Missouri governor candidate interview: Jay Ashcroft

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

ABC 17 News is interviewing candidates in the major races on the August primary ballot.

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft is seeking the Republican nomination for governor against two well-funded opponents and a large field of others.

Lucas Geisler: What's your work and your political background?

Jay Ashcroft: Well, I started off and I mean, I guess my first job was working at Dairy Queen when I was 15. So I worked in fast food, worked in restaurants, worked in retail industry while I was in high school and paying for college. But I graduated from the University of Missouri-Rolla with two degrees, accredited engineering degrees, a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. After graduating, my first job out of college was down in West Plains, Missouri, working as an engineer for a defense contractor was SCI at the time that changed their name several times since. Worked for them for about four and a half years. About two years into it, one of the upper-level bosses requested that I come up and work with him at the headquarters. So I was in West Plains for about two years and then I was at the Cool Valley location for the balance of the four and a half years that was left. Near the end of my time with them, the contract was coming to an end and every Friday there were more empty seats and they were starting to get close to mine. So I took a position teaching, was certified by the state of Missouri to teach mechanical engineering in mechanical engineering technology, and I taught that for six years at St. Louis Community College, was on all three campuses. There's now a fourth campus, but there were only three campuses when I was there.

While I was teaching there, I got married and my wife decided that she wanted to go to law school. So I did what I said I would never do. When I was 17 years old, I said, "I'm never going into politics and I'm never going to become a lawyer." I said, "I'm going to get a real job and be an engineer." And yet I ended up going to law school. But I have been an engineer longer. I just want to make that clear. I went to law school, practiced law for, what, eight years, I guess, and was elected secretary of state and have served as a secretary of state of the state for the last eight years.

Geisler: What made you want to run for this job for governor?

Ashcroft: Really, what made me want to run for this job? I knew that I shouldn't run for secretary of state again. I don't like the idea of people just sitting in one position. They start to think it's theirs and that they've earned it. I think it's good to be reminded, frankly, every day that it's the people's right and it's by their grace that they allow anyone to serve.

So I knew I had to leave the secretary of state's office, and I was thinking about getting out of politics entirely, which is a really nice thought. But then I realized that there were so many things that needed to be done in our state and no one was moving forward on them. We didn't have educational freedom like we're seeing even in Iowa and Arkansas. But beyond that, Arizona and Florida and other states are putting parents in charge of education. I saw what was happening with public safety and it's going in the wrong direction. We have families across this state that don't feel safe when they go to sleep at night in their own home. And there was no one that was putting out a plan to actually change that.

I saw the growth in our government. Our state budget has increased by over $20 billion. I mean, it's hard to comprehend that number. I mean, I know what a billion means, but to visualize that and yet our government hasn't got better. They've just decided, they passed the largest tax increase in the history of the state three years ago when they had billions of dollars they didn't know what to do with it. So really, those are the three main points to put parents in charge of education. Fewer than 25% of Missouri eighth graders are proficient in math and reading. What future are we setting them up for here? Setting them up for a future of dependency. We should be setting them up by teaching them to think, not indoctrinating them for a future of independence, so they can make their own decisions.

They can go into the skilled trades, they can go into business, they could be an entrepreneur, they can do whatever they want. So I just chose three main areas. And then, of course, I saw the travesty of selling our land to our enemies. You know, both of my main opponents have voted to sell our land to foreign entities. I've actually led the fight last year to stop that. No one else was getting it done. So I said, I'm going to have to jump in. So I ran because, well, you know, the probably the finest one I can put it on it is I can talk about different policies, educational freedom and public safety and cutting government.

But it really comes down, I guess, I've got four kids and I'm tired of our state's No. 1 export being the best and the brightest of the next generation. I want Missouri to be a state where kids from around this country and frankly around the world say that's where opportunity is. That's where I can work hard and I can achieve success and control my own destiny. And government will be out of the way. And so I guess it's partially selfish, but I want my kids and I also want other Missourians' kids to be able to stay in Missouri and to be great and let their greatness be revealed.

