As Bill Eigel sets his sights on a county office, his impact on Missouri politics endures

by Jason Hancock, Missouri Independent
March 10, 2025

Bill Eigel hasn’t been a Missouri senator for months, and he fell short in his two recent runs for governor and chair of the state GOP.

Yet as the Missouri General Assembly speeds toward the midpoint of its most productive legislative session in years, Eigel remains a subject of fascination for the legislature he left behind.

“We lovingly refer to that as the ‘ghost of Bill Eigel in Jefferson City,’” Eigel said with a laugh in a recent interview with The Independent. 

Part of it is Eigel’s years as a ringleader of Republican insurgents who warred with GOP leadership and created enough gridlock that fewer bills passed last year than any session in living memory. 

With legislation now seemingly flying out of the Senate, it’s little wonder his supporters would miss his intransigence and his detractors would publicly celebrate his absence. 

But the interest — some might say obsession — goes beyond that. 

Eigel’s run for governor last year was written off as a quixotic adventure destined for a distant third-place finish in a three-way GOP primary. He had no money, no name ID and no chance against two statewide officials — one with a massive campaign warchest, the other the scion of a Missouri political dynasty. 

Yet despite being outspent four-to-one, Eigel’s MAGA-fueled insurgent campaign ended up capturing 33% of the vote in the August primary, finishing second to now-Gov. Mike Kehoe and holding him to only 39%.

Two months later, he nearly pulled off another upset, when he ran against Kehoe’s choice to serve as chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, losing by only four votes. 

His surprising electoral strength — “the only people that I’m surprising are the status quo folks who’ve gotten used to how things are run,” he says — demonstrated Eigel’s ability to harness the frustration of the Republican base.

And it put leaders of his party on notice. 

“Bill Eigel has a great political compass on where the Republican and the conservative base is, and he speaks to the issues they care about,” said James Harris, a longtime GOP lobbyist and political consultant. “Underestimating him again would be a mistake.” 

Now Eigel has thrown his hat into the race for St. Charles County executive, the top position in the third-largest county in the state that twice elected him to the Missouri Senate by wide margins. 

But no one sees the move as evidence that Eigel is ready to step off the statewide stage. 

To the contrary, the campaign is seen by Jefferson City denizens as Eigel simply looking for a political perch to mount another primary challenge against Kehoe in 2028. 

“I feel like I’ve heard that from both my detractors and my supporters,“ Eigel said, “and actually, I think what my detractors don’t understand is they’re actually flattering me.”

He insists he’s looking no further down the road than the 2026 county election. Yet he’s also quick to point out the big impact on state politics he could have from the county executive seat. 

“We have a chance to create a positive, uplifting vision of how a county ought to run, where we have a low tax, low regulation environment,” he said. “St. Charles County has a role to play in state-level conversations that it’s never had before.”

And it doesn’t take much prodding to get him to tick through a litany of problems he has with the first two months of Kehoe’s first legislative session as governor.

He believes utility legislation that cleared the Senate will lead to higher energy bills for consumers, and looks disdainfully at the governor’s proposed budget and bills like that one that recently cleared the Senate making a tax that funds Medicaid permanent. 

“Where’s our tax cut?” he said. “Where’s our conservative budget?”

Maybe most of all, Eigel bristles at behind-the-scenes talks in recent weeks among lawmakers, local officials and the governor about how to fund new stadiums for the Chiefs and Royals. 

“There’s few issues I can think of,” he said, “that resonate less with everyday folks that are trying to make their mortgage payment and pay their bills than whether we should pay for new stadiums for billionaires.”

Bill Eigel vows to slash budget, round up immigrants if elected Missouri governor

Eigel ran for governor on a pledge to eliminate the personal property tax, abolish the income tax, slash state spending and round-up undocumented immigrants. He accused GOP leadership in the legislature (the RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, as he calls them) of ignoring these issues and the Republican voters who sent them to Jefferson City in the first place. 

The political establishment in Missouri, he said then and now, is overdue for a political reckoning. 

But if anyone is to blame for conservative legislation dying on the vine every year, his detractors insist, it’s Bill Eigel. 

As a leader of the Missouri Senate Freedom Caucus, Eigel squabbled with GOP leadership and engaged in years of procedural maneuvers that gummed up the chamber. Last year, fewer bills passed than even the COVID-shortened 2020 session.

The gridlock, his critics say, cost the GOP super majority years of potential legislative success. 

State Sen. Mike Cierpiot, a Lee’s Summit Republican, told The Independent last year in the closing hours of the legislation session that Eigel and the Freedom Caucus were determined to turn the Senate into “clown show… and if people are dedicated to be a part of a clown show it is hard to shut it down.”

Eigel is gone, and so is the infighting that dominated the chamber. 

“People are talking,” Cierpiot said in a recent TV interview. “Things this year are more based on policy, which is how the place is supposed to work, and not personality. And that’s very helpful.”

Even state Sen. Rick Brattin, a Harrisonville Republican and chair of the Freedom Caucus who fought many of the intraparty battles alongside Eigel, acknowledged earlier this year that the “dumpster fire” of a 2024 session “had to do with personality, with particular individuals.”

Eigel makes no apologies for the gridlock he helped inspire, saying last year that most of the bills GOP leadership wanted to pass were bad policies that he was happy to kill. 

And to be sure, the vibe shift is not all Eigel. A change in GOP leadership, along with other senators leaving the chamber, surely played a role. 

But the difference is palpable. 

Harris, the GOP lobbyist and consultant, compared the drama of recent years to a family who let dysfunction linger too long. It finally came to a head last year, Harris said, and returning senators were ready for a rest. 

“People thought, ‘I can blow everything up. I can stop everything,’” he said. “They didn’t understand the ramifications, that they create a lot of ill will and then people would go out and return that favor. This year, people are trying to communicate more and senators are trying to carefully pick their battles.”

Eigel insists that nobody is happier than he is that “folks aren’t necessarily having some of the acrimony that we saw take place in recent years.”

“But ultimately,” he said, “the folks in Jefferson City are going to be judged by what they do or they do not accomplish.”

And he’s not trying to take shots at his former Freedom Caucus allies, who he said he trusts to do right by the people of Missouri. But voters are frustrated, Eigel said, as they watch the legislative session being dominated by “special interest bills. I used to refer to them as ‘the sludge.’”

“They’re frustrated and they’re angry,” Eigel said of GOP voters. “They see Donald Trump is doing things to change the game up in Washington, D.C., and they are wanting, rightfully, to know why, with all these Republicans around here in Missouri, why aren’t we seeing that same kind of energy, that same kind of momentum to the positive in Jefferson City.” 

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

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