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Ashcroft, whom Quade labeled “an extremist who thinks he’s entitled to the People’s Mansion because of his last name,” is seeking a post that his father held from 1985-1993 before his one term in the Senate and time as head of George W. Bush’s justice department. The younger Ashcroft claimed the secretary of state’s office in 2016, but it was just after he easily won his second term four years later that he truly made a name for himself as a right-wing zealot.
The secretary of state addressed a 2020 pro-Trump “stop the steal rally” days after it became clear that Joe Biden had claimed the presidency and bashed mail-in voting, telling the crowd, “I am continuing to push in Missouri for it to be safe to have people vote in person.” While Ashcroft said the following year, “Under our Constitution, Joe Biden was duly elected by our presidential electors. End of story,” that was far from the end of the story.
Ashcroft instead went on to meet with Mike Lindell, the far-right pillow salesman who has been one of the most vocal Big Lie spreaders in the nation, this January. Ashcroft the following month spoke at a “secretaries of state conference” organized by far-right organizations pushing “election integrity,” though his presence was only revealed in a story in The Guardian published the day before his launch. In March, the Republican also withdrew the Show Me State from the bipartisan Electronic Registration Information Center, a multi-state group to maintain voter lists that has been at the center of numerous far-right conspiracy theories.
Ashcroft last year also proposed a rule to prevent libraries from getting state funding if they offered material he believed were “age-inappropriate materials” to minors and to allow anyone to file a challenge against books, a move that went down poorly with the people who run Missouri’s libraries. The president of the Missouri Library Association said Ashcroft didn’t discuss the proposal with them while the head of the St. Charles City-County Library District, who said that a mere six of its 1.1 million patrons complained about book content last year, declared, “This is a far cry from the picture being painted in the media and by politicians and in no way justifies this overreaching action.”
The secretary of state, though, was hardly deterred. He alluded to this plan during his kickoff when he listed one of his goals as “keeping obscene material out of our public libraries;” that same video, while not mentioning any of his rivals, showed a picture of Kehoe as Ashcroft talked about how “politicians and lobbyists in Jefferson City slap each other on the back while they give our tax dollars to global corporations, sell out farmland to China and raise gas taxes on hardworking Missourians.”
