Before Curtis Trent can try to run the Missouri Senate floor, he has to win reelection in southwest Missouri.
Trent, a Springfield Republican seeking his second term in the state Senate, is also running for majority floor leader — one of the most powerful jobs in the Capitol and a position that could shape the 2027 legislative session. But his path to leadership now runs through Lori Rook, a Springfield elder law attorney casting him as exactly the kind of Jefferson City insider Republican primary voters have punished before.
So the Aug. 4 contest in Senate District 20 isn’t just an incumbent-versus-challenger primary. It is a test of whether Trent’s growing power in Jefferson City is his strongest argument for reelection — or Rook’s strongest argument against him.
Rook shows up with a sharper edge than the usual long-shot bid against an incumbent. She has personal money, statewide campaign experience and a team led by Sophia Shore, who managed Jill Carter’s 2022 upset of incumbent Republican state Sen. Bill White — the last time GOP primary voters tossed a sitting senator in southwest Missouri. Shore also helped run Bill Eigel’s campaign for governor in 2024.
Trent is no easy target. He enters with a large financial edge, years representing the area and backing from much of the Republican establishment.
Daniel Ponder, a Drury University political scientist who lives in the district, said Trent starts with advantages Rook will have to overcome, namely money and name recognition in southwest Missouri.
Trent has “been on the yard signs and on the ballot for coming up on 10 years,” Ponder said. Recent mailers, he said, have urged voters to thank Trent for supporting President Donald Trump’s agenda — a sign the incumbent is already working to blunt any argument he’s insufficiently conservative.
What makes this particular primary matter beyond southwest Missouri is the prize waiting for Trent if he survives it.
If he is reelected and chosen by his Republican colleagues as majority floor leader, Trent would help decide which bills come up for debate, when they move and how Gov. Mike Kehoe’s agenda is managed in 2027. The job is opening at a moment of turnover: Term limits are removing President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin and Majority Floor Leader Tony Luetkemeyer.
The floor leader controls the calendar, which means controlling what reaches a vote — power that touches taxes, energy, education, the budget and the long-running fight over whether to expand gambling in Missouri.
Rook rejects the argument that the district benefits from sending one of its own into leadership — a case she says her own party often frames as “sit down, shut up, wait your turn.”
“None of that benefits Senate District 20,” she said. “People outside the echo chamber of this establishment group just want somebody that’s going to go up to Jefferson City and fight for them and come back and talk to them and show up at their local meetings.”
The challenger
Rook is making her second run for office.
In 2024, she ran for state treasurer in a crowded Republican primary and finished third, with 127,970 votes — 19.4% — behind incumbent Vivek Malek and former state Sen. Andrew Koenig.
She ran stronger in the counties that make up Senate District 20, finishing second in Greene, Dade and Webster counties and winning Barton County, according to official election results.
Rook lost that race but built name recognition among conservative activists and showed she would spend her own money. She has put $100,000 of it into her Senate campaign.
The treasurer’s race, she said, opened her eyes to “dysfunction” and “corruption” in both parties. She said she decided to run after looking at Trent’s record and seeing someone in “lockstep with the things that bothered me.”
A self-described Republican outsider, she has run squarely against the Capitol’s governing class.
“I am running for state Senate because southwest Missouri deserves actual conservative fighters, not more go-along-to-get-along lobby corps lackeys,” she said in announcing her candidacy.
Rook grew up in Springfield, graduated from Nixa High School and earned a criminal justice degree from Missouri State University before law school in Oklahoma City. After several years as a trial attorney, she shifted into elder law in 2012.
Her argument against Trent is that his record is a catalog of favors to corporations and insiders.
She points to the 2025 utility law Trent supported, which opened a path for electric companies to bill customers for power plants while they are still under construction. Rook ties that law to rising utility bills and to the data centers seeking to plug into Missouri’s grid, including a proposed project in Webster County that led county officials to approve a six-month moratorium.
She also opposes Amendment 5, the tax overhaul Trent sponsored, arguing it ignores the state’s spending problem and will result in higher costs for families. To her, Trent’s sponsorship of the measure reflects his alignment with lobbyists and Jefferson City insiders — who she believes will benefit the most if Amendment 5 passes.
And then there is gambling.
For years, Missouri lawmakers have fought over whether to legalize and regulate video lottery terminals — slot machines that have spread into gas stations, convenience stores and bars. House-backed bills have repeatedly died in the Senate.
Video lottery supporters believe a friendlier Senate is within reach in 2027, and an analysis by The Independent found gambling interests have poured more than $4 million into Missouri legislative campaigns since the start of 2025 — money concentrated in the primaries that could clear the path.
