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Column: Jeff Mazur – The Missouri GOP’s Graham Harrell Effect

By Jeff Mazur

Missouri Republicans have spent the last decade building a dominating presence in the General Assembly, yet success at the statewide level has largely eluded them.  This owes partly to demographics.  But to understand the dynamic fully, look to an unlikely analog: a schoolboy pigskin hero from Ennis, Texas.

In his three years as starting quarterback for the Texas Tech University, Graham Harrell completed nearly 1,400 passes.  Those accounted for 15,371 yards of offense and 131 touchdowns.  He tacked on 12 rushing touchdowns of his own.  For the uninitiated, those totals are staggering.  A college quarterback who throws for 40 touchdown passes or 5,000 yards in a single campaign has had a once-in-a-lifetime season.  Graham Harrell averaged more than 43 touchdowns and 5,100 yards per year over three seasons.

Over the last ten years, Republicans in Missouri’s General Assembly have piled up equally impressive statistics.

Jeff Mazur
Jeff Mazur

Today Republicans hold 109 of 163 seats in the Missouri House and 24 of 34 seats in the Senate.  They have gained of seats in all but two biennial general election cycles dating back to their takeover of the General Assembly in 2003, steadily growing a massive majority which most observers view as institutionalized for generations to come.  Republicans exert unilateral control over what policy gets a hearing and have unquestioned power to stop disfavored legislation.  The GOP is a legislative dynasty.

But notwithstanding the astonishing numerical success they share, GOP legislative leaders and Graham Harrell have a common problem: an inability to translate their success at one level into victory at the next.

Harrell went undrafted after college, bounced around the Canadian league and finally landed as an NFL afterthought, backing up a popular superstar who doesn’t miss games.

Similarly, in the five general election cycles since seizing control of the Assembly, Missouri Republicans have failed to build the same dominance in statewide offices that they have in the legislative chambers.  They’ve actually failed even to play Democrats to a draw.  The last decade has seen 21 statewide offices stand for election in the state.  Democrats won 13 with Republicans taking just eight.

But why?

Republicans who are wildly successful in Missouri’s legislative sphere have failed to succeed statewide at the same rate because they have a team of Graham Harrells.  They are, to use a gridiron term of art, System Quarterbacks.

NFL scouts would have called Graham Harrell a System Quarterback as a way to express doubt about his ability to play in the pros.  ‘System Quarterback’ is convenient shorthand to describe a player whose on-field success is attributed to the particular ‘system’, or style of play, which his team and coach implement.

Harrell’s school played a style that placed a premium on running a lot of offensive plays and throwing the ball on an overwhelming portion of those offensive plays.  Lots of plays and lots of throws means lots of yards and lots of scores, inflating the statistical output of players in that system.

Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily.  Having players who fit nicely into a replicable system is vital to sustaining success at a high level, both in college football and in a legislative caucus.  Does it lead to an easy transition for those who play within that system when they attempt to leap to a league where that style is less viable?  No, quite the contrary.

As with Harrell in Texas Tech’s “Air Raid” offensive scheme, Missouri’s GOP legislators have for the past decade been playing within a consistently successful, high-flying system.  That system prizes the ability of members to prove their worth by contributing to the good of the whole rather than the elevation of the individual.

Legislative Republicans succeed within their own ranks by buying into the caucus program, raising money to contribute for expansion of their own caucus and demonstrating a nearly monolithic adherence to the conservative ideological orthodoxy of the moment.  When they do so repeatedly, session after session, and navigate their relationships with other members of their caucus who have also succeeded at doing those things, they are elevated to positions of greater relevance and political power.

The genius of the system is that it is built perfectly for self-replication and perpetuation.

There is unlimited upward mobility within the caucus system because term limits are always clearing out the members atop the hierarchy.  There is always a reason for new members to buy into the program and perpetuate it with their own financial contributions because that is the most proven path up the ladder.  And because the system relies upon the imputed powers of incumbency and a vast supermajority as the primary selling point for its fundraising efforts, it isn’t even necessary for the members coming into the program to be particularly skilled at raising the money that keeps the caucus rolling.  All givers need to know is that they are contributing to the winners, and that the freshman member they are helping today will be a key committee chair or assistant majority leader tomorrow.

The system works, and they run it.  The identities of the cogs in the majority machine may not even matter.

Would Texas Tech’s offense have been just dynamic if, instead of Harrell, they had some unnamed kid from Plainview running the show?  Hard to say for sure.  But it helps to know that among the quarterbacks who preceded Harrell at Tech, one passed for more than 12,000 yards and 95 touchdowns and another set the all-time college record for passing yardage in a single season.  There’s something to the system.

