Missouri Resistance

Well, hey everybody, Dan Dietrich here, and we’re welcoming you to this standalone episode of the Missouri Resistance Podcast.

Now, we’ve launched this episode ahead of our main podcast in order for you to get to know this guy.

He is Chris Rikerd, and he is the Democratic candidate for Missouri’s 8th Congressional District.

Well, given that the November 3rd election is right around the corner, we wanted to make sure that you got to know Chris, his policies, and why he deserves your vote.

Now, we’ll be launching the debut episode of Missouri Resistance soon after.

And with that, here’s our interview with Chris Rikerd.

Welcome to Missouri Resistance.

Here’s your host, Dan Dietrich.

Well, welcome everyone.

Missouri has eight congressional districts.

Kansas City and St.

Louis are represented by Democrats, while the remaining six districts have Republican representatives.

Now, conventional wisdom suggested that this map would remain the same after the November election.

However, there have been rumblings in the 8th Congressional District that Jason Smith, the current MAGA Republican representative, was, well, actually in trouble because of the gentleman that we’re about to meet, Chris Rikerd.

Now, Chris was born right here in Missouri’s 8th Congressional District.

His background includes working as a technician with IBEW.

He is a military veteran serving three tours of duty in Iraq, and this is his first jaunt into politics.

So, with that, we welcome our guest, Chris Rikerd.

And Chris, let’s just jump into it.

Why a run for Congress at this time?

Well, I mean, honestly, what got me to start running for this was just— Waking up angry every single day.

You know, I served in the Army for eight and a half years.

I spent time supporting social movements on the street, standing up for people’s constitutional and civil liberties.

And this just seemed like the next step for me to go for.

Well, you know, some people are a little bit skeptical at first.

They might see my appearance, but once they get to know me as a person, I’m not the career politician.

Just I’m speaking to them like actual people, because I am one of the people.

I’m working class.

I work in IBEW Local 1, use my hands, and just being a veteran, this just hits our actual community.

You know, I’m glad you mentioned the Mohawk, because let’s be perfectly candid about this.

First appearances do make a difference, and a lot of people see the Mohawk perhaps as a fashion statement.

But I’ve heard there’s a story behind it, so please tell us about that.

Ah, yeah, sure.

So there’s, um, found out in my genetic history that I’m 25% Irish and Scottish, going to the Gaelic regions, and they’ve actually found the Clonycavan Man is one of the oldest known recordings of this haircut.

It was a bog body mummy found within Ireland just in the early 2000s.

Well, a nod to your heritage, and that’s a wonderful thing to do.

Now let’s talk about your opponent, Jason Smith.

He’s been in Washington now representing this district for a little over 12 years.

So what is it about him and his policies that you just don’t like?

Well, when it comes to his policies, you know, you look at he co-wrote the Big Beautiful Bill.

He likes to talk about one specific part of it, the working families tax cuts, which is limited on the working class for only a few years, while there’s permanent cuts on the upper class.

But when you combine that with him being the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, he could have addressed all these crazy trade and tariff deals that have been thrown out by the White House.

And then you throw in putting a stamp of approval on DOGE when DOGE came out and we lost between 200,000, 300,000 jobs.

When it comes down to our district in general, those three things alone cost our district nearly half a billion dollars in negative economic pressure.

Well, part of the problem, I think, Chris, is that Jason just doesn’t come around anymore.

He’s rarely in Missouri to answer questions in public forums about what he’s doing in Washington, what he can do better, and how he can get that pushback.

And actually, here are a few images of me and a group of his constituents outside his Farmington office asking, Where is this guy?

Well, we have found evidence that he conducted eight town hall meetings in 2016 and hosted a virtual, let me emphasize, virtual town hall meeting in 2023.

And that’s it.

And Chris, you’ve actually taken advantage of this and put together, I think, a great spot about you trying to contact Jason Smith.

Let’s watch.

Hi, this is Chris Riker, Democratic candidate for Missouri’s 8th District, and I’m about to call Jason Smith’s office asking directly for a debate.

Congressman Smith’s office, how can I help you?

Hi, this is Chris Reichert, the Democratic candidate.

I’m calling to speak directly with Congressman Smith.

Give me one moment.

