It is a testament to the extremist, corrupt and dysfunctional political leadership of Missouri that residents generally have to go around their elected representatives to achieve anything governmentally constructive these days. While the Legislature has been busy with right-wing virtue signaling to the Republican base over the past few years, voters have had to use ballot initiatives to increase the minimum wage, legalize marijuana, expand Medicaid and more.
Government by referendum isn’t an ideal system. But when elected lawmakers routinely refuse to carry out the people’s will (and even, on issues like abortion rights, aggressively defy it), citizens are left with little choice but to take matters into their own hands.
Whether legalized sports gambling is the people’s will is unclear; polls show as many as a quarter of Missourians are undecided on the issue. That, along with the Legislature’s typical inability to dig in on serious policy issues (as opposed to culture-war nonsense) makes the new referendum campaign by the Cardinals and other sports franchises a reasonable way to settle the question.
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The Cardinals are leading a new effort by a group of sports teams including the St. Louis Blues, City SC and the Kansas City Chiefs, Royals and Current to get sports betting on the Missouri ballot. As the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson reports, the effort comes following multiple years of failure to get the Legislature to decide the issue one way or the other.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether legalized gambling is a net positive for society. When properly regulated and heavily taxed, it can be a boon for education funding and other important priorities. But it undoubtedly brings with it societal costs like gambling addiction.
Today, however, that debate is effectively moot. Legalized gambling, for better or worse, is a permanent fact of life in Missouri as in most of America. The only question is how heavily the state wants to bet on it.
The U.S. Supreme Court effectively raised the ante in 2018 with a ruling that overturned a ban on sports betting, leaving the issue to the states.
Since then, all but a dozen states have created legal sports-gambling industries, generally allowing patrons to bet on games either at the stadiums, in casinos, or online.
As a result, Missouri today is surrounded by states that allow residents to do what Missourians can’t — but what many of them clearly want to.
Assessing how many people travel from Missouri to Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, Kentucky or other bordering states to bet on sports is difficult. But as the Missouri Independent recently reported, an industry company that tracks cross-state wagering identified more than 10,000 such bets placed by Missourians in Illinois and Kansas in 2023 alone.
Even more telling may be the number of failed attempts by Missourians to bet from here online on other states’ sports (which is restricted): The company, GeoComply, has identified more than 356,000 Missouri accounts that unsuccessfully attempted to place bets more than 24 million times last year.
To the extent those numbers represent pent-up demand in Missouri for sports betting, the haul for state education funding could be significant. Neighboring Kansas saw some $1.85 billion in bets placed during its first year of legalized sports betting. By one estimate, Missouri could net (after winning payouts and all other expenses) almost $30 million annually at the 10% tax rate proponents are seeking.
Passage of a statewide referendum will by no means be assured. A St. Louis University poll last year found a 41% plurality of Missouri oppose legalized sports gambling here — though 35% were in favor and a significant 24% were “not sure.” Convincing those 1-in-4 undecided would be the challenge for the proponents.
It would be encouraging to report that the Legislature’s inaction on the issue over the past few years was out of concern about unclear public opinion. But in fact, it’s nothing so responsible.
The holdup has been primarily over the fate of the thousands of unregulated, untaxed video gaming machines that have been allowed to operate at gas stations and other venues throughout Missouri with impunity, despite flagrantly violating state gaming laws. Players put money into the machines in hopes of getting more back — the very definition of gambling — yet the machines’ owners claim they don’t fall under state gambling regulations.
Their arguments are specious, but their heavy campaign donations to Missouri politicians have effectively paralyzed legislative efforts to either regulate and tax the machines or shut them down. The insistence by some in the Legislature that the debate over the machines be settled as part of any new gaming package has killed sports betting in the past.
So it may, yet again, fall to the residents of Missouri to directly make state policy in the voting booth, in the absence of a Legislature capable of carrying out its core function as an institution of representative democracy. Why do we even bother electing them?