Missouri treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick wins state auditor race, flipping it to GOP control
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State treasurer and Republican Scott Fitzpatrick won the race to be Missouri's next state auditor Tuesday.
A southwest Missouri native, former House budget chair and business owner, Fitzpatrick will serve as the state's elected government watchdog. With his victory, Republicans now hold every statewide office in Missouri; current auditor Nicole Galloway, who had been the lone Democrat, opted not to run for re-election.
Fitzpatrick ran a campaign touting himself as a conservative with experience in both legislative and administrative government, defeating Rep. David Gregory in the Republican primary.
In Tuesday's general election, he won more than 59% of the statewide vote, according to preliminary results, defeating Democrat Alan Green (38%) and Libertarian John A. Hartwig Jr. (3%).
Fitzpatrick has pledged to expand the role of the office with regard to school districts and has expressed a desire to audit curriculum and spending — a function that Galloway and previous auditors have stayed away from while occupying the office, but one increasingly of interest to Republicans seeking to scrutinize public schools.
"We've got over 500 schools in the state of Missouri, and in the last 15 years the auditor's office has only audited about 20 of them," Fitzpatrick told supporters at a rally in Columbia on Monday. "I'm looking forward to working on that as state auditor, working with the legislature to hold school districts accountable for how they're spending their money, make sure they're spending that money to educate kids and not indoctrinate them."
The former leader of the House's budget writing committee pledged to hold state officials local governments to account regardless of partisanship or leadership, saying in a September forum that he wasn't afraid of "making people mad, whether they're Republican or Democrat."
Galen Bacharier covers Missouri politics & government for the News-Leader. Contact him at gbacharier@news-leader.com, (573) 219-7440 or on Twitter @galenbacharier.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Scott Fitzpatrick wins state auditor race, flipping to GOP control
