It’s all about the base

Daniel Desrochers
·11 min read
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In Virginia there is a politician named Joe Morrissey.

Morrissey was a defense attorney and served as a commonwealth’s attorney from 1989 to 1993. He had a temper. In 1991, he punched another attorney in the face during a heated argument at a drug trial. In 1993, he was indicted on bribery and perjury charges and lost reelection but was acquitted by a jury after the primary.

He lost his law license, left to teach in Ireland and Australia until they found out he had been disbarred and returned to Virginia.

Through all of those scandals Morrissey remained popular. He ran for the House of Delegates as a Democrat in 2007 and was elected. The Supreme Court gave him his law license back in 2011. He was reelected to a second term the same year.

Then, in 2014, the 56-year-old Morrissey was accused of having sex with his 17-year-old receptionist.

Morrissey denies that they had sex until she turned 18, but he took a plea deal and pled guilty on a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

He was forced to resign from his seat in the House of Delegates after the plea deal and instantly vowed to run in the special election to fill his seat. He ran as an Independent and won from prison, but resigned to run for state Senate later that year and eventually withdrew from the state Senate race.

By then, Morrissey was considered politically cooked. He married his former receptionist (with whom he posed for photos in period clothing) in 2016, when she was 21. They have three kids. He tried to run for mayor of Richmond in 2016, but lost.

He launched a political comeback in 2019, winning a seat in the state Senate where he was again embraced by Democrats. Then he faced criminal charges again in 2020, this time for allegedly campaigning at a polling place.

He is still a state senator in Virginia.

The point here? Never doubt a politician’s ability to survive scandal.

Donald Trump hasn’t lost his base of support in part because they elected him to break Washington, D.C. With every new norm-smashing revelation, he was doing what many elected him to do.

The same applies to House Republicans like Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobert or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Or to New Jersey’s Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who’s entrenched enough that he won reelection in 2018 by around 12 percentage points after he was indicted on bribery charges for allegedly trading political favors for luxury trips.

All of that is to say that if a politician’s core supporters don’t care or don’t pay attention, they can still win. Particularly if there’s a crowded primary field splitting the vote.

In Missouri, there is a politician named Eric Greitens.

He was a rising star in the party, became governor in 2017 and was spoken about as a future president. Then, in 2018, he was accused of sexually blackmailing his mistress. An investigation by the legislature found that he had tied her to pull-up bars in his basement, pulled down her pants and took a picture of her exposed. It found that he forced her to perform oral sex on him.

He was forced to resign as governor after he faced additional criminal charges for campaign finance violations.

He remained popular with some of his core voters and attempted to mount a comeback by running for U.S. Senate in 2022. This week, he was accused of physically and mentally abusing his ex-wife and two children.

He is not dropping out of the race. This week he appeared defiant, casting the allegations as part of a political hit-job by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. His ex-wife’s allegations were made in a sworn affidavit, submitted to a Missouri court as part of the couple’s ongoing custody dispute.

“Eventually truth prevails and if we stay the course we will get them,” Greitens said.

It is not the talk of a man who was going to heed the calls of Missouri’s two senators and all of his opponents to drop out of the race. It is not the talk of a man who would be swayed by national Republicans saying they don’t want his company in the U.S. Senate.

“I think any organized effort could potentially backfire,” said Jean Evans a former chairwoman of the Missouri Republican Party. “They say when your enemy’s digging a hole for himself or whatever, just kind of let him do that.”

Instead, to paraphrase McConnell, the people of Missouri will have to examine the evidence presented to them and decide if they want to send him to Washington, D.C.

More from Missouri

At long last, the Missouri Senate passed a congressional map on Thursday. The vote broke weeks of deadlock that left candidates filing for office without knowing the boundaries of their districts and prompted lawsuits to take map making out of the legislature’s hands. The new boundaries will not gerrymander Rep. Emanuel Cleaver out of the seat he’s held in Kansas City for nine terms.

Here are headlines from across the state:

And across Kansas

A dark money group has been shaping laws in the Kansas legislature since 2011. After Trump lost the 2020 Presidential race, they began promoting bills to restrict how elections are conducted. Last year, they were behind a measure to prevent private money from being used to help fund election administration, based on a conspiracy about Mark Zuckerburg. This year, it’s a bill that would make it harder to vote by mail.

The latest from Kansas City

In Kansas City …

Have a news tip? Send it along to ddesrochers@mcclatchydc.com.

Odds and ends

Long’s almost endorsement

Trump put out a statement in support of Rep. Billy Long Wednesday night that left many scratching their heads, including Long. In it, he asked whether Missouri knew how good they had it in being represented by Long while also explicitly saying he wasn’t endorsing him.

