Local voters mirror statewide results

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Former Navy SEAL officer Eric Greitens won the Republican primary for Missouri governor Tuesday after a hard-fought race in which he cast himself as a conservative outsider willing to use his military bravado to blow up perceived corruption in government.

Greitens prevailed over another self-described outsider, businessman John Brunner, and a pair of more experienced Republican leaders — longtime Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder and former Missouri House Speaker and U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway.

He will face Attorney General Chris Koster, who easily won the Democratic gubernatorial primary, in the Nov. 8 general election.

Nodaway County Primary Election voters Tuesday followed Missouri’s trends, at least as far as early statewide trends indicated expected outcomes.

Missouri Sixth District Congressman Sam Graves paced the Republican candidates with 2,501 votes to return to his Washington office, slightly more than the 2,305 ballots U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt polled in gaining primary victories.

Democrat Kyle Yarber garnered 194 votes to win the county vote for Graves position. Jason Kander, with 502 votes led the Democratic Senate race in the county.

Republican Eric Greitens gathered strong local support, as he did statewide, carrying Nodaway County with 1,693 of the 3,234 GOP votes cast for governor. Chris Koster topped the Democrat slate for governor with 510 votes.

Republican Mike Parson led the GOP lieutenant governor’s race with 1,688 votes, well ahead of the Democrat winner, Russ Carnahan, who tallied 529.

Jay Ashcroft continued the Republic landslide across Nodaway County, pulling 2,196 votes for secretary of state, far ahead of Democrat Robin Smith’s 476.

GOP candidate Josh Hawley also swept the county votes for Missouri attorney general, tallying 1,628 to edge Kurt Schaefer’s 1,411. Teresa Hensley collected 360 local Democratic votes to represent her party in the November General election.

The Missouri governor’s office will be open because two-term incumbent Jay Nixon, a Democrat, has served the maximum amount allowed under state law and cannot seek re-election.

Greitens, 42, of St. Louis, already has a resume that few could match. He’s been a Rhodes scholar, a boxer and black belt in taekwondo, and traveled on humanitarian missions around the world — documenting the lives of street children in Bolivia and refugees from genocidal wars in Bosnia, Rwanda and Zaire.

He joined the Navy in 2001, just months before the Sept. 11 attacks, and trained to be a SEAL officer. While deployed in Iraq, he was chlorine-gassed in a suicide bomb attack but returned to duty within days. He later served as a White House fellow under President George W. Bush in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And Greitens founded the nonprofit group The Mission Continues, which connects veterans with volunteer work to ease the post-military transition.

He’s also written three books, including the bestselling memoir “The Heart and the Fist,” and published a collection of documentary photography.

He introduced himself to Missouri voters with an attention-grabbing TV ad in which he fires a military-style assault rifle into a seemingly empty field, causing a fiery explosion of a gasoline bomb.

He pledged to “take aim at politics as usual” and clean up a state Capitol he claimed is run by “career politicians owned by corrupt consultants, high-paid lobbyists and special interests.”

The message appeared to resonate with many voters in a year that also saw the rise of outsider presidential candidates, including Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic runner-up Bernie Sanders.

“The fact that he’s not a career politician speaks to a lot of people right now,” said Debbie Raines, of Liberty, a part-time camp worker who voted for Greitens.

As a fundraising gimmick, Greitens’ campaign sold stickers described as “ISIS hunting permits,” including ones signed by the former Navy SEAL who claims he killed Osama bin Laden. But he also raked in high-dollar donations from around the country, including $1 million from Michael Goguen, a California venture capitalist accused of sexual abuse in a pending civil lawsuit. Goguen has denied the allegations.

Greitens’ Republican rivals called on him to return the money, but Greitens said he won’t rush to judgment as the case is pending. In the final days before the election, a Democratic affiliated political group also launched an ad attacking Greitens for keeping the money.

His Republican opponents also questioned whether Greitens truly is conservative. He attended the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008 for then presidential-nominee Barack Obama’s speech. And Greitens once was courted by Democrats as potential candidate.

The backgrounds of the four Republicans were one of the few ways they could distinguish themselves in the primary. All four candidates supported expanded gun rights and tax cuts. They also sharply criticized the way Nixon responded to protests at the University of Missouri in Columbia last year over racial concerns and to riots following the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson.