Republicans retain full control of the Missouri General Assembly after Tuesday's elections

The Missouri General Assembly will have new faces next year, but the partisan lineup will likely remain unchanged as Republicans appear to have retained their two-thirds supermajorities in both chambers.

The question of which party would have a majority in the General Assembly was never up for discussion in these elections. The Democrats’ goal was to gain seats in both chambers — something they haven’t done since 2006 — and to to break the two-thirds supermajority that the GOP has enjoyed since the 2012 election.

With the only incomplete results in close races in Greene County, Democrats appear to have fallen well short of that goal.

Shortly before 11:30 pm on Tuesday, unofficial results showed that each party had captured a seat from the other in each chamber, but nothing else changed. If that result holds, Republicans will retain 111 seats in the Missouri House and 23 seats in the Missouri Senate.

The only incumbent Democrat to lose a House seat was state Rep. Jamie Johnson of Kansas City, who represents the 12th District in Platte County. Johnson, the first Black lawmaker to represent the district, was elected in 2022 and was defeated Tuesday by Mike Jones, a veteran and small business owner.

Another freshman lawmaker, state Rep. Chris Lonsdale of Liberty, was the only incumbent Republican to lose a House seat. Lonsdale was defeated by Marty Jacobs, a retired teacher.

In the Senate, Republicans and Democrats traded open seats.

Democrats captured the 19th District in central Missouri, where former state Rep. Stephen Webber of Columbia will replace outgoing Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden. Webber defeated James Coyne, who took over the race after the withdrawal of former state Rep. Chuck Basye.

In the Independence Region, Republican Joe Nicola won his first race after several attempts, including a run for Congress. Nicola will fill the seat previously held by Democrat John Rizzo, who was term-limited and is now executive director of the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority.

Nicola defeated State Representative Robert Sauls.

The status quo election result is the worst showing for Democrats in the Missouri House in five elections. Democrats won 52 seats in the House of Representatives in 2022, up from three in the fourth consecutive election, with the party flipping more seats than it lost.

At the time of publication, there were still a handful of races yet to be decided that could change the outcome. In the 100th District in St. Louis County, incumbent Republican state Rep. Philip Oehlerking held a 119-vote lead over Democrat Colin Lovett in a rematch of their 2022 race.

And in Greene County, results were incomplete, but the incumbent party maintained the lead in three races in which about half the votes remained to be counted.

The Democrats had ten seats in the Senate after the 2022 elections and have not gained a seat in the Senate since 2018. And they had several candidates who raised more than most of the party’s statewide contenders.

Retired businessman Joe Pereles spent nearly $900,000 on television ads in St. Louis County’s 15th District, and a PAC supporting him spent another $155,000 in an effort to capture the Republican district. He was defeated by former state Rep. David Gregory, who had depleted his campaign account by winning the primary but was buoyed by about $425,000 in television spending from the Republican Party’s Senate PAC, the Missouri Senate Campaign Committee.

Sauls was defeated despite a $325,000 television campaign in the Kansas City area.

Both Pereles and Sauls were defeated despite expressions of support of the generally Republican-leaning Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry and outpaced their opponents.

This year’s election is the second to use maps drawn after the 2020 census. That year, voters approved changes to the process that means most legislative districts will no longer cross county lines unless they have enough residents for a full district.

This story was originally published by the Missouri independent.