Missouri election officials expect as many as 1.4 million voters will cast ballots by the time polls close Tuesday, continuing the historic trend of high turnout in primary elections featuring major ballot questions.
This year, there is no headline-grabbing statewide candidate primary. Instead, two ballot measures — Amendments 4 and 5 — have drawn more spending than in any candidate race.
Local election authority estimates show turnout will vary widely across the state, Hoskins’ office said in a statement to The Independent. Intense congressional primaries are underway in the northern half of the state in the 1st, 5th and 6th districts, plus hard-fought state legislative and local races.
Campaign spending accelerates as Missouri primary election draws near
Turnout is expected to be as low as 20% in some counties and as high as 70% in others, Hoskins said.
Because his estimate is based on local projections, it is only as good as the guesses behind it, Hoskins said. In 2022, turnout was estimated at just under 32% and actual turnout, of about 1 million voters, came in at 24%. There was a crowded U.S. Senate primary in the Republican Party that year but no major ballot measure.
In 2018, there were no high profile candidate primaries, but a right-to-work referendum drew 1.4 million voters.
Reports on early voting from some of the state’s larger counties show high voter interest.
In Boone, Greene and St. Charles counties, the number of people who had voted by the end of last week exceeded early-voting numbers from the 2024 primary.
More than 4,000 people had voted in Boone County by the end of the day Thursday, said County Clerk Brianna Lennon.
“The past two days have been over 500,” she said Friday morning. “I anticipate today will be similar.”
In Greene County, where as many as 55,000 people are likely to cast ballots, more than 4,600 had done so by Friday morning, County Clerk Shane Schoeller said. In 2024, the total absentee vote was just under 3,200.
Early voting ends Monday afternoon at local election offices and designated voting locations in larger counties.
In Missouri’s primary, a voter can request a ballot from the party they prefer — Democratic, Republican or Libertarian — or a nonpartisan ballot with only ballot issues. In Greene and St. Charles counties, a significant number of voters are skipping the candidate races and requesting a nonpartisan ballot.
Of that amount, The Independent’s tracking of broadcast ad spending reports to the Federal Communications Commission shows almost $8.9 million for television and radio ads in the Amendment 5 debate, with proponents holding an edge of about 4-to-1.
On Amendment 4, opponents have had the airwaves almost to themselves, with $3.9 million in spending.
Historic data shows that the voters who swell turnout for ballot-measure primaries lean heavily Democratic.
Greene and St. Charles counties are rich in Republican primary voters. In the past four primaries, an average of 33,403 Republicans have voted in Greene County primaries. In St. Charles County, the average of the past four primaries is 47,666 Republican votes. The highest primary vote in each was in the 2016 primary for governor, when there was no major ballot measure.
Democrats average 11,737 and 20,371 votes in non-ballot measure years in Greene and St. Charles, respectively. That jumps to 19,740 and 35,742 Democratic votes in years with major ballot measures.
Schoeller said almost 7.5% of the ballots cast so far this year have been non-partisan, compared with 0.8% in the 2024 primary.
Missouri congressional incumbents flush with cash heading into primary election
Along with the statewide ballot measure campaigns, congressional and legislative candidates are using airwaves, social media and mail boxes to bombard voters.
More than $6.5 million has been spent on broadcast ads to influence congressional primaries, mainly in the 1st, 5th and 6th Districts.
Almost $2.5 million has been spent on television and radio in the 1st District Democratic primary in St. Louis, with an equal amount spent in the 5th District Republican primary.
In the 1st District, incumbent U.S. Rep. Wesley Bell has outspent former U.S. Rep. Cori Bush by a 12-1 margin. Both have been outspent by the United Democracy Project, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee-backed group that has spent $1.5 million on Bell’s behalf.
In the 5th District, where six candidates are vying to take on U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver in the gerrymandered district, outside spending is also eclipsing candidate spending. Win It Back PAC, supporting state Sen. Rick Brattin, has spent $1.4 million on broadcast ads, while Brattin himself has spent $100,000.