Okay.

Thank you.

You have this issue connecting with Jason Smith?

Get in the comments.

Let us know.

Congressman Jason Smith’s office, how can I help you?

Hi, is this Jason Smith?

No, this is not.

This is one of his staffers.

So I was looking to speak with Jason directly.

This is candidate Chris Reichert, and I wanted to formally challenge Jason Smith to a debate in the 8th District.

Yeah, I can definitely pass that on to him.

Is there a better way to get a hold of the congressman at this point in time?

I can definitely give you his scheduler’s email address, if that would work for you.

I guess I’ll have to go with that.

And then I will make sure that the message gets over to him as well, but he’s currently not in Washington, D.C.

So, like many of you, I’m not able to get directly a hold of the congressman.

I’ll try the email.

We’ll see what happens.

I think part of the reason that Jason doesn’t come to Missouri more often is that he feels he doesn’t have to.

And, you know, the history kind of nudges it along that way.

He believes the 8th District is locked.

In the last election in 2024, he was running against Randy McKellian, and he beat her by 76 to 22 percent margin.

So how do you combat that?

Well, honestly, the people have to come to the terms themselves.

I know I’ve run into a lot of people.

It’s not just the left; it’s the independents and the right that are getting mad at the policies coming out of Washington.

And when you look at the history of not just our country or our state or our district, we’ve been a purple state, we’ve been a blue state.

Our country goes through the waves back and forth.

This district…

While it’s been red since 1981, the 20 years prior to that was blue, and a lot of the state representatives have been blue and red back and forth over the years.

Okay, so let’s take a look at this from another perspective.

You’re sitting at a cafe in the 8th Congressional District.

A number of Republicans have gathered around you, and they’re genuinely interested in learning more.

What do you tell them?

Like I said earlier, I’m working class, like pretty much everybody in our district is.

So I’m coming at them on their level.

While I might be a construction worker and a lot of the people in our district are working in factories or they’re working the farms and they’re cattlemen, look, we’re all the same.

We’re all fighting for our share at this point.

And hitting them with the working class and being a veteran, that gets me in the door.

Talking about the views, yeah, we’re not going to agree on everything.

And while I have some views that are very left, I am not a one-dimensional person.

So I go from progressive to populist to even libertarian views from my time over the years.

And here, Chris, I think one of the things that we can relate to, to all Republicans is the fact that during the August primary election, we both know that Amendment 4, which would have basically gutted the population’s ability to make their own laws, and Amendment 5, which would have replaced the loss of revenue from the income tax with a huge increase in sales tax, were strongly supported by Jason Smith and Mike Kehoe, and they both went down in flames, both losing by more than 80%.

How do you turn that around to your advantage?

Well, here’s the deal with how Missouri is.

Like I said earlier, it’s been a purple state.

A lot of this legislation that gets approved or denied, usually even the Republicans are voting towards what the left side views would be, but they keep voting the people in that would actually overturn those decisions.

Now, when it comes to once again meeting with the Republicans and the independents across the district, what I’ve found in the common ground all across the board are the data centers and the flock cameras are one of the biggest issues, and they’re getting pushed so hard by the Republican legislators from Donald Trump to Jason Smith all the way down to the state level.

You know, one of the encouraging things when I look around is that Republicans, when presented with good evidence and common sense, will vote Democrat like they did in 2008 in Iron County for Barack Obama.

But it’s going to take more than, I think, common sense to win this election.

So let’s talk campaign finances and money raised to date.

The differences are quite staggering.

According to the Federal Election Commission, for every dollar you have raised, Jason Smith has raised a thousand dollars.

Now, I’m not going to give the actual amounts, but what do you do with such a wide deficit in fundraising?

I get out and actually see the people face to face.

Okay, I will certainly give you credit.

I mean, you’ve had the opportunity to get out there and meet with people face to face.

I think you’ve said that since December, you’ve traveled about 20,000 miles, and that’s great.

But the fact of the matter is that face to face is only going to do you so much good.

Republicans make up well over 75 percent of the 8th Congressional District.

How are you going to relate to them?

Well, there’s been attendances at multiple nonpartisan events, usually it’s the data center type events.

