For most of the twentieth century Missouri went with the country. It backed the winning presidential candidate in every election from 1904 through 2004 but one — 1956, when it stayed with Adlai Stevenson as the nation re-elected Dwight Eisenhower — and the run gave the state a name as the place that voted the way the country did. The line then broke. Missouri gave George W. Bush 7.2 points in 2004 and held with John McCain in 2008 by a tenth of a point as Barack Obama won nationally. It has widened every cycle since: R+9.4 in 2012, R+18.5 in 2016, R+15.3 in 2020, and R+18.4 in 2024.
The Democratic vote that remains sits in three places. Jackson County, which holds Kansas City, went Democratic by 19.3 points in 2024; St. Louis County by 23.4 and the separate city of St. Louis by 64.6, the widest Democratic margin in the state; and Boone County, home to the University of Missouri at Columbia, by 9.7. Outside them the map is close to uniform. Of the state’s 114 counties and the city of St. Louis, only those four went Democratic; the rest went Republican, most of them by 60 to 80 points. Wright County, in the south-central Ozarks, ran 75.6 points Republican, the widest margin anywhere in the state.
The profile underneath is middling and Protestant. Median household income was $70,702 in the 2024 ACS, 40th of the fifty states and below the U.S. $80,734, with 32.4 percent of adults holding a bachelor’s degree, 32nd. Missouri ranks 11th in Evangelical adherents, at 24.1 percent. Its population of 6.2 million is 76 percent White and 11 percent Black, the Black share concentrated in Kansas City and St. Louis — the two metros that, with Columbia, hold nearly all of the Democratic vote. The suburban ring is where the line is closest: St. Charles County, outside St. Louis, went Republican by 16.9 and Clay County, north of Kansas City, by 5.6.