The broadcast spending tally for state Senate races so far is $2.8 million. The largest amount is in the 18th District in northeast Missouri, where more than $720,000 has been spent on television and radio ads for state Reps. Ed Lewis of Moberly, Greg Sharpe of Ewing and business owner Dusty Blue of Mexico, Missouri.
Large amounts from NEMO Leadership PAC, set up to promote the political interests of the outgoing incumbent, Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin of Shelbina, have been funneled into other PACs, named Protect NEMO Values and Let’s Go Brandon PAC, for ads attacking Blue.
The second highest amount of broadcast ads are playing in the 20th District of southwest Missouri, where incumbent Republican state Sen. Curtis Trent is trying to fend off a challenge from Springfield attorney Lori Rook.
So far, $574,000 has been spent on broadcast ads, and Trent has a 2-to-1 advantage in on-air advertising.
St. Charles County is holding one of the most significant local Republican primaries, with former state Sen. Bill Eigel and Lake Saint Louis Mayor Jason Law challenging long-time incumbent County Executive Steve Ehlmann. An Eigel victory is viewed by many as setting him up for a 2028 primary rematch with incumbent Gov. Mike Kehoe.
Kurt Bahr, St. Charles County director of elections, said his office had received more than 14,000 ballots by Thursday afternoon.
“We have already surpassed our 2024 primary absentee numbers,” Bahr said.
Of that number, 8.5% of voters are opting for the non-partisan ballot. That could show a high level of interest in the ballot measures, he said.
“Or the dislike,” he said, “of political parties.”
Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.
Today’s children could be the first generation since the 1970s to do better than their parents as young workers become more sought after and well paid. They may even see a surplus of housing to make their lives even easier after recent shortages.
Some states are already seeing a shortage of young workers. North Dakota and South Dakota routinely have twice as many job openings as people looking for work, and those jobs often require physical labor that AI could never replace. Oil fracking in North Dakota, for instance, is hard, sweaty work, and truck drivers have to move the oil.
The US needs homes. But first, it needs the workers to build them.
“Really a lot of the Midwest is still investigating things like autonomous systems but we’re not really there yet. So labor shortages are a thing and are an issue,” said David Flynn, an economics professor at the University of North Dakota.
Those issues will hit more states, including Washington and Nevada, where people looking for work still outnumber job openings by almost 2 to 1.
Today’s small children have a brighter future economically than any generation since the surge of Baby Boomers aged into adulthood in the early 1970s, swamping the job market and dampening pay for 20-somethings ever since, said Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.
“The second half of the boomers were particularly the victims of this,” Ruggles said. “They got here after things had been going great after World War II and wages had been going through the roof, and then all of a sudden the bottom falls out because there’s too many of them. ”
Ruggles in May published a paper, titled “The pig in the python,” about the slow progression of baby boomers through the national economy, maintaining that a coming shortage of young workers will give them more prosperity.
“We are on the verge of a radical reshaping of labor markets in which new workers will be in extremely short supply,” Ruggles wrote in the report. “We may finally see real (inflation-adjusted) wages of the young exceed the levels of the early 1970s. Americans born in the 2020s might be the first cohort in a half century that earns significantly more than their parents did.”
For the first time since at least 1910, people leaving the labor market will outnumber young newcomers by 2040, and rising pay may not be the only change. Housing could become more affordable too.
We just don’t have the bodies.
– Marcia Goetz Havens, North Dakota Labor Market Information Center
“If construction activity remains elevated, changing demographic trends could lead to a growing oversupply of housing in more markets,” the Mortgage Bankers of America concluded in a June white paper. “We expect that this will lead to falling prices for both single family and multifamily housing at the national level.”
The “potential for oversupply and falling prices” will affect house prices most in states such as Arizona, Florida and Texas because of fast construction — more than Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, where building has been slowed by costs and restrictive zoning, the paper noted.
While the prospect of better pay and lower housing costs is something to look forward to, demographers caution that such a turnaround has been predicted before. Some “really smart economists” turned out to be “dreadfully wrong” in the 1990s when they predicated a housing market crash based on lower demand from aging boomers, said Richard Jackson, president of the Global Aging Institute, a Virginia-based research firm.
Still, the future drop in the numbers of young people is fairly certain, he said.
