Meet the conservative strategist working to upend Missouri Republican politics

CAMDENTON — Polls had been open a few hours on primary day in August 2022 when Sophia Shore called her dad with a problem.

She’d spent the summer running a long-shot campaign for Jill Carter, a family friend challenging an incumbent Republican state senator with vastly more money and nearly every advantage Missouri politics could offer.

Shore, then in her mid-20s, was nearly broke.

“You’re probably gonna need to put some money in my account,” she remembers telling her dad. If Carter lost, Shore figured she would spend a few weeks at her old job, waiting tables at a waterfront restaurant at the Lake of the Ozarks called Shorty Pants, until she got back on her feet.

Three days out, a state representative called Shore to tell her she’d done a good job but was still about 10 points behind the incumbent, state Sen. Bill White, and should start looking for her next gig.

He was wrong. Carter won by just over 4 points.

Shore came away from the race with a lesson that would shape the political consulting firm she eventually built: Money and endorsements don’t make an election outcome inevitable.

From a three-room office in Camdenton — next door, appropriately enough, to Rule Breakers Salon — Shore runs Missouri Maverick Strategies, specializing in the Republican candidates who are told they can’t win.

Most political consulting firms in Missouri start lining up candidates long before voters know a primary exists. A candidate with deep pockets or strong establishment backing can assemble a team of consultants, pollsters, fundraisers and media firms, leaving a challenger scrambling to find experienced help.

Those are the candidates Shore works to elect.

Her candidates tend to come from the GOP’s insurgent right, and they rail against lobbyists, corporate incentives and Republican leaders they believe have become too comfortable in Jefferson City.

This year, she managed Senate campaigns for Jim Avery, Lori Rook, Dusty Blue, Ike Skelton, Sam Alexander and Bill Hardwick, often against opponents backed by larger firms, better-funded political committees and prominent Republican officeholders.

Avery cleared the primary field, while Rook, Alexander and Hardwick emerged victorious on Aug. 4.

The results have made Shore, 28, a new force in the fight over the direction of the Missouri Republican Party.

“Am I satisfied? Absolutely not. Not even close,” she said. “I founded my firm as an alternative to the establishment racket.”

David Barklage, a veteran Republican consultant who has worked in Missouri politics for decades, sees Shore as part of a broader shift in where the energy in the GOP resides. The establishment that once controlled Republican politics, he said, has lost much of that power to insurgent candidates and activists.

“She clearly represents this new wave,” Barklage said.

‘The world is up for grabs’

Missouri Maverick doesn’t look much like a political powerhouse.

For much of the summer, the firm consisted of five people working long days out of its modest Camdenton office. All were younger than 28. Shore’s brother handles media.

The team produced ads, helped raise money, briefed candidates and built door-knocking operations across the state. Shore puts particular emphasis on the ground game because her candidates often can’t match their opponents dollar for dollar on television and mail.

Her first official campaign was in 2020, when Mike Moon was running for the Missouri Senate.

Moon, an evangelical conservative best known for his staunch opposition to abortion, initially asked her to handle volunteers and events. Shore told him she wanted to run the whole campaign or not do it at all. He agreed, and Shore spent much of the summer couch surfing with relatives around southwest Missouri while figuring out campaigns as she went.

She designed palm cards, helped write mail, organized door knockers and tried to stretch a small budget across five counties. There was no money for polling, so she talked to people in grocery stores.

Moon won the Republican primary over a former state party chairman. Along the way, Shore became convinced that candidates did not need the political establishment’s permission to compete.

“The world is up for grabs,” she said. “To win an election, you need to convince one more person than the other team. That’s it.”

Shore’s fights with the Republican establishment weren’t limited to campaigns.

At the Missouri Republican State Convention in May 2024, grassroots conservatives organized to elect Shore as convention chair over the party leadership’s preferred candidate. Once in control, the insurgent delegates pushed through their own slate of delegates to the Republican National Convention.

Growing up political

Shore grew up near the Lake of the Ozarks in Roach, in a family with deep roots in southwest Missouri and strong conservative politics.

Her mother, Stacy Shore, became active in conservative grassroots causes, particularly opposition to Common Core education standards. Sophia Shore traveled the state with her and remembers speaking at Tea Party rallies as a child.

Political activism was so normal in her family, Shore said, that she did not realize people could make careers out of it.

She attended an Assemblies of God school, earned a degree in biblical studies and considered going into ministry. She became active in the anti-abortion movement and helped organize women to testify in favor of abortion restrictions before the Missouri Senate.

The COVID-19 pandemic pulled her deeper into politics.

Her family strongly opposed government shutdowns and vaccination requirements. Shore, who describes herself as instinctively skeptical of government authority, became increasingly drawn to conservative candidates challenging Republican leaders from the right.

One of the people she became closest to in that world was state Rep. Mazzie Christensen, a Bethany Republican who had won her own race as an outsider in 2022. The two became close enough that Shore later served as maid of honor at Christensen’s wedding.

Christensen describes Shore as intense but unusually straightforward for politics.

“She’s a fighter, but she also will always do the right thing,” she said. “And that is almost impossible to find in politics, and especially in Missouri politics.”

Critics of the GOP’s insurgent wing argue lawmakers elected to fight “the establishment” can prove better at confrontation than governing. Missouri Republicans have been through this fight before.

Beginning early this decade, a group of conservative senators repeatedly clashed with Republican leaders, using filibusters and other procedural tactics to block legislation and try to force action on their priorities.