And I’ll even admit, in the beginning, I was a soft no to the data centers.

And the more I get out there, the more I learn, the more I see the corruption, like what happened in Festus, that pushed me to a hard no.

And it’s hitting people on these common grounds.

Once again, this is where the communities are actually coming together.

It’s these events.

Well, I admire your tenacity.

I admire the fact that you’re willing to get out there and work seven days a week to get this done.

You certainly have boots on the ground, and I admire you for that.

Now, I’m going to reveal something to you that’s purely anecdotal, but I think it hits on a strong message.

I’m a member of three democratic organizations and three more what you might call civic-minded organizations.

The collective thought is that, Chris, you’re going to lose.

But the victory lies in the fact that you’re going to close the gap, and the margin of his victory will shrink.

So my question to you is easy: are you here to close the gap, or are you here to win?

I am absolutely fighting to win.

But regardless of the outcome, I have appreciated all the support that the community has brought my direction.

And I think we can move not just the needle in my election.

I think we can flip seats on the state elections.

We have so many great candidates running across the district that people are ready for this change, and they’re ready to step up for it.

Well, I’m certainly delighted to hear that.

Now, let’s face it, you don’t have to be a household name or to have millions of dollars in the bank to win this.

In fact, you proved that in the primary when you beat your Democratic opponent, Frank Barnett.

Frank owns several businesses.

He served in the Missouri House of Legislature, and he certainly was, I think, better funded than you.

So I’m glad to see that after the election that Frank has pledged his support to you, and Frank, thank you for that.

Have you been in touch with Frank, and what’s the level of support we’re talking about now?

I actually just was in a text conversation with Frank this morning, and he’s going to be passing over a quilt that was donated to him so that I can auction it off for my campaign.

I’m certainly glad to hear that.

I do appreciate Frank’s continued support.

There is concern, though, Chris, among many of his followers about an endorsement that you received from the Southeast Missouri Democratic Socialist of America Club.

And as you well know, the national DSA platform is very controversial.

So we’re going to do a lightning round here, and I’m going to throw out one of their principal policies and let’s get a reaction from you.

So let’s get started.

The first one is abolish the Senate.

Abolishing the Senate is one of the aspects I don’t agree with with DSA.

I understand why they have the population-based in the House, and then they have the state-based in the Senate so that we can have some sort of balance back and forth.

It does make things harder to get things passed, but that is not one of the parts of the institution that I support getting rid of.

The next is that Congress should elect the president.

Absolutely not.

The presidency is a position that should be elected by the people.

And then there’s defunding the police and the prisons.

As far as it comes to police and the prisons, we do need massive reforms.

Defunding, it gets lumped in together in a way that defunding isn’t always necessarily defunding, but redirecting funds to make sure that it’s not militarization of the police, but actually making sure they have the training that if they’re out in the public, they’re not— causing all these national instances of violence that we see.

How about abolishing ICE?

Right now, as it stands, I am all for abolishing ICE.

With the way that they’ve trampled on civil and constitutional liberties, I am 100% for it.

We do need a massive immigration change, much like what happened after 9/11 and immigration got separated into Customs and Border Patrol and the current immigration and ICE.

And it’s going to take more than just me to figure this out, but there are humane practices from all those eras beforehand that we can get back into progress and get a working path to citizenship for people.

And then the last, I would say, major controversial one is closing the military bases overseas.

What’s your take on that?

When we have allies that want our support there on ready access, if we’re not ostracizing them the way that the administration has done, it is very key and crucial with some of the conflicts of the world.

Well, thanks for clearing those up.

You were forthright, and no one can say that you backed away from that issue.

Now, I am interested about your campaign and how it’s working.

I know, according to election statistics, that you’ve listed yourself as your own campaign treasurer.

So I’m curious, who’s your campaign manager?

Who’s helping you with finances and fundraising and publicity?

Just tell me what your organizational support looks like.

So the main member of my team is actually my wife, has been my manager, PR, crisis management, mostly just trying to be the crisis management, and then— Unofficially, just working with members of the community that have been in the Democratic clubs and, like, Indivisible, and working with the actual state, the state candidates.

So, like, when they’re out knocking doors, I give them my material to go with them, just so that we’re trying to work the down ballot all together.

