The weird world of Missouri campaign B-roll

It’s one of my favorite times of the election year: B-roll season.

Across Missouri, candidates are posting B-roll — the wordless, context-free footage ad-makers layer under narration — so the political action committees they’re legally barred from coordinating with can stumble upon it and cut it into ads. All of it perfectly legal, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s touching faith that money spent “independently” can’t corrupt anyone.

They don’t make it easy to find, often burying footage in unlisted YouTube videos, public Google Drive folders and campaign website pages coded so search engines pretend they don’t exist — public enough to be found, hidden enough that no actual voter will ever stumble across it.

But to those bored enough to dig, the results are often hilarious.

Do you want to watch Republican 5th Congressional District hopeful Taylor Burks chat in slow motion with an unidentified gentleman in front of a tank, accompanied by what I presume is royalty-free blues rock?

We got that B-roll.

What about Democrats Gina Mitten and Steve Butz, running against each other for a St. Louis-based seat in the Missouri Senate, marching down courthouse steps or thumbing through family photos?

We got that B-roll.

Or perhaps you’d prefer 15 seconds of Democratic St. Louis County executive candidate Brian Williams smiling into the camera, followed by 15 seconds of him turning very serious?

We got that B-roll.

Missouri didn’t invent this. In 2014, Mitch McConnell’s campaign posted two minutes of the senator silently smiling at the camera; Jon Stewart turned it into a meme (“McConnelling”), and a pro-McConnell PAC was airing the footage within 10 days.

The genre has flourished ever since — and Missouri has contributed some classics.

Among my all-time favorites: Jay Ashcroft making what appears to be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in slow motion during his 2024 campaign for governor. Slow motion makes everything feel more profound.

I remain fond of State Treasurer Vivek Malek leaning against the border wall in Texas while the sun sets behind him. For sheer quantity, there’s 48 minutes of former Attorney General Andrew Bailey driving a tractor, fixing a barbed wire fence and standing confidently with arms folded in an alley.

But the B-roll that makes me laugh hardest came from the 2024 Democratic primary for a Kansas City seat in the Missouri Senate between Patty Lewis and Pat Contreras.

Designed, presumably, for the PAC backing Contreras, it is mostly nine minutes of people claiming to have no idea who Patty Lewis is.

The first 30 seconds alone feature an unnamed woman saying:

“Rep. Patty Lewis? Who’s that? I’ve never heard of her. Patty Lewis? She’s just another politician in Jeff City getting nothing done. Wait, who’s running for Senate? Patty Lewis? I’ve never heard of her. I think she’s a do-nothing politician. Rep. Patty Lewis? Who’s that? I’ve never heard of her. Patty Lewis? I’ve never heard of her. Patty Lewis? Has she accomplished a single thing in Jeff City?”

Nine minutes.

Someone wrote that script. Someone assembled that cast. Someone watched stranger after stranger pretend not to know who Patty Lewis is and said, “Perfect — but can we get one more?”

Lewis won the primary with more than 67% of the vote.

Ordinary campaign ads are polished attempts to manipulate voters. B-roll lets us see the raw ingredients before the manipulation begins: the candidate walking through a factory, the candidate listening intently to a farmer, the candidate laughing slightly too hard at something a small-business owner has said.

No dialogue. No context. Just hours of candidates opening doors, examining equipment and reacting warmly to comments we cannot hear.

Eventually, an independent political committee may take these images and transform them into an advertisement explaining that the candidate is either the only person capable of saving Missouri or an immediate threat to the republic.

The campaign, of course, will have had no role in that decision.

It merely posted an hour of professionally filmed, high-definition footage online, organized around the candidate’s preferred themes, for anyone who happened to need it.

Independently.