A leading Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri, Greitens faces new allegations from his ex-wife that join a long list of controversies. But for now, he’s staying in the race.
Lurid allegations of blackmail, sexual misconduct and child abuse would doom most politicians.
Not Eric Greitens. Or at least not yet.
Until recently, the former Missouri governor was the undisputed leader of the state’s Senate race, despite facing years of scandals. Republicans have urged him to drop out amid fears that his possible victory in the Aug. 2 primary could hand a seat in the chamber to Democrats — or at least force the G.O.P. to stomach an unpalatable candidate in a state that should be undisputed Republican turf.
Pressure has grown on Greitens in recent weeks over allegations made in court filings by his ex-wife, Sheena Chestnut Greitens. In a statement to a Missouri judge first published on Tuesday, she said he had become “unhinged” and “threatening.”
Sheena Greitens, a scholar of Asian geopolitics, had previously accused her former husband of abusive behavior, including an alleged incident that loosened one of their son’s teeth. In her new statement, she said she stood ready to provide “photographic evidence” of the child’s injuries “at the appropriate time.”
Instead of stepping aside, Eric Greitens has made a brazen attempt to defy political gravity. Short on cash and bereft of allies, he has vowed to fight on, arguing without evidence that national Republican figures are conspiring with his ex-wife to sully his reputation, which she denies.
“I want to tell you directly, Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell,” Greitens said late last month in a video shared on his social media accounts. “Hear me now. You are disgusting cowards. And we are coming for you.”
Greitens has denied all wrongdoing, and on Tuesday, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for the candidate, said in a statement that the alleged abusive behavior “never happened” and accused Sheena Greitens of lying.
A shrinking base of support
News of Sheena Greitens’s latest statement rippled through Republican political circles in Missouri, where anxiety over the former governor’s bid to replace the retiring Senator Roy Blunt was already extremely high. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL and Rhodes scholar, resigned as governor in 2018 amid allegations that he had tied up his former hairdresser, taken an explicit photo of her and threatened to make it public if she revealed their sexual affair.
“The latest revelations that hit this morning will upend his candidacy and will mean catastrophic shrinkage in his effort,” said Peter Kinder, a Republican former Missouri lieutenant governor who is supporting one of Greitens’s opponents, Representative Vicky Hartzler. The other major contender in the Republican primary is Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who has the backing of some in the state party establishment.
There are some signs that Greitens’s support is softening. The latest public poll of the primary, by the Trafalgar Group, showed Greitens falling into second place among likely primary voters for the first time. Another recent survey commissioned by Schmitt’s campaign showed similar results. And on Saturday, in what some saw as evidence of his growing difficulties, Greitens skipped a Republican Party event in Taney County, one of the bigger annual gatherings of activists in the state.
The turmoil in the Republican primary has complicated Donald Trump’s efforts to influence the outcome. Some party insiders had feared that Trump would endorse Greitens, who has tailored his campaign message around “defending President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies” and has questioned the 2020 presidential election results.
After the previous round of allegations by Sheena Greitens, Trump issued a statement praising “the big, loud and proud personality of Congressman Billy Long,” who is also running for the Missouri Senate seat but has failed to gain much traction. “This is not an Endorsement, but I’m just askin’?” Trump said.
Eric Greitens has struggled to raise money, with finance reports showing that his campaign had less than $300,000 in the bank as of January. Super PACs supporting Greitens have received large donations from two Republican billionaires, Richard Uihlein, a shipping magnate, and Bernard Marcus, a founder of Home Depot. Greitens has also brought in nearly $900,000 through his joint fund-raising committee, and a spokesman said his upcoming fund-raising report would show that the campaign had raised a “six-figure” sum of money since Sheena Greitens made her first statement.
But James Harris, a Republican lobbyist who has been talking with Missouri donors and activists about the race, said, “They’re really just done with him.” Harris recounted a conversation with a donor who recently turned down a fund-raising pitch by Greitens, saying his wife would “kill me” if he gave money to the former governor.
And now, the entry into the race of an heiress to a beer-company fortune threatens to make the general election competitive.
Democrats’ dilemma: The heiress or the veteran?
Republicans are warily eyeing the newly announced campaign of Trudy Busch Valentine, who is the daughter of August Busch Jr., the Anheuser-Busch beer baron who died in 1989.
A registered nurse who grew up on her family’s 281-acre estate, Grant’s Farm, Busch Valentine is making empathy central to her campaign message.
“It seems we have lost our ability to be understanding and compassionate for each other,” she said in her announcement video. “We have so much more that unites us than divides us.”
In the video, she also spoke about her son’s death in 2020 from opioid abuse.
“Twenty months ago, my oldest son died of an opioid overdose,” Busch Valentine said. “Matt’s death brought us so much sadness, but his death also reignites the passion in me to make a positive difference for others, this time on a larger scale.”
Busch Valentine has never held elected office, but she’s a well-known donor in Missouri. Democrats expect her to plow her personal fortune into her campaign, with a focus on winning back some of the white rural voters who have defected to Republicans in recent elections. She is close friends with Claire McCaskill, the last Democrat to win a Senate seat in Missouri.
Busch Valentine is already facing questions about her past. And she’ll first have to dispatch her main rival in the Democratic primary, Lucas Kunce, a retired Marine and former Pentagon official whose campaign could hardly be more different.
In an interview, Kunce said he was running to “fundamentally change who has power in this country.” He explained how he grew up keenly aware of his parents’ struggles with money — recalling how his family went bankrupt when his sister was born — and laughingly described participating in medical experiments at a V.A. hospital to earn money while he was in college.
A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kunce said he was disgusted by how American politicians had spent hundreds of billions of dollars on those conflicts while starving their own communities of resources.
“There’s always money for war and Wall Street, never for stuff back home,” he said.
Kunce has sworn off money from corporate PACs and federal lobbyists, and his campaign says it has raised nearly $3 million, primarily from grass-roots donations online. He’s as critical of Democrats as he is of Republicans; voters in Missouri have lost faith in both parties, he said.
“People feel betrayed by Democrats,” Kunce said. “They think they don’t stand up for working people anymore.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
What to read tonight
In announcing his retirement, Representative Fred Upton of Michigan became the fourth House Republican who supported impeaching Trump to decline to run for re-election.
The Oklahoma House voted to approve a State Senate bill that represents a near-total ban on abortion in the state. It now goes to the desk of Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican who has promised to sign “every piece of pro-life legislation” brought before him.
Ivanka Trump was testifying Tuesday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Framework
An old boogeyman in Kansas
As the party in the minority, Republicans have an easy scapegoat for the country’s problems: the Democrats, who are in power in the White House and in Congress. Most Democrats don’t have an easy villain in the 2022 elections. Donald Trump comes close, but he’s out of office.
In Kansas, however, Democrats are relying on a strategic throwback: Blame Brownback.
In her first re-election ad of the cycle, Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, opens with an image of Sam Brownback, the former Republican governor who resigned in order to become Trump’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom in 2018. At the time, Brownback was one of the least popular governors in the country, largely because he instituted tax cuts that left the state with a huge deficit. The Republican-led State Legislature revoked those tax cuts while Brownback was still in office.
“So, Kansans voted for change,” the ad’s narrator says after blasting Brownback, going on to boast that Kelly balanced the budget, fully funded schools and fought for tax cuts.
Trump also makes an appearance in the ad, with footage of Kelly talking to the former president, as the narrator says that Kelly worked with “both sides.”
Fellow Democrats in competitive races in other states may not follow suit. In a tough national environment for her party, Kelly is running in a state that Trump won in 2020 by nearly 15 percentage points.
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.
— Blake & Leah
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