Because when you’re running a grassroots, bare bones campaign, there’s only so much you can do.

And, you know, you want to be able to pay people for their time.

And the limited funds I got is just not doable at this point.

Well, Chris, I appreciate that, but I’m not sure you have to pay people to help you out.

This is an election in which they have as much or more to gain than you do, so I would certainly give them an opportunity to reach out and lend support when they possibly can.

Now, we were talking about things in your favor, and here’s one I find particularly interesting.

During the primaries, Jason Smith ran ads against you, not Frank Barnett, who I think would have to be considered the front-runner at the time.

And it makes me wonder why.

Now, this is pure supposition.

I have no proof of it, but I wonder if Jason has done some preliminary polling and shows that you’re getting closer than he’s comfortable with.

And in fact, I had to smile because I’ve seen a video that was produced about one of your constituents, or his constituents, rather, confronting him at a gathering recently, where he challenges Jason to see if he will have a debate with you, and Jason pretends that he doesn’t even know you.

But you put together a spot right after that that shows quite literally that he knows you very well.

Let’s watch.

Last month, in a rare wild sighting, just after the primaries, a constituent managed to catch up with Jason Smith and when asked if he would have a debate with me, all Jason could say was, Who?

Well, Jason, the people don’t forget that just a month prior, you had an aggressive ad campaign of videos here in Missouri.

Radical Chris Reichert.

Text messages and mailers.

By your campaign.

Jason, the people want you to come back to the district, answer their questions in a town hall or a debate with me.

They don’t want these games, so stop playing around and say it to my face.

Classic.

Okay, let’s talk about the issues.

Give us your top five priorities once you get into Washington, D.C.

I’m glad you said top five, because when they say top three, it makes it so much harder.

So what’s been brought up within the district ends up being the top two being healthcare and education.

Then there’s accountability, affordability, and then that fifth one would have to dance between either being veterans' care or for labor rights.

You know, Chris, you’re going to have a tough fight when you get into the nation’s capital.

You’re not only going to be battling Republicans, you’re also going to be battling entrenched Democrats from the good old boy network, and they’re not too pleased to see newcomers come in with a lot of progressive ideas.

So how are you going to attend to that?

Well, I’ve been trying to work to build coalitions with the other congressional candidates within the state so that we can try to hit the ground running with a bunch of these bills that I have marked.

At this point, of the 15,000 stalled bills in Congress, I have about 200 marked to review or actually support and try to get put into omnibus legislation.

But when it comes to before even getting elected, I’m going to be joining Take Back Congress in Washington, D.C., and they’re a group that is set to bring accountability and balance back to Washington, D.C., and they operate off of five tenets, which is getting congressional term limits, overturn Citizens United, getting a moratorium on lobbying, no stock trading, and a code of judicial ethics for the U.S.

Supreme Court.

We’re going to be taking to the Capitol stairs and having a press conference and interviews with national media afterwards.

So hopefully that also helps the problem of getting my face and name out there.

Yes, and congratulations.

You raised $2,000 to get to that event, and it sounds like they’ve got a wonderful platform.

You now have the floor.

The last word is yours.

When it comes to elections, this is one of the founding core aspects of our country.

When it came to the primary election, only 30% of Missourians came out to vote.

That 70% that we know are disenfranchised.

There’s another 20% that are eligible to vote that aren’t even registered in our district.

Now I know that we’re hurting.

We’re one of the poorest districts in the country.

We’re definitely the poorest in the state with the highest poverty rate, often the highest in unemployment.

We have children going hungry between one in four and one in five, depending on the part of the district that you’re in.

If you want these things to change, you have to be able to go out and vote.

Chris, thanks so much for joining us.

We wish you the best in the campaign, and we will do the best we can to support you.

Thanks again to our special guest, Chris Reichert, and thanks to all of you for joining us on this special episode of Missouri Resistance.

We’ll be launching our debut podcast in just a few weeks, and we invite you to join us as we look for innovative and impactful ways to fight back against the corruption going on at both the national and state level.

Because we are Missouri Resistance, grassroots-born, people-powered, and Missouri strong.

We’ll see you soon.

This has been Missouri Resistance with your host, Dan Dieter.