to abortion, the battle lines are clearly drawn. Busch Valentine believes abortion should be safe and legal. She has pledged to “vote to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law and will support efforts to end the filibuster to pass legislation to federally protect the right to an abortion.”
In 2010, Sen. Claire McCaskill won reelection by defeating Rep. Todd Akin, who made the ludicrous claim that women very rarely become pregnant in cases of “legitimate rape.” Schmitt is Akin on steroids.
As attorney general, Schmitt relentlessly tried to regulate out of existence Missouri’s last abortion provider, Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region. And when the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision on June 24, Schmitt immediately enacted an extremist trigger law that bans abortion from conception onward, even in cases of rape and incest. The only exception is for medical emergencies and when necessary to save the life of the mother, but it’s unclear what medical conditions qualify for the exemption. The law makes it a felony to provide an unlawful abortion, punishable by five to 15 years in prison.
Busch Valentine’s latest ad on abortion hits hard as it features a woman from Joplin, Missouri, Mylissa Farmer, who said she was denied an emergency abortion at a local hospital even though doctors had determined that she had lost all of her amniotic fluid because of a pregnancy complication and her fetus was not expected to survive.
Schmitt sent a cease-and-desist letter to get TV stations to stop running the ad, but it continued to run. Then the Missouri health department launched an investigation to determine whether the hospital violated federal health care rules by denying the woman an emergency abortion.
And Busch Valentine has shown that she cares about children outside the womb. While Schmitt was filing lawsuits seeking to stop Missouri schools from imposing mask mandates, Busch Valentine volunteered to administer COVID-19 vaccinations to hundreds of Missourians.
After last month's deadly shooting at a St. Louis high school, she issued a statement supporting passage of "common-sense gun safety measures … including universal background checks, red flag laws, expanding access to mental health treatment, and getting military-style assault weapons out of the wrong hands.”
It just so happens that there’s something else on the Missouri ballot that might help boost turnout among young people: a referendum on legalizing recreational use of marijuana for adults over 21 and provide a path to expunge the criminal record for those convicted of certain nonviolent marijuana offenses.
Schmitt also joined five other Republican state attorney generals in filing a lawsuit seeking to have President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program declared unconstitutional. The lawsuit has temporarily blocked the Biden administration from implementing the debt relief program.
And then there's a question of how many moderate Republicans might cross over to vote for Busch Valentine. Schmitt was among the Republican attorneys general who filed a lawsuit in late 2020 to overturn the results in battleground states won by Biden, which the Supreme Court rejected. He was also vice chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which was involved in a robocall encouraging "patriots" to come to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.
Earlier this month, former eight-term Republican Rep. Tom Coleman endorsed Busch Valentine in an op-ed in The Missouri Times. Coleman wrote that Schmitt is “too extreme for Missouri.”
Coleman added that “the overarching challenge to our nation is whether or not we will continue to live in a democracy” and Missourians need a senator “who will protect them, maintain our liberty and freedoms, and secure our nation. Trudy will be such a senator. Her life has been devoted to serving with compassion those in need of care. Her views are Missouri mainstream. She is ready to nurse our broken nation back to health.”
In his campaign, Schmitt has disparagingly referred to his Democratic opponent as ”The Heiress Valentine,” calling her a radical extremist who is out of touch with the plight of working families. That’s a bit hypocritical since at least three of Busch Valentine’s brothers are Republicans and major donors to Schmitt.
Busch Valentine has been endorsed by the Missouri AFL-CIO as well as many of its member unions. She has a pro-union agenda that includes supporting the PRO-Act to make it easier for workers to organize unions, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, and raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
In an op-ed for the KC Labor Beacon, she wrote: “I saw firsthand the power of labor unions when I was a child and watched my father, Gussie Busch, work alongside the Teamsters to build the world’s biggest brewery right here in Missouri. He understood the dignity that comes along with a job that paid fair wages, offered good benefits, and protected the health and safety of employees. For him, these weren’t just business decisions. It was the morally right thing to do, and I’m so proud of that.”
Schmitt’s father and uncle both worked at Anheuser-Busch for nearly 30 years. Schmitt himself worked as a tour guide at Grant’s Farm, the Busch family estate that Trudy Busch Valentine and some of her siblings preserved as a public attraction and wildlife preserve.
Busch Valentine has characterized Schmitt as an extremist and career politician who is beholden to special interests. And she’s used that in her pitch to rural voters. Busch Valentine herself has a 1,000-acre farm near Rhineland in Montgomery County, which raises cattle, bison, and other animals. She has zeroed in on votes Schmitt took in the state legislature that authorized the sale of Missouri farmland to foreign ownership, particular Chinese entities.
This is not exactly your typical Democratic campaign ad:
And finally, if you judge politicians by whether they’re someone you’d like to have a beer with, it’s hard to top Busch Valentine. She knows how to make beer, pour beer, and drink beer.