Trent’s committee has taken a share of it.
Four days after lawmakers adjourned in May, J&J Ventures, an Illinois company that operates video gambling terminals, gave $50,000 to 417 PAC, a political action committee aligned with Trent. More recently, PACs tied to former House Speaker Steve Tilley, who lobbies for Torch Electronics, donated a combined $30,000 to 417 PAC.
“It’s pay to play,” Rook said of that money. “It’s completely corrupt, and none of it surprises me.”
The incumbent
Trent’s case for himself is that he’s a conservative willing to do the complicated work of moving major policy through the statehouse.
He grew up on a small farm in southwest Missouri, graduated from Missouri State University and earned his law degree from Saint Louis University. Before winning the open 20th District seat in 2022, he worked as deputy chief of staff to former U.S. Rep. Billy Long and served three terms in the Missouri House.
In the Senate, he has risen fast, serving as assistant majority floor leader and chairing the General Laws Committee. He has drawn endorsements from business-oriented conservative groups, including Americans for Prosperity Missouri.
Trent did not return calls seeking comment for The Independent’s earlier story on gambling money, and his campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
On gambling, he argued during Senate debate that Missouri needs legal clarity around games already operating in much of the state. He questioned whether a crackdown led by Attorney General Catherine Hanaway — her push to shut the machines down as illegal — would succeed, and pointed to cities that have passed ordinances against the machines as a sign the law is less settled than opponents claim.
“If it’s already illegal, you don’t pass an ordinance outlawing it or prohibiting it,” Trent said, arguing lawmakers would do better to “create a deliberate framework.”
On energy, Trent has been outspoken in support of the 2025 utility law, arguing in a January op-ed that it did not cause recent rate increases and that its construction-financing provisions are tightly restricted.
Harris, a veteran Republican consultant and Jefferson City lobbyist who has known Trent since Billy Long’s 2010 congressional campaign, said Trent is routinely underestimated.
“He is really smart, he’s a good campaigner,” Harris said. “If I was going to go with who fits the district, I’d say Curtis.”
Harris said Trent’s southwest Missouri roots, prior wins in the district and low-key style make him harder to caricature than other incumbents. He did not quarrel with the description of Trent as a deal-maker popular with Capitol insiders. But he treated it as an advantage.
The “swamp” attack Rook is running, Harris argued, is easy to throw and hard to land against a well-funded incumbent.
Trent “will have more resources,” he said, “so he can define himself and withstand some slaps of swamp.”
The clearest example of Trent’s approach this year was Amendment 5, the plan to give lawmakers a temporary window to broaden the sales tax in order to phase out the individual income tax.
At an April Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce event, Trent argued the state risks falling behind if it does not move faster.
“The states around us are being very aggressive about lowering their income tax rates, even more aggressive than we have been,” he said.
The cause has a longtime patron, and in late June he surfaced in Trent’s own finance reports.
Rex Sinquefield — the retired financier who has spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to abolish Missouri’s income tax — gave $125,000 to 417 PAC, by far the largest donation the committee has reported this year.
A familiar fight
The contrast is one Missouri Republicans have grappled with for a decade: Trent’s governing model, built around experience and leadership, against Rook’s insurgent model, built around hostility to lobbyist influence and the way business gets done.
“In current politics, personal ambition and ideological preferences trump traditional party loyalties,” said Peverill Squire, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “As a result, across the country we see incumbents in both parties being challenged by politicians on their ideological flanks.”
The last time disgruntled voters tossed a sitting senator in southwest Missouri was 2022, when Carter beat White — the race Rook’s campaign manager ran for the challenger.
Whether that precedent translates is another question. Harris said White lost in part because he had alienated voters with an abrasive style — a personal vulnerability he does not see in Trent.
“Curtis is not a villain,” Harris said.
Senate District 20 is heavily Republican, and the August primary will almost certainly decide the seat. Democrat Sean Falconer has filed but faces long odds. Trent won the 2022 general election unopposed after taking the GOP primary with more than 58% of the vote.
Squire expects Trent’s money to matter, but said the outcome of the race will turn on who actually shows up in August and “whether they remain comfortable with the incumbent or are anxious to try something different.”
Ponder, the Drury University political science professor, said the race has been relatively quiet so far. But in the closing weeks before the primary, he doesn’t expect that to hold.
“Usually, in campaigns like this,” he said, “particularly state elections and especially state legislative races, which don’t tend to be very high profile, the last month is really when you see the push.”