The Missouri Republican Party has given the national party permission to begin spending money on behalf of U.S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley prior to the Aug. 7 primary, despite the fact that 10 other Republican candidates are still vying for the party’s nomination.
The move, which the state party has done just twice before in the past dozen years, was confirmed by a state party spokesman Tuesday.
“President Trump has endorsed Josh Hawley, and as was the case in 2006 and 2010, the MOGOP Executive Committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of our leadership signing a letter authorizing the RNC to spend on Hawley’s behalf before the primary,” the spokesman, Chris Nuelle, said in a statement.
The decision drew condemnation from Austin Petersen, one of the other candidates seeking the GOP Senate nomination for the right to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., in November.
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“This is an attempt to disenfranchise the voters of Missouri,” Petersen said in a written statement. He accused the state party of using the same tactics that the Democrats used against insurgent 2016 Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders, “and we all know how the story ends.”
Hawley’s campaign issued a written statement Tuesday evening defending the party’s decision, in a way that appeared to invoke the Todd Akin fiasco of six years ago.
“In 2012, Missouri Republicans failed to beat Claire McCaskill because the party failed to unite and choose a good candidate,” Hawley’s campaign said in its statement. “No Missouri Republican wants that to happen again.”
Akin, a congressman, won the Republican Senate primary to challenge McCaskill that year despite misgivings about his radicalism — then lost badly after he said in an interview that “legitimate rape” rarely leads to pregnancy, a medically unsound trope of the far right.
Hawley, currently Missouri’s attorney general, has garnered the backing of Trump and state party leaders and has led the GOP field widely in fundraising and polling. Petersen is a former Libertarian presidential candidate who has emerged as Hawley’s chief rival for the party’s nomination, largely on the strength of an enthusiastic social-media-based following.
The RNC bylaws include Rule 11, which prohibits the national party from spending on behalf of any Republican candidate prior to the primaries, unless the state party in question gives it a waiver from that rule. The Missouri Republican Party’s executive committee approved such a waiver during a Monday telephone meeting, on a 12-1 vote.
“They felt it was necessary to go ahead of the primary because some polling was showing Hawley at 46 percent and nobody else had hit double digits, so they’re going to assume Hawley is the nominee,” Mark Anthony Jones, the Republican chairman in Jackson County and the sole dissenting vote on the state executive committee, said in an interview.
“I feel like it’s a slap at the grass roots. I’m the only one who spoke against it,” said Jones, adding: “It’s what they do when they get desperate.”
McCaskill is considered by many to be the most vulnerable incumbent Democratic senator in the country this year. But most head-to-head polls nonetheless show Hawley tied at best with her, and his own campaign has been dogged by concerns that it’s lackluster.
In addition to Hawley and Petersen, Republican U.S. Senate candidates on the primary ballot are (in ballot appearance order) Tony Monetti, Fred Ryman, Christina Smith, Kristi Nichols, Bradley Krembs, Ken Patterson, Brian G. Hagg, Courtland Sykes and Peter Pfeifer.