Former state Sen. Bill Eigel, whom Shore would later help run for governor, was at the center of those battles, first as a founding member of the Senate Conservative Caucus and later as a leader of the Missouri Freedom Caucus.

The fights consumed enormous amounts of Senate time. The 2023 legislative session came close to setting a modern record for futility. A year later, after another session dominated by fighting between the Freedom Caucus and GOP leaders, lawmakers passed just 28 non-budget bills — fewer than even during the COVID-shortened 2020 session.

That history explains why critics are skeptical another wave of insurgent senators would improve how the Senate functions.

Eigel laughs off that criticism with a reference to Star Wars.

“I get a kick out of the idea that the Empire is complaining that the Rebel Alliance doesn’t know how to govern,” he said.

Stopping legislation can itself be a form of governing, Eigel said, and Shore is looking for senators willing to not only pass conservative priorities but block proposals they believe are bad.

Shore answers her critics by pointing to government spending and measures such as Amendment 5, the tax overhaul Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected this month, as evidence that Republican leaders are out of step with voters.

“They have a $2 billion deficit and they voted to put Amendment 5 on the ballot,” she said. “They got beat 80-20.”

A business built on saying no

Political consulting is a business, and candidates with money are attractive clients. Many consulting firms also operate lobbying practices, giving them another source of revenue after campaign season and keeping them connected to lawmakers once they take office.

Shore says she has no interest in becoming a lobbyist. She also says she has turned down campaigns that would have paid considerably more because she did not believe in the candidate.

“I’ve never just taken a check,” she said. “I don’t think that the soul is nearly as dividable as people act like it is. I don’t think I could convince other people to bleed for me if I wasn’t willing to bleed myself.”

Christensen said she’s watched Shore make little or no money on some races because she cared more about electing the candidate than what the campaign could pay her.

“She genuinely believes in every candidate she takes on,” Christensen said, “and she’s not doing it to try to gain access to people or to make a bunch of money.”

Jim Lembke, a former Republican state senator and political strategist who advised both the Conservative Caucus and Freedom Caucus, said that’s one of the things that separates Shore from other consultants he has worked with.

“She’s a true believer,” he said.

She looks first for candidates who share her ideology, Lembke said, and then decides whether they can win. He also points to her work ethic.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody work the hours and invest themselves in races like she does,” he said.

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But Barklage believes there’s a wrinkle in the outsider-versus-establishment story.

Shore’s candidates may campaign against the influence of business groups and lobbyists, he said, but some have benefited from another powerful interest. Trial attorneys, who were once a major source of money for Missouri Democrats, have become important financial allies of the Senate’s conservative insurgents.

There is a policy history behind the alliance. During the years when the Conservative Caucus and later the Freedom Caucus regularly tied up the Senate, legislation backed by business groups to limit lawsuits repeatedly stalled.

Barklage sees that history and the money flowing into this year’s races as an important part of the rise of the GOP’s insurgent wing. As Republican primaries have become more important than general elections in much of Missouri, he said, trial attorneys have become more willing to invest in candidates who align with their interests regardless of traditional party alliances.

Lembke rejects the idea that trial attorney support makes the candidates pawns of the trial bar. Conservative Republicans and trial attorneys have found common ground on access to the courts, he said, even when they disagree on most other issues.

“There’s a lot of trial attorneys that I don’t agree with on 80% of the issues,” Lembke said. “But we agreed on that one issue.”

Shore said the common ground is about policy, not allegiance.

“I don’t believe in giving corporations legal immunity,” she said, “and the candidates I support don’t believe in it either.”

‘Just win’

In 2024, Shore worked on the campaign that put her name on the statewide political radar: Eigel’s run for governor.

Eigel began the race polling in the low single digits and was widely viewed as trailing Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe.

Carter’s upset win put Shore on his radar, Eigel said.

“She kind of burst onto the scene,” he said, pointing to her ability to organize and motivate conservative activists.

In the end, Kehoe captured the Republican nomination and was elected governor. But Eigel became a serious contender, finishing a strong second and reinforcing Shore’s belief that the political consensus in Jefferson City is often little more than insiders talking to one another.

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By 2026, she had created Missouri Maverick and was testing that theory across a slate of races. And perhaps no race captured Shore’s approach this year more than Lori Rook’s upset win over state Sen. Curtis Trent.

Trent had the sort of advantages that normally discourage a primary challenger. He was an incumbent, had strong relationships in Jefferson City and was positioned to become a Senate leader.

But Shore believed Rook, who went on to win by 7 points, better reflected Republican voters in southwest Missouri. As the campaign grew increasingly bitter, prominent Republicans rallied around Trent and outside groups poured money into the contest.

When the campaign got ugly, Shore says she thought about something her grandfather used to tell her: “You know what makes everything better? Winning.”

But she prefers the version associated with former Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis.

“Just win, baby.”

She likes the final weeks of a campaign best, when the ads are everywhere, the attacks are flying and months of work finally come down to a vote.

“I really enjoy when it gets loud,” she said. “I really enjoy when the arrows start flying.”

Barklage called Shore “a real talent,” adding: “There’s going to be a lot of days that she’s going to beat us because she’s that good.”

But her success, he said, creates a problem she hasn’t had to solve yet.

“How do you stay an insurgent campaign company,” Barklage said, “when you become ‘the establishment’ by the fact of your success?”

Shore doesn’t spend much time worrying about whether success could make her part of the establishment.

“You’re only as good as your next race,” she said. “There’s always another election cycle every two years. You’re not guaranteed anything.”

And if it stops working, she already has a backup plan.

“I’d just waitress at Shorty Pants,” she said. “If they’d have me.”