Missouri’s 1st Congressional District: Dem primary 2024 vs. 2026

Next week, on August 4, is a Democratic primary rematch in Missouri’s 1st congressional district (MO01) between former district representative Cori Bush and incumbent district representative Wesley Bell. We will take a look at the 2024 and 2026 constituent compositions, primary participation, and campaign contributing from a voter cluster lens. You can review information about the national voter clusters here.

First of all, there is a change in the MO01 boundary from the 119th (left, 2024) to the 120th (right, 2026) Congress. We utilize the HB1 shapefile directly from the Missouri Spatial Data Information Service for the new boundary.

Secondly, to clarify a couple plot conventions; the pink areas — including St. Louis Lambert International Airport (irregular splotch northwest of center) and the Saint Louis Zoological Park (rectangle shape below center) — denote areas with no registered voters from a given cluster. “Uniform” on the colorbars denotes the value corresponding to the hypothetical scenario where all registered voters district-wide are distributed uniformly across voter clusters and precincts. Takeaway: the color contrast helps make underlying patterns more stark.

So, what do we learn from the plots above? In 2026 as in 2024, the clusters dominating MO01 are: “Rainbow Sunset (L),” “Out With the Old,” and “People Power.” They constitute half the district’s registered voters! Since these three clusters hardly ever vote Republican and the district has more high-turnout, Dem-aligned clusters like “Vanilla Libs” and “They’re With Her,” we can assume from this information alone that MO01 is safe blue.

Keep those first two frequency plots as a baseline reference; from now on, we’ll look at proportion plots. Below are the proportion versions of those first two plots. Notice that the greens for the dominant clusters get nicely smoothed out across precincts because we’ve controlled for precinct size. It looks like a broad swath of MO01 is about half “Rainbow Sunset (L)” and half “Out With the Old,” with “People Power” and “La Lucha” making up most of the balance.

So what happened in the 2024 primaries? “Fox&Friends” and “Fox Lite” are almost always the highest-average turnout amongst conservative- or Republican-aligned clusters, so it makes sense that they are the deepest green overall in the GOP primary plot. However, that primary is pretty inconsequential because MO01 is safe blue!

Since the Dem primary is so pivotal, we are interested in 1) frequency counts of the more Dem-aligned clusters, 2) those clusters’ historical turnout rates, and 3) approximating which voters who actually turn out will tend to vote for which primary candidate. Nationally, we know a priori that three clusters — “Rainbow Sunset (L)", “Vanilla Libs,” and “They’re With Her” — tend to be neoliberal (i.e., capitalist), and four other clusters — “Out With the Old,” “People Power,” “Professional Left,” and “Unburdened Left” — tend to be more leftist/socialist/communist (i.e., anticapitalist/capitalism-critical). Based on 2024 AIPAC spending and other factors, it seems very reasonable to assume that primary voters in the neoliberal-type clusters would more often support Bell over Bush, and primary voters in the more leftist-type clusters would more often support Bush over Bell.

Donations are not a perfect proxy for level of political support because not everyone has disposable income to offer campaign contributions, but we can glean some information! Nationally, “Vanilla Libs” and “They’re With Her” tend to vastly out-donate all other Dem-aligned clusters, both in terms of number of unique donors and total dollar amount. Bush (CORI BUSH FOR CONGRESS (C00638767)) carried out-of-state support from those two clusters. Looks like some out-of-state, big spender “Vanilla Libs” swooped in for Bell (BELLFORMISSOURI (C00842336)).

Within the district itself, we see that Bell handily carried support from “They’re With Her,” to a lesser degree from “Vanilla Libs,” and vied for it from “Rainbow Sunset (L)” in terms of both donor count and total dollar amount. Interesting to note that Bell also received support within the district from conservative clusters like, “Fox&Friends,” “Fox Lite,” and “Golden Years (R).”

The heatmaps below really help illustrate the magnitude of unrealized turnout in the 2024 Dem primary. “Rainbow Sunset (L)” participated the most by far on a frequency level, yet only around half of registered voters in that cluster actually ended up voting. “Out With the Old” had drastically low turnout rate in the Dem primary.

“Out With the Old” did turn out at a higher average rate for the general election in 2024 than it did for the Dem primary; see below. “Rainbow Sunset (L)” is a neoliberal, Dem-aligned cluster approaching life expectancy, so it will probably only get smaller in the near-term. “Out With the Old” is now the largest voter cluster in MO01 and has so much unrealized mobilization potential. Its members do not need to be persuaded away from Republicans; they need to be persuaded that a party vying for their vote will actually represent them and work in their best interest. They have student loan debt, are worried about climate catastrophe, police brutality, foreign policy, and generally feel disenfranchised by electoralism and the duopoly. If a candidate can convince them that their interests will be represented, they have very large ranks that have the potential to overwhelm at the polls.

We do have the entire national voter file labeled by cluster membership. If this kind of analysis looks helpful for voter targeting or any other use case, we would be delighted to discuss! Please e-mail: contact at volsweep dot com. We look forward to hearing from you!