This state has the most outside spending of any in the country — and most of it comes from anonymous donors. When her 18-year-old son Seth was planning to attend the Missouri Senate race debate in St. Louis earlier this month, Gail White invited her first-time voter and his uncle to discuss politics over a family dinner. They spoke of taxes and pre-existing conditions, of military spending and immigration. But by the end, Gail wondered if it even mattered what they thought about these issues. She had a creeping suspicion that money, not individual voters in families like hers, was the real decider in elections. “Can a candidate win if they don’t have big money behind them?” she wondered. She isn’t alone. Her worries fit in with