Likewise, the Missouri Republican legislative operation is free from a need to have the most skilled politicians on its team in order for it to win.  That’s a compliment.  A system that requires a never-ending stream of preternaturally skilled, razor-crisp politicians may not be a system at all, because such people are in short supply.  Better to have a system that requires only members with enough skill to work the plan and play the long game.

But this system which produces such sustained and remarkable results on a legislative level doesn’t pipeline statewide candidates directly into office, for several reasons.

First, a System Quarterback in the GOP caucus program must in meaningful ways submerge his own political identity within that of the caucus in order to maintain his path to power within that caucus.  Members who seek the spotlight for their individuality can easily provoke the skepticism and ire of their colleagues.  Of course, it is politicians who differentiate themselves well from similarly situated others and build a compelling personal narrative that make the best statewide candidates.

Second, a GOP System Quarterback also has heavy incentives to forego good statewide opportunities that arise early in his career because the biggest benefits within the caucus system accrue to members who are in their later terms in office.  Those who’ve been steadily paying their dues have good reason to sit tight so they can exercise the power they stand to gain from being at the top of the General Assembly hierarchy.

Third, System Quarterbacks ordinarily have a rigid set of policy positions that allow them to fit nicely within the ideological ecology of the GOP caucus.  But rigidity is no friend to the candidate for statewide office.  Flexibility in the service of broad appeal to the state’s moderate voters is a key for successful statewide candidates.  It’s an albatross for the GOP System Quarterback.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, the System Quarterback in Missouri’s GOP caucus program understands he can and will succeed by being part of a team that works together.  He benefits from those who came before him and tries to be a benefactor to those who follow after.  Then he wanders out into the cold, solitary slog of a statewide campaign and understands suddenly that he is alone, with none of the comforting structure of the system that helped make him a powerful figure in the General Assembly.

It turns out the skills and traits that contribute to someone’s success within the GOP legislative realm aren’t the same attributes which make them great candidates for a statewide run.

The history bears this out.

A scan of the Republicans who’ve won statewide posts since 2003 reveals none who came into the legislature during the period of GOP dominance.  Still other recent GOP legislators who reached positions of importance in the General Assembly have fared poorly in their attempts to move up.  Catherine Hanaway and Mike Gibbons were the high-ranking members in their respective chambers before losing statewide.  Brad Lager, Shane Schoeller, Scott Rupp, Bill Stouffer and Cole McNary headline a list of other successful lawmakers whose statewide efforts failed.

Compare this with the GOP’s partisan opposition.

For all of the vast success of the GOP caucus operations, the Democratic caucus electoral efforts in recent cycles have been correspondingly dismal.

Buy-in by members into the Democratic caucus fundraising program is narrow and shallow.  There is very little reason for members to believe their ascendancy in the caucus is correlated with their level of political participation.  And the prospective pay-off in power for reaching a high perch within the caucus is negligible given the caucus’s size and, particularly in the House, minimal influence.

Yet the House Democratic caucus has seen two of its former members win three statewide races in just the past three election cycles, and the Senate Democrats have seen one do so as well.

In a reverse of the Graham Harrell effect that afflicts legislative Republicans, Democratic legislators are actually better prepared for succeeding statewide because of the lack of support infrastructure that exists within the Democratic caucus machinery.

Democratic legislators have no system to play in.  For them, everything is an improvisation.  They have every opportunity to shape their legislative and policy record as they see fit, because there is very little premium placed on party discipline.  They can seek ways to stand out rather than blend in without much fear of alienating caucus colleagues or partisans around the state.  They can jump at a good opportunity for higher office without the fear of risking substantial legislative influence just a couple sessions away.  Missouri’s legislative Democrats understand, and are already accustomed to, the notion that they are in their fight all alone.  For them, it has always been thus.

All of which is not to say that Republican legislators aren’t skilled politicians.  It was, after all, GOP members of the General Assembly who had the brilliance and foresight to design their party’s dominant system and who retain the grit and leadership to keep members accountable to it today.  And it would be foolish to think that, one of these cycles, a contemporary GOP System Quarterback won’t break through by winning statewide office.

Even so, that eventuality won’t change the fact that a Missouri Republican caucus program which has been so good for so long at creating All-Americans in the General Assembly is a notably poor training ground for prospective statewide winners.

But in the rush to lament reduced opportunity for legislative Republicans to reach the highest levels of elected office in the state, one must not lose sight of a truth about the GOP’s caucus system: almost any kid who’s ever picked up a football and hoped to toss it in a game thinks it’s pretty damn cool to be Graham Harrell.

Jeff Mazur is the Executive Director of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 72.