Geisler: And we'll certainly talk about a lot of those points that you made there on why you're running. I want to start firstly on the state of business, and the economy in Missouri. What are your priorities when it comes to taxes in the state and for government spending?

Ashcroft: I want to both cut taxes and cut spending. I want to cut taxes because I want to give the people back their money. I'm the only one that's actually put out a plan for getting rid of our state income tax. I've worked with the Heritage Foundation. I've worked with Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. I've worked with Dr. Laffer and other individuals.

You know, our state income tax is eight and a half billion dollars a year. Our government has grown by over $20 billion in the last six years. Think about that. We could get rid of our state income tax. We could quit penalizing people for working and subsidizing people for not working. We could actually require ourselves to cut government and we could return $8.5 billion, and that will be $8.5 billion every year back to the people of this state to use. And they will be so much more efficient in how they use it than our state government. And even if they aren't, it's their money and they ought to be able to keep it. So we're going to get rid of the state income tax. That is a no-brainer. That's what we need to really incentivize economic activity in this state. When people work hard, they know that they get to reap the rewards of that. I mean, right now we are taking your tax dollars and we're giving it to illegal aliens. You know, my competitors talk about what they're going to do about illegal immigrants, and yet each of my elected opponents has voted for budgets that give your tax dollars to illegal aliens. We're never going to get rid of people that are coming here just to break the law when we're paying them to be here. But that's government-think that we'll just pay them to be here. No, that will stop when I'm governor. I'm also going to get rid of the latest 12-and-a-half cent gas tax increase that was championed by Tax-Hike Mike. Our state had billions of dollars that we could use for roads and instead of using that, they said let's raise taxes on the people of this state. The people, this state had already turned down similar taxes, I think it's three times over like the last 10 years. And yet the legislature forced it on the people. And once again, both of my elected opponents were part of the legislature when that happened.

We need to cut taxes. We need a governor that will use the line-item veto, that will use the line-item reduction veto and will start us off at zero, not just saying what did you spend last year no matter how much you wasted, let's give you a certain percentage more than that, we need to start off at zero and we need to say "what is it that government has to do or what has to be done that can only be done by government because it can't be done by private individuals or private enterprise." That's all government should be paying for. Everything else we should allow the people to make their own decisions. And as governor, I'm going to focus our budget on three things -- funding for education. It's required under the state constitution, funding for roads, bridges and inland waterways. And our state has done a terrible job with our inland waterways. For far too long, the leaders of our state have said, these waterways, they're terrible. These bridges are expensive. Yes, they are expensive. But those waterways are a great way to move goods, either finished goods or work in progress and to help the people that work in this state to have a competitive advantage. As governor, we're going to put money into making sure we can bring cargo up from the Gulf on containers all the way up to south of St. Louis, and then on smaller ships to bring it up the Missouri River to Kansas City and revolutionize Missouri as the logistics hub for this country. And we should become the largest inland port in this country, which would be massive economic activity, great jobs for the people of this state, and would really make it easier for our businesses to compete because their cost of goods, raw materials that they're importing, our exports of finished goods would be dramatically lower. But we talked about cutting taxes, cutting government.

We're going to pay for education. And then we got to do public safety. It is wrong that we have people in this state in their home at night go to sleep scared. We need and I vowed to put a thousand new officers on the street. Some of those will be new ones that are newly trained, probably them, the vast majority of them will be officers that we get from other states that, where they're treated like crap and we say, come to Missouri. We love people that stand up for the law. We love law enforcement that are willing to make sure we can enjoy our lives and enjoy our liberties. We will protect you. We will back you. We will restore you. We're going to get truth in sentencing. I already introduced legislation for that two sessions ago last year and 2023. So that you do the crime, you actually do the time. We have individuals that are getting sentenced to double-digit years in prison and they're let out after year one, and then they just continue to commit crimes. On average, when you're led out of a Missouri prison, you return eight to nine times. I am the only candidate for governor that actually has a plan for dealing with crime. We don't need more buzzwords. We need actual policy to fix the problem.

