This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 27, 2010 - State House Majority Leader Steve Tilley, R-Perryville, is confident that the national and state anti-Democratic mood now means that his party will have "a tailwind at our back'' and make state House gains in this fall's elections.
How many? Four or five seats, he said during an interview with reporters as he made the rounds at this weekend's state GOP Lincoln Days gathering, held at the St. Charles Convention Center.
And whom will those new Republicans replace? Tilley predicts that the south St. Louis County seat (100th District) now held by Democrat Sue Schoemehl will go Republican, along with the northeast Missouri seat (6th District) occupied by Rachel Bringer, D-Palmyra.
The voting patterns in both districts lean Republican, Tilley said.
Tilley noted that he hadn't been so optimistic in 2008, when he had publicly disagreed with rosy Republican predictions and estimated that his party would lose some of its edge in Jefferson City. That turned out to be true, although Republicans still hold 89 of the 163 seats in the Missouri House. That's seven more than the 82 needed to retain control.
Among Tilley's reasons for optimism? He's seeing a lot of young people circulating in the halls during the Lincoln Days' festivities. That signals, he said, that Missouri Republicans are attracting interest -- and possible support -- from independents and political newcomers, whom he expects to show up at the polls in November and vote for Republicans.
To hear him talk, Missouri's political mood in 2010 is a lot like 2002, when Republicans took over the Missouri House for the first time in decades.
That said, Tilley has forged an interesting bipartisan political relationship with St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, a Democrat, by taking on the mayor's pet project: returning control of the St. Louis Police Department to St. Louis.
Tilley has been the chief champion in Jefferson City of the local-control movement and helped build the momentum now evident throughout the state Capitol.
Tilley expects that the local-control camp will have the votes to get its bill through a House committee on Monday.
Several procedural hurdles, and the House Rules Committee, remain -- but Tilley exuded optimism that the House votes are present to, at minimum, get the measure on the floor for a final vote. He declined to predict whether the full House will officially vote to end 150 years of state control of St. Louis' police force.
Tilley gives credit to Slay, who drove down to Perryville last fall to meet with Tilley to discuss the matter. Slay also stopped in Farmington to talk to Senate Majority Leader Kevin Engler, the No. 2 Republican in that chamber.
Tilley said that Slay was very persuasive with his arguments in favor of local control, beginning with the Civil War reasons St. Louis lost control of its police department to begin with. Those reasons (a Confederate state capital worried about a pro-Union St. Louis) "are not relevant now," Tilley said.
Tilley added that he couldn't imagine Perryville officials not having control of their police force, and he expected that most outstate legislators -- many of them Republicans -- would hold similar sentiments.
The upshot, said Tilley, was that he admired Slay for reaching out to GOP leaders to make his case. "I thought he was practicing good politics," said the man who's likely to be the next speaker of the Missouri House -- unless his political predictions turn out to be way off.