“Most of the relevant demographics is already locked in. These people have already been born and so absent some Hollywood catastrophe like a colliding comet, we know how many 30-year-olds there are going to be 15 years from now,” Jackson said.
Immigration is also a wild card, with many recent arrivals drawn by the need for skilled young workers in construction and other trades.
“It definitely helped prolong the glut of labor,” Ruggles said. “Wages might have turned around a little quicker if there had been less of a boom in immigration, but to some extent the immigrant jobs were ones that didn’t directly compete with U.S. workers like farm labor.”
It’s hard to predict the effect of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda on future arrivals. Ruggles said his analysis holds across a wide range of possible immigration outcomes.
The population of young adults could grow “a bit” or shrink over the next 20 years depending on immigration policy, said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
Without immigrants and their children, the population of children and young adults would have shrunk by 5 million after the year 2000, according to a 2024 MPI report co-authored by Gelatt.
More industries want Trump’s help hiring immigrant labor after farms get a break
“Whether any of that translates to higher wages seems pretty uncertain to me,” Gelatt said. “With slower population growth, or population stagnation, labor demand is unlikely to keep growing at the pace it has been. There will not be the same growth in the number of people buying goods and services. And nobody is sure yet of how AI will affect labor markets.”
In North Dakota, companies have been willing to pay high wages for scarce workers, especially young men in jobs unlikely to see AI competition such as energy, construction and manufacturing, said Marcia Goetz Havens, manager of the state’s Labor Market Information Center.
“Companies were willing to pay big wages to attract labor to take oil and gas jobs resulting in a significant inflow of new workers from across the country,” she said. “Even within the state, high wages attracted younger, less educated workers from other parts of the state.”
The competition for young workers is making it hard to fill other jobs. Almost half the state’s unfilled job openings have been in health care, hospitality and retail, according to a state survey of employers last year. Nurses, cashiers and fast food counter workers are especially hard to find, employers reported.
“We just don’t have the bodies,” Flynn said. At business roundtables, employers also complain that fewer young people are interested in manual labor.
“Construction company owners complain about not being able to find someone who can swing a hammer: They say, ‘We don’t even have people who are interested in doing that.’ Can you fault them if there are easier jobs at higher pay? So compensation for those types of jobs likely has to come up.”
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
Jim Walton's contributions are the latest from an individual or group pushing the concept of pouring more taxpayer money into charter schools and school vouchers at the expense of public schools.
Walton is one of American Federation of Children's leading contributors.
The Stand for Truth PAC has been putting even more money into attacks against Carter, according to Ethics Commission documents.
The latest 24-hour filings from Stand for Truth show the committee spent $123,349.47 over the past two days for attack ads against Carter, including $39,326.97 for mailing and postage, $13,000 for video production and editing and $55,000 for network and streaming ads.
The Carter campaign filed a 24-hour report Friday, noting a $2,000 contribution from Arlan Campbell, Stark City.
A Tuesday report showed the Carter campaign receiving maximum $2,400 contributions from Treatment Now PAC, Sandy PAC, BB Freedom Fund and William Hardin IV of St. Charles, $1,000 from Shelter Insurance PAC and $500 contributions from Missouri Broadband Providers PAC, Larry Woodward Properties, Joplin; and Amy Ipsen, Joplin.
Voters have the opportunity Aug. 4 to put Missouri on track to be the 10th state without an individual income tax.
Many of the states without an income tax have to get creative in the way they generate revenue to fund state operations. From property taxes and sales taxes to communication taxes and live entertainment fees, revenue from these taxes is vital for providing essential services.
A yes vote will allow a broad sales tax on all goods and services to make up for the loss in revenue. This would repeal limits currently in place on such taxation. The state’s sales tax is 4.225%.
Gov. Mike Kehoe has suggested exemptions for healthcare, agriculture and real estate; the legislation passed by the House included no language for such exemptions.
The resolution’s sponsor, state Rep. Bishop Davidson, a Republican from Republic, noted the amendment that voters will consider does not mandate that the state make any changes to a sales tax. However, the Missouri budget must be balanced, so the loss in income tax revenue must be made up elsewhere.
