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Scharnhorst and Dogan fighting could push votes toward Veillette

Saint Louis, Mo. — For Missouri Capitol regulars, the race in Missouri’s 98th House district has always been a contest to quietly keep an eye on.

Rep. Dwight Scharnhorst will be termed out in November and his wife, Rea Scharnhorst, is vying for his seat. Rea Scharnhorst has to beat Shamed Dogan and Carlo Veillette in her primary before she can claim the seat. Dogan has been widely considered a major contender and perhaps a frontrunner for the seat.

Shamed Dogan
Shamed Dogan

Dogan’s time as an alderman in Ballwin and work with then-Senator Jim Talent make him a tough opponent for the Scharnhorst family. The resulting primary has been ugly, mean, and, according to both sides, a little dishonest.

In one mailer recently distributed by the Scharnhorst camp, Dogan accuses his opponents of deliberately misquoting his Twitter account to make him appear to sympathize with Democrats.

The mailer quotes a five-year-old Tweet from Dogan as saying: “Have to give Claire McCaskill credit… Makes GOP… look even more timid, out of touch.”

The full Tweet read: “Have to give @clairecmc credit for voting against omnibus. Makes GOP pork defenders look even more timid, out of touch. #tcot #motcot”

Dwight Scharnhorst defended the tweet.

“In context what he said is not Republican,” Scharnhorst said. “He’s praising Clarie McCaskill. How many Republicans praise Claire McCaskill?”

The Scharnhorst campaign has also told voters with some glee that Dogan once referred to Nixon as “Missouri’s first working governor,” on Twitter. Dogan says that anyone following him understood it as a sarcastic statement.

Rea Scharnhorst
Rea Scharnhorst

“I was live-blogging the State of the State and at some point Nixon said something about valuing the hard work of individuals in the state,” Dogan said. “And so I tweeted, sarcastically, something like ‘Oh, Nixon is the first governor in the state to work hard’ or something like that. But it was obviously meant as sarcasm, and again, anybody would have known that. These smears just show how desperate they are to install a dynasty in this district.”

Dogan, a black man, says the Scharnhorsts are attempting to paint him as a “closet Democrat” and are hoping people will assume his race makes him a liberal candidate.

“They’ve tried to connect me with Barack Obama,” Dogan told The Missouri Times. “It’s not very subtle, but they put an Obama logo on something with my picture on it. I think they hope people will see that and think black guy plus Obama logo must equal liberal or Democrat. It’s beyond the pale, and it’s not very subtle, to try to make me seem like I’m not a real Republican.”

The Scharnhorst camp strongly denied allegations that their attacks were racially motivated.

“I resent being called a racist,” Dwight Scharnhorst said. “Something I’ve noticed, and I’m tired of it and I think other people are too, is that any time you don’t agree with a black person suddenly you’re a racist. That’s something we’ve seen a lot of lately and it’s coming from the liberals and from President Obama and his people.”

Scharnhorst said repeatedly that Dogan was against photo ID bills for voting. Scharnhorst cited a recent candidate forum in which he claims Dogan said the measure would “exclude voters.” Dogan says Scharnhorst is deliberately misquoting him.

“First of all, you’ll notice it was Dwight at that candidate forum and not Rea, she was not there, he spoke for her,” Dogan said. “What I said was that if we are going to pass voter ID, we need to make sure we don’t do it in a partisan way where we can be accused of excluding voters that don’t agree with us. Now I freely admit my answer could have been better, because I stated my support after I said what I thought had to be done to get it passed. But to say that I was against it, he either has a very poor memory or he’s lying.”

Dogan has repeatedly hammered Rea Scharnhorst for effectively not being present during her campaign. He claims that her husband Dwight has largely represented her, both at events and in day-to-day door knocking operations. Dogan accused Dwight Scharnhorst of making an illegal in-kind campaign contribution to his wife by placing yard signs from his own 2012 campaign out in the district. Dwight Scharnhorst admitted to it, but said it was a simple mistake.

“It was just the wrong signs, I’ve actually just got a new load of signs with the correct stuff on them and we’re out replacing them,” Scharnhorst said. “He wants to attack me and attack me, and that’s fine, but to say it’s on purpose or to say we are misleading people is a bald-faced lie.”

The irony to the bloody final weeks of the primary largely seen as a two-person contest from the beginning is that Veillette — once considered an ‘also ran’ — is looking like a strong contender to pull a close second place in the race and even, under the most unusual of circumstances, a shocking upset. Dogan and Scharnhorst both believe that Veillette is a likely second place. Of course, they both think that their own camp will be victorious on primary day.