It came after Trump called Long twice in the aftermath of the allegations against Greitens, first on Tuesday night. A day later, Long was walking the aisles at a Walmart in Springfield when Trump called with a heads up that he was putting out a statement Long might like.

On Thursday, Trump (and Billy Long) adviser Kellyanne Conway went on Pete Mundo and treated the statement like it meant Trump was basically endorsing Long. And if Trump doesn’t issue an actual endorsement in the race, it might be the closest thing any of the candidates get.

Legal support

On Sunday, University of Missouri law professor Frank O. Bowman III co-authored a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee denouncing Hawley’s attack on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sentencing record. The letter explains that Jackson’s sentencing practices on child pornography offenders fall within the mainstream of federal judges.

The letter also said that it has long been known by judges, practitioners and the Sentencing Commission that the federal guidelines for non-production child pornography crimes (meaning the person charged didn’t create the image) are defective.

Hawley has repeatedly criticized Jackson for issuing sentences that were lower than what the prosecution recommended in the case.

“This is a puzzling criticism on its face inasmuch as it suggests that the task of a judge passing sentence is not to make an independent determination of the most appropriate penalty for crime... but rather to rubber-stamp the recommendations of the government,” they wrote.

Here’s the letter.

Bowman was also among a group of 56 law professors from Missouri’s four law schools who signed a letter supporting Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Hawley the Attorney General

The Washington Post’s David Weigel pointed out this week that while the focus on child pornography cases may have been a new topic of argument for a U.S. Supreme Court hearing, it wasn’t completely unfamiliar political territory. It comes plucked straight out of the campaign playbook for offices like Attorney General or local judge.

Hawley was Attorney General in Missouri before he ran for the U.S. Senate, and is familiar with how a “soft on crime” argument plays with voters. During his term he tried to focus on sex trafficking to the point where he showed up to an FBI bust of a massage parlor in Springfield one summer day wearing a badge around his neck. The bust did not result in any charges.

His own record has come under scrutiny this week. Missouri lawyer Chuck Hatfield pointed out that Hawley’s office accepted a plea deal from a sheriff in Knox County who charged with sexual assault and domestic abuse that gave him probation instead of jail time. The probation was later revoked because the sheriff didn’t seek treatment. Hawley was also criticized for not doing enough to investigate sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as Attorney General.

Hawley on Herschel

Hawley officially called on Greitens to drop out of the U.S. Senate race this week, saying he believed Sheena Greitens and found the allegations against the former governor serious.

“We’re talking about abusing your wife, abusing a woman, but also child,” Hawley said. “And as I’ve said, I don’t come to this entirely cold.”

But Hawley has backed other candidates accused of sexual assault. In 2021, he offered his endorsement to senate candidates Herschel Walker in Georgia and Sean Parnell in Pennsylvania. Both men were accused of domestic violence. Parnell dropped out after a judge ruled in favor of his ex-wife in a custody case. Walker is still running in Georgia.

When asked why he hasn’t called on Walker to drop out of the race, Hawley said he didn’t have as much detail about the allegations against Walker as he did about Greitens, given their history in Missouri.

“I’ve got some background here and therefore I believe I can form an assessment,” Hawley said. “I was attorney general while he was governor.”

He said he would “monitor” the news about Walker.

Opposing polling

The National Republican Congressional Committee released a summary of internal polling from battleground districts.

All of the words immediately above come with grains of salt:

(1) It’s a poll commissioned by a political party.

(2) We just have a summary of the results, not the actual data.

(3) it’s an amalgam of all of the battleground districts they’re surveying.

Anyway, it showed only 40% of people in those districts approve of President Joe Biden, that 46% indicate they’re most worried about an economic issue and that 75% of voters in those districts will support a Republican candidate who will try to lower the price of gasoline and groceries.

The NRCC says all of those things put them in a good position to take down Rep. Sharice Davids in November.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quickly responded with a press release pointing to a poll by Politico and Morning Consult that showed 73% of voters supported a federal gas tax holiday, which is an idea Rep. Sharice Davids has supported and her Republican opponent has opposed. I wrote about some of the criticism of a federal gas holiday here. Basically its seen as a costly band-aid for a larger problem.

Happy Friday

Here is an article wondering if leopards should be paid for their spots. Former Kansas City Star reporter Bryan Lowry (now with the Miami Herald) is recommending a simple Irish Coffee this weekend. Here’s a song from Stephen Sondheim’s Company (sung by the inestimable Elaine Stritch) for the road.

Enjoy your weekend.

Daniel Desrochers is the Star’s Washington, D.C. Correspondent
Daniel Desrochers is the Star’s Washington, D.C. Correspondent

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