Former Missouri Sen. John Danforth spent $6 million on independent candidate’s short bid

John Wood was a candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri for 55 days this year.

The former and current legal counsel to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol quit his job in June and moved to Missouri to launch a late write-in campaign as an independent candidate who would caucus with the Republican Party.

Wood collected enough signatures to get on the ballot. But after Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt won the primary, Wood soon dropped out of the race in August to return to his job in the Capitol.

Through it all, Wood had support from former U.S. Sen. Jack Danforth, his former boss who began advocating for an independent candidate in February. Danforth, a Republican who represented Missouri from 1976 to 1995, started a PAC called Missouri Stands United in May and started spending money at the beginning of June, about a month before Wood entered the race.

“It was an opportunity to state the case for holding the country together,” Danforth said. “Was I disappointed? Yes. Because it turned out that we couldn’t translate that general feeling that we’re too polarized into an actual campaign.”

The group collected money from two donors: $2,500 from Karl Hoagland, a California ultrarunning enthusiast, and $6 million from Danforth, according to the group’s filing with the Federal Elections Commission.

The PAC spent about $5.6 million of it supporting Wood — $102,218 for every day he was in the race.

Instead, the biggest beneficiaries of Danforth’s political effort may have been political consultants.

While the group spent more than $3.5 million on ads supporting Wood’s candidacy and more than $1.4 million on media placement, the PAC paid a number of political consulting groups to boost Danforth’s indictment of polarization in modern politics.

The group’s October filing lists nine businesses across the country that received money for “PAC strategy consulting,” not including groups that got money for compliance consulting, legal fees or media consulting. The biggest checks went to a group called Bendixon and Amandi International, a communications consulting firm based out of Miami, who collected more than $95,000 of Danforth’s cash.

The campaign was unlikely to succeed from the beginning. While there are currently two independent Senators in Congress, both had established political careers in their home state before winning. And while polling shows that many Americans agree with Danforth that politics is too divided, moderates don’t usually hold the same political power as some the more engaged, polarized electorate.

“In July, I wrote that Wood’s best chance of winning would require a meteor to strike a debate stage containing the party nominees,” said Jeff Smith, a former Democratic state senator. “Since those candidates never debated or were in the same room to my knowledge, Wood literally never had a chance.”

When asked whether he regretted spending the money on a likely doomed campaign instead of finding a different approach to battling political polarization, Danforth talked instead about his disappointment in the Republican Party, saying he doesn’t feel like he has a political home.

“It was a message,” Danforth said. “It was a message of restoring the center and restoring politics as a place where you try to work things out. And it was a reaction to Trump.”

When discussing what he was looking for in a politician, Danforth mentioned conservatives in the mold of when he served, like former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. He said he’s identified as a Republican his whole life and has rejected supporting Democrats like Trudy Busch Valentine, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, who has made a similar argument about restoring civility in politics.

Danforth said he still believed that Wood was better than either candidate running. He said there is little to distinguish Schmitt from former President Donald Trump — taking issue specifically with Schmitt’s support for a lawsuit attempting to overturn the result of 2020 presidential election.

Republicans encouraged Wood to drop out of the race out of fear that he would hurt Schmitt’s chances of winning the U.S. Senate race, according to Danforth. He said “several prominent Republicans” have told him Schmitt is just “play acting,” but that he believes that Schmitt is saying what he means.

Danforth has already voted in the November election, using an absentee ballot. He wrote in John Wood.