In 2022, I visited every, well I visit every county in the state every year. But in 2022, I made it a focus to talk to deputies, to sheriffs, police officers, prosecutors, judges. What can we do to stop this problem? We need truth in sentencing. We need more officers on the street. We need some legal changes to protect officers from prosecutors that go rogue and don't care if they did the right thing or not, they just hate the police. They need to know that they'll be protected in this state. We also need to make sure I had legislation that would allow us to get special prosecutors appointed. And we need to make sure we amend that legislation so when prosecutors refuse their job, they will be removed from office and they will no longer get taxpayer salaries if they're not doing their job. But if we focus on education, inland waterways, rivers, bridges and public safety, we focus our budget on that, we will see economic, a boom in this state which we've failed to see for decades, really.

Geisler: Now, China and the business that it does in this state has become a major point in this campaign. What do you think is the appropriate relationship between the State of Missouri and Chinese-owned companies?

Ashcroft: I'm very happy to sell our goods to them at high prices. But the idea that both the lieutenant governor and the state senator have voted to sell our farmland and other land to them is wrong. They have both done that. Some of them have done it multiple times. I'm the only elected official running for this office that has always been against allowing foreign entities to buy that land, especially China, and we need to put a stop to it. And that's why I led with House Bill 903, also worked on Senate Bill 55, but House Bill [903] passed the House. I believe it was actually bipartisan, which always scares me, but it passed. And then in the Senate, one of my opponents actually amended it to allow any foreign government to buy any land they want in our state. That's wrong. The Chinese government is not our friend. They are an enemy. Chinese people, great people. But the government, the communist government, they are an enemy and we need to treat them as such.

Geisler: Would you, the Chinese companies that are already here, obviously in 2013 it was a way to allow the WH Group to continue in Smithfield to continue business.

Ashcroft: Well, yeah, I think they gave a bunch of money to elected officials. So the elected officials took their money and changed the law for them. I think that's what happened.

Geisler: Would you require any sort of divestment of governments that are already here or the ones that, you know, the government-owned land or foreign companies that currently own land? Are they under your administration? Are they still good to go?

Ashcroft: Well, I definitely think we need to look at what's happening with that. I think we want to get to the point where Missouri land is owned by Missourians or at the very least Americans. But it's just like someone in a car accident. If they've got a head wound that's bleeding and they also sprain their ankle, you don't spend your time taking care of the ankle. You stop the bleeding first. And what we need to do here is we need to stop further sales of our land to foreign entities. I'm sorry, Arkansas has passed some legislation. They're in litigation right now on how to take back land or require foreign entities to divest of that land back to individuals from Arkansas or at least Americans. I think it makes sense for us to stop the sales and then use the litigation that Arkansas is involved in to give us a road map, road map as to how we may legally do that. There are those that want to just say we should just take it back. Well, I don't want to use eminent domain and then ship hundreds of millions of dollars overseas to China for their land. That's the wrong answer. So first thing we have to do is we have to stop the sale and then we have to work through the legality of how we can force that divestiture.

Geisler: We talked a second, about crime. You're talking kind of your your platform there. Do you think it's safe to live in Missouri?

Ashcroft: Look, I think that there there are places that are safer than others. I believe that at the very least, there is a perception that it's stopping businesses from moving to St. Louis, that are stopping businesses from coming to Missouri. I think there's a reason that when you go to downtown St. Louis at 7:00 on a Thursday night, if there's not a baseball game, you have a hard time finding a place to buy a sandwich, much less to get a drink. There is a problem we are seeing. I mean, it's not as bad as it is in Chicago, but yes, the people of St. Louis are scared. We had a circuit attorney that for years refused to prosecute criminals. So we were losing police officers and we were having more and more criminals on the street because they weren't being prosecuted. That is the wrong way to go. And we need to operate and act in such a way that it's not only safe, but people know that it's safe because then you can't claim to be a free society when people are scared to walk out their door. And in the city of St. Louis, we have people that are scared to walk out the door. They're scared that while they're sleeping, bullets are going to come flying through the wall of their house. We need to support our police. We need to have judges that when individuals are convicted, will sentence them to real time. We need our Department of Corrections to actually hold them in prison for that time so they won't commit crimes. And we've got to make sure we have prosecutors that will prosecute. People need to know that we're going to lock up the criminals. We're not going to make the law-abiding citizens lock up their doors and go to sleep at night in fear.

