On August 4, more than 80 percent of Missouri voters rejected Amendments 4 and 5. Most Republicans in the legislature supported putting both on the ballot. In November, voters sent a second message, and it was louder.

Democrats flipped 16 House seats and two Senate seats, ending our supermajorities. State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick was the only statewide candidate on the ballot. He won with about 51 percent, after taking 59 percent in 2022. And Amendment three was defeated by 55% of the voters.

Most of the pushback came from Washington. Voters are angry about the president, the war and what they pay at the pump. Nothing we do in Jefferson City can fix that.

But we can’t blame Washington for all of it. We did a lot of this to ourselves.

We got comfortable. Republicans hold every statewide office, and until this month we held supermajorities in both chambers. Somewhere along the way, winning stopped meaning persuading. We told voters how it was going to be and expected them to deal with it. Independents and moderate Democrats got the message that their opinions didn’t matter. People who feel ignored don’t stay quiet in November.

Meanwhile, the fights moved inside our own house. Primaries became the main event. Those hard-fought races created factions, and the factions spent their energy attacking each other. They spent almost none of it explaining to average voters what we were doing and why.

That’s the sad part. The record is good, but almost nobody knows it.

Schools. The fiscal 2027 budget commits a record $4.7 billion in general revenue to K-12 schools. That’s $8.4 billion with lottery, federal, and other funds. The constitution requires that at least 25 percent of general revenue go to schools. We’re spending about 31 percent. The foundation is at a record $4.27 billion, up 27 percent since 2020. Every school district in Missouri has seen its state aid numbers hit record levels. Yet plenty of parents believe Republicans defunded their schools. 

Taxes and jobs. The top income tax rate has dropped from 6 to 4.7 percent. We ended taxes on Social Security benefits and became the first state to eliminate the capital gains tax. Those changes are worth more than $1.8 billion a year. Since 2020, net general revenue grew by $4.7 billion. That’s more than $2.50 in new revenue for every $1 in tax cuts. The state did not go broke. Instead, Missouri added 95,700 jobs in 2024, the most of any state on a net basis, according to Missouri Partnership. Federal data then showed Missouri with the fastest rate of job growth in the nation in 2025.

Smaller government. The state payroll has dropped from 62,832 employees in 2002 to 49,540 today. That’s more than 13,000 fewer people. This year the legislature also cut $3.7 billion from the governor’s budget and leaves about $600 million in General Revenue (GR) surplus. On top of that, the Budget Reserve Fund, or Rainy-day Fund, has grown from $652 million in 2020 to nearly $955 million. 

Roads. Since 2019, Missouri has added more than $7 billion in GR funds to MoDOTs budget. That includes a $2.8 billion rebuild of I-70 and a $748 million expansion of I-44. The I-70 funding passed the House 151 to 4. Voters don’t see any of that. They see one-lane construction zones and wonder why it’s taking so long.

Health care. Voters approved Medicaid expansion in 2020, and the legislature is constitutionally obligated to fund it. Before the vote, projections said expansion would save the state $117 million. Instead, general revenue spending on Medicaid grew 87 percent, from $1.97 billion to $3.68 billion. Enrollment grew from roughly 850,000 Missourians to more than 1.2 million. At $20.07 billion in fiscal 2026, Medicaid is now the largest line in the state budget, more than twice the entire K-12 budget. Thanks to our growing revenue we covered that bill without gutting schools, roads or the rainy-day fund.

Voters know almost none of this. We had a strong story but kept it to ourselves.

Then came Amendment 5. We had a perfect opening. We could have said, “Cutting taxes worked. Revenue is up, jobs are up, schools are funded, roads are being rebuilt, so let’s cut more.” Instead, we told voters Missouri was a terrible state getting passed by its neighbors and staring at a huge budget hole.

Think about how that sounded at the kitchen table. The Republicans running the state said it was in trouble and then asked for a big change to the tax system. Voters didn’t hear a case for cutting taxes. They heard that Republicans were doing a bad job and maybe slipping a tax increase in to plug the budget hole.

So here is where we are. Voters are mad at Washington over the president, the war and gas prices. They’re also mad at us, because they think we defunded their schools, tried to raise their taxes to fill a budget hole and tore up every road in the county. Perception is reality, and we let that perception stand.

The fix is not complicated. It starts with remembering that this is a job we’re hired for, and voters can fire us.

That means town halls in the districts we just lost, not just the ones we won. It means telling the school funding story in every community, with the numbers about their schools. It means putting a sign at every construction zone that says what it cost and when it will be done.

It also means changing how we act online. Name-calling and meanness on social media isn’t persuasion. It tells the person on the other end that we’ve stopped listening, and it’s a big reason people stopped listening to us. We should use those platforms to listen and learn, to ask voters what they think and to answer the question they actually asked.

Missouri voters didn’t walk away from our ideas. They never heard the facts about what we’ve done, because too many of our fights were about initiative petition reform, Clean Missouri, mid-decade redistricting and overturning their votes on measures like Prop A.  

Some say the answer is to move to the middle and water down our conservative principles. I don’t agree. Our policies are working. Shrinking government, cutting taxes, supporting education and investing in infrastructure have grown our economy and brought in record revenues. We don’t need new principles. We just need to stop fighting each other, stick to the bread and butter issues, and tell our story.

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