Proponents of the resolution often compare Missouri to other states with no state income tax. Although a majority of these states rely on sales tax, their tax structures can vary drastically depending on different industries present, constitutional provisions or recent policy changes.
Here’s an overview of how the nine states without individual income tax generate state revenue:
Alaska became the first state to successfully repeal its income tax in 1980, thanks to the state’s oil boom. Almost all Alaskan oil production is on state-owned land, allowing the state to receive revenue in four different ways: production tax, property tax, royalties and corporate income tax.
Accordin g to the Resource Development Council, Alaska has made up to 90% of the state’s unrestricted general fund revenue from taxes related to oil in most years.
Roughly 30% of general fund revenue came from taxes on petroleum while 60% came from various investment returns. A majority of these investments came from Alaska’s permanent fund, which has received financial deposits used to invest in bonds, stocks and real estate.
Transfers from the fund make up a majority of investment revenues in Alaska’s unrestricted general and restricted designated general fund revenue.
Nevada receives roughly 37% of its general revenue from a sales tax and use tax, including taxes on gaming fees, insurance premiums and a live entertainment tax.
The state’s base rate is 6.85%.
If Nevada were its own country, it would rank 10th in gold production, but tax revenue from natural resources only produces a small portion of revenue in taxes related to its natural resources. A state constitutional provision limits taxes on minerals.
New Hampshire phased out its individual income tax in 2025 and does not have a state sales tax either.
The state derives a little over a third of its budget from a business profits tax. New Hampshire has a meals and rooms tax, which serves as a form of tourism tax. This accounts for a little over one-tenth of its revenue.
New Hampshire makes up the remainder of its revenue from miscellaneous fees, such as its tobacco tax, Medicaid enhancement tax and its tax on real estate transfers.
South Dakota makes over 60% of its revenue from sales tax. The state has a base rate of 4.2% on general sales. The state also imposes a contractor’s excise tax, which is a 2% fee on the total cost of a construction project. This tax accounts for a little under one-tenth of the state’s budget.
Similar to Nevada, South Dakota has a strong mining industry but derives less than 1% of its revenue from its severance tax.
Tennessee makes up 60% of the state’s revenue from a general sales tax. Tennessee’s state sales tax is 7%. Tennessee employs a franchise and excise tax on corporations and businesses that contributes 16% of revenue.
In Texas, a 6.25% state sales and use tax is imposed on all retail sales, leases and rentals for most goods and certain services. The state first imposed a sales tax structure in 1961, and it provides over half of the state’s budget.
Texas fills the remainder of its budget with various taxes on motor vehicle sales, franchise taxes and taxes on the state’s natural resources.
Washington makes almost a fifth of its budget from the state’s business and occupation tax, calculated based on the gross income of a business. The rate depends on which category of activity the business is classified as, with Washington having over 50 different classifications.
Washington also has a property tax that generates 13.4% of its revenue.
A massive reform to the state’s tax structure was approved in March when Senate Bill 6346 was signed into law: the first-ever “Millionaires Tax.” Beginning in 2028, a 9.9% income tax will be applied to taxable earnings above the $1 million standard deduction.
Wyoming makes a little under 40% of its revenue from its general and select sales tax structure.
Wyoming generates significant revenue from its mining industry. The state levies fees ranging from 1% to 6% for the various minerals and resources that are extracted.
Similar to Alaska’s permanent fund, the Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund receives revenue from its severance tax and is used by the state legislature to invest in various assets.
Wyoming ranked ninth nationally for natural gas production and eighth in crude oil production in 2023. This allows the state to fund its entire budget reserve account just with federal mineral royalties or severance tax revenue.
State Rep. Steve Butz, a Democrat from St. Louis, argued that Missouri cannot replicate the similar success seen by other states that never had an income tax or repealed it.
“God bless Branson, but it’s not Orlando,” Butz said in a March committee hearing. “We are never going to be Texas, Texas has a huge percent of this nation’s energy in that state, and it’s just not below our ground.”
“You have to face the facts,” Butz added. “Tennessee hasn’t had an income tax; it’s not part of the way they fund their government, but their sales tax is dramatically higher.”
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online.
Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.