Geisler: Do you think there are any programs that you see in Missouri that are meant to alleviate crime that you're interested in either investing further into or expanding?

Ashcroft: Well, I've talked about some. One, let's get a thousand new officers on the street in the city of St. Louis alone. They are there, at least 400 officers short. There's a little bit of playing with the numbers. They sometimes count officers that are actually still on the force but are using up vacation days and will never actually walk the beat again. We're at least 400 officers short. When criminals proliferate and you remove police from the streets, you're going to get an increase in crime. So we need and we need to support our police. I've called multiple times, the first one to call for it, for the state to take back control of the police of the City of St. Louis. They have been defunded by the current government. They do not have the resources they need. The government of the City of St. Louis does not have their backs. They leave their houses every morning never knowing if they're going to make it back. They put on maybe 30 extra pounds of gear every day. They deal with some of the the dregs of society and they do it for us. The very least we can do is make sure they have the resources necessary to do that and make sure that they know that we have their backs. I mean, in Kansas City right now, we have a police officer that was sentenced to six years in jail, and no one can tell me what he did that wasn't according to the procedures that he was taught. Think about that. No one could tell me where he violated police procedures. And yet he's doing six years. The police need to know we have their back. We need to prosecute criminals when they're convicted. We need to lock them up. It works.

Geisler: We talked about education. I know you brought up education as a central part of this of this campaign as well. What's the current state of public schools in Missouri as you see it?

Ashcroft: Well, the story, the current state of education in Missouri is that fewer than 25% of Missouri eighth graders are proficient in both math and reading. I didn't say Greek and calculus. I didn't say Latin and differential equations. I said math and reading. It's morally repugnant that our legislators and our leadership have not been willing to put parents in charge of their children's education. That's how you solve this problem. You quit teaching about DEI and ESG and that people are bad or good because of the color of their skin. You teach them reading, you teach them writing, you teach them arithmetic. You teach them to logically construct and deconstruct arguments so that they can learn whatever they need to learn for the rest of their life. No one knows what a student entering kindergarten now will have to know for their job when they in 20 years. Nobody. The way you prepare them is you teach them to think. You don't indoctrinate them. You don't teach them to pass the test that the state gives. You teach them to think.

And if you want to have accountability in schools, here's how you do it. You give parents control of the money and the parent goes and talks to that teacher. You know, and let's talk about teachers. They've devoted their lives to teaching, and yet at most schools, they have the least power and authority of anyone. It's about time we started saying the most important people that work for the school are our teachers. We give that money directly to parents to use for public education, private education, home schooling, tutoring. We give it for education. And you know what a normal parent's going to do? They're going to go out and meet with that teacher and say, "how are you going to teach? What are the values you're going to teach my child?" And that's what it ought to be. It ought to be about every parent ought to come first and just slightly below. The parents should be that teacher deciding how best to educate that child. And when that teacher has those 20, 25, 30 parents that say, I want that teacher teaching my child, that teacher can go to their school and say, look, I've got 20, 25, 30 kids. They're going wherever I go. Either you give me the resources I need, either you give me the disciplinary backup I need, or I'm going down the street and I'm taking these kids with me. That will transform education and that will also help to make sure that we are protecting and keeping and providing for our teachers the way we should be.

Geisler: How do you ensure in that system that the proficiency and the achievement is moving in the right direction?

