A yes on Amendment 3 means Missourians will have districts reflecting their values
Vote yes on Amendment 3. Do it for your town, your neighborhood and for the chance to keep local representation in Jefferson City. Vote yes to keep legislative districts compact, to respect political boundaries and to preserve the importance of communities.
The opponents of Amendment 3, who all seem to be from somewhere outside of Missouri, will tell you that Amendment 3 will protect incumbent politicians. If these folks were from Missouri, they’d know that we have term limits. Whatever you think of our present crop of elected leaders, most of them will be gone before Amendment 3 will take effect.
They’ll tell you that the Clean Missouri initiative was passed by Missouri voters two years ago and therefore is one of the unshakable foundations of our state. To hear them talk, Clean Missouri should be considered as an addendum to the Bill of Rights, only slightly less important than the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, Stan Musial’s statue and the Columns in front of Jesse Hall at the University of Missouri in Columbia. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Clean Missouri is chiseled on tablets carried directly down from the Ozark Mountains and prominently displayed in the state capitol. Missouri voters have spoken, and can never, ever, change their minds. From such baloney are political consultants’ careers made.
Clean Missouri was sold as ethics reform, but it was, and is, a bald-faced bid to achieve political results that those same political consultants are too lazy to win at the ballot box. Here is an idea: Instead of selling Missouri voters the radical redistricting scheme in Clean Missouri — something that hasn’t been attempted in any other state — spend those millions of dollars to find candidates and platforms that are attractive to Missouri voters.
Our present redistricting scheme, the scheme that Amendment 3 would correct, is predicated on the idea that legislative districts should be “competitive” — meaning that voters and their interests should be mixed and mashed and tumbled and run through a million computer simulations until every political race is decided by one vote. Trump acolytes, Bernie Bros, anarchists, neoliberal artists, socialist pipe fitters, libertarian actuaries, antifa, MAGA, community organizers, suburban moms, Unitarian ministers and Pentecostal laypeople living miles apart should be mixed together in districts shaped like spaghetti. This is a genuinely silly idea. After all, most of my neighbors and other people I know who live in small places have little interest in sharing a state senator with people from larger places — people who don’t care about rural roads, small towns or eight-man football. We are not alone, as I have a solid suspicion that people living in Lee’s Summit or the Power & Light District would not trust the judgment of me and my neighbors, who live in Atchison County, on Kansas City issues.
Of course, the opponents of Amendment 3 wouldn’t care about competitiveness if their candidates were winning. They care about changing the outcomes of political races in Missouri without doing the hard work of changing hearts and minds. They haven’t noticed, or won’t admit, that political affiliations can change over time, and if polls can be believed, we’re in the midst of a historic change in voting patterns. Voting patterns can change. Amendment 3 would keep communities together, and communities share interests that are permanent and important.
Missouri voters are being inundated by ads paid for by out-of-state groups, filling our TV screens with slick and professional commercials urging Missourians to vote against Amendment 3. Backers of the amendment, who actually live and work in Missouri communities, are being outspent by at least 40 to 1. There’s nothing “clean” about a political contest between New York and Peculiar, between Los Angeles and Platte City. A yes vote on Amendment 3 is a vote to protect your community and a vote to keep a political circus out of Missouri.
Blake Hurst is a farmer from Tarkio, Missouri, and president of the Missouri Farm Bureau.
This story was originally published October 27, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A yes on Amendment 3 means Missourians will have districts reflecting their values."