Ashcroft: Well, A, it's moving in the wrong direction now. So even if it continues to move in the wrong direction, we're no worse off than we are. But B, we can look at what's historically happened in other states. We can look at what's happened in Arizona, we can look at what's happened in Florida. Hasn't gone as far, but they're doing it in Iowa. They're doing it in Arkansas because they had a governor that was willing to lead. We can bring in third-party accreditation means so that people, we can have a plethora way of ways of measuring students. But when you get more parents involved and in my family, it would really be my wife, and that's the best person to do it because she's good at that. That would be a change and children's lives would be changed. And when you look at the data from other states, it's not just that private schools or public charter schools work. Education gets better. It's across the board because you're not just putting parents in control, but you're empowering teachers. And I believe that we have a tremendous number of teachers that love to teach. They've gone through all this training and they're being beaten down by schools that just are putting this burden one after another on them and won't let them do their job. When we, working with parents, teachers can say, "you know what, I'm going to do what I was trained to do, what I've wanted to do my entire life." It's going to be awesome what happens.

Geisler: Immigration has also been a major part of this campaign and really across the country. What role do you see the executive office in Missouri having with illegal immigration and specifically at the southern border?

Ashcroft: Well, first thing, I was the first person running for governor to call for us to send troops to the southern border to help stop the bleeding. It's several years ago. I would say these governors ought to declare an invasion, not under the state constitution, but under the United States Constitution, because the federal government is obligated to protect states from invasion. And it's not doing that. And people might say, "well, we're not a border state." Yes, we are. We're feeling the effects of that. The No. 1 killer of individuals between the ages of 18 and 45 are the drugs that are being brought across illegally across our border. They're coming up [Interstate] 44. They're coming across on [Interstate] 70. We have major interstates across our state. They are killing our children. So, yes, sending troops to the border, declaring that invasion.

But also, we've got to quit subsidizing illegal immigrants in our state. Both of my elected challengers have voted for budgets that took your tax dollars and gave them to people that were illegally here. That's asinine. They have supported illegal immigration with their votes, and we're never going to get rid of the, I don't know, the federal government says 75,000, which probably means there's 85,000, we're never going to get rid of people whose very first act in this country was to break the law when we're paying them to be here. But we also have to resource our law enforcement. So when they come across an individual that has broken the law but is here illegally, so they've broken the law a second time, at least they can work with the Trump administration to make sure they're deported. We need to move these illegal immigrants out of our state. The best way to do it is to initially make it so they don't want to be here, to make it so they realize they can't get a job here because they're breaking the law in this state, to make them understand that they're not going to get taxpayer benefits in their state so they'll move elsewhere, to make sure that when we encounter illegal aliens with our police and our law enforcement, they're turned over to ICE. And then because of that winnowing effect on the number of illegal immigrants, then we can go ahead and make sure that they're deported also.

Geisler: How do you ensure that a deportation program like that doesn't upend the lives of people who are here lawfully and legally?

Ashcroft: Well, as I said, this is about illegal immigrants. If you're legally here, you have the right to be here, and we have no right. I mean, we have jails. That doesn't mean we just throw innocent people in our jails. What we have to do is obviously, this only affects people that are illegally here. I mean, we do all sorts of things where we say, well, we treat lawbreakers this way and law-abiding citizens differently. It's not that hard. There is an adjudication. There are facts taken into account. And then you deal with lawbreakers as they deserve. And try to just leave law-abiding citizens alone because government isn't helping them.

Geisler: I do want to ask about the health care as well in the country, really in the state. How do you kind of reverse the trend of of rural hospitals, specifically kind of we've seen in the last several years closing down?

Ashcroft: What we really need to be talking about and I'm not against rural hospitals by any means, but what we ought to be focused on is rural health care. I don't care if that's done in a hospital. I don't care if that's done in a clinic. I don't care if that's done in the modular rooms that they can put into like a library where you can do video health and telehealth mail, soundproof rooms with shades. You can walk in there. They're like little pods, they're oversized phone booths, I guess I would, if anybody's old enough to remember what phone booths look like. We need to make sure that we're provisioning health care where people are.

We have a problem not only in this state but in this country with spots for residencies, for doctors. We have more people that are going to medical school than we have spots for them to get residencies. So we arbitrarily, through government action, are saying you all went to medical school, but we can't use you as full-fledged doctors. Sorry, we need more doctors. That's the government getting in the way. I've talked to health care providers and insurance companies about how do we use our libraries. I think 80 to 90%, if not more of the population of Missouri, is within 20 minutes of a library facility. And our libraries are open past 4:00 in the afternoon and they're open on weekends and they have good broadband. How do we use those so that it's easier for people that need to get health care, that can do a telecheck up, or or how about our veterans? You know, some of our veterans, they were promised health care. They're promised mental health care. And yet the cost keeps rising. That's supposed to be free. And now we're telling them, well, we're not. The federal government is telling them they have to pay for it, and then they're being told they have to drive potentially hours when these are individuals that, you know, aren't necessarily in the best health in the first place. How do we get that provisioning of services closer to them? How do we do it at no cost to them?

And it's not just about health care, but if you're going to have that kiosk or that room set up for telehealth, that could also be set up just as easily for someone that needs to deal with the Department of Revenue in Jefferson City. And instead of having to drive to Jefferson City, they can do it right there, someone that needs to deal with the Department of Labor. We need to get around this idea that the people of the state are supposed to come to the government. A: we don't want to have to deal with government, you know. Some people would say that a measure of how good your government is, is how little people have to think about it. But we do need to make sure that when people need to interact with government, we make it easier for them. We make it quick for them. And we haven't seen that.

Geisler: As we wrap up here, you know, as of us talking right now, I suppose we'll see in November if there will be a ballot issue regarding abortion and reproductive health care in Missouri. I want to know your thoughts on that measure specifically. And also, what is your stance on the current law and the current law around abortion and reproductive health care?

Ashcroft: I'm in favor of the current law. The initiative petition is horrendous. It will put women's lives at risk, not just women in the womb, but pregnant women. It allows for abortion at any time from conception to the very last second that the last toenail leaves the birth canal. It allows abortion for any reason whatsoever. You can have an abortion because you don't like the race of the father. That is a horrendous thing, eugenics. You can have an abortion because it's a boy and you wanted a girl or something like that. It would totally preclude and forbid any requirements that an individual performing an abortion have medical training. You couldn't even require that someone had the Boy Scout First Aid merit badge, much less that they'd be a paramedic or a doctor when they're performing an abortion. It would prohibit any recourse for a woman or a woman's family if a woman is mutilated, even killed during the performance of an abortion. This is not pro-woman. This is an anti-woman initiative petition. I have been calling for the people of this state if it gets to the ballot to vote against it ever since it was filed. I believe that the people of this state will not vote it through. It is a Trojan horse masquerading as something that it is not.

And we should really focus our energies instead of trying to put women at risk, we should focus our energies on making sure that any pregnant woman, no matter what her circumstances, knows that she can keep her child or give her child to someone else, that she will be cared for and that her future will remain bright and that there will be resources not only to take care of that child, to save that child's life, but resources for that mother going through. I mean, look, I can't get pregnant. I'm a Republican. I know the difference between a man and a woman. But from what I've been told, that can be a very, very, extremely difficult situation for a woman. And we should be the state that's leading and making sure that woman knows that she is going to be taken care of, whether she keeps the child or gives it away, and that she will be able to have a great future. That's what we ought to focus on. And I'm really, I'm thankful Missouri Right to Life has endorsed me. I'm the only candidate for governor that they've endorsed because I have steadfastly not just been in agreement with the pro-life movement, but I've been the leader in the state of Missouri.

Geisler: Secretary, I've got about a minute left on this call. Anything in that minute you want to add that I didn't ask you about?

Ashcroft: I just want to thank the people for allowing me to serve. It's an even-numbered year. So we're going to hear a lot of, quote, conservatives that are convenient, conservatives that say one thing in an election year, but they do a different thing in the odd-numbered years. I ran on election integrity and improving our elections. We went from being ranked 11th in the country by the Heritage Foundation to being in the top three. I didn't just say I would do it, I did it. When I saw problems with our libraries and pornographic or obscene material, I acted when the legislature refused to make sure parents should be in charge of what their kids were seeing and obtaining. When I saw what was happening with Missourians' investments, them being squandered on social justice investments instead of getting the best rate of return for Missourians when the legislature refused to act, I acted. And there's only one state in the nation where that's illegal. It's Missouri because we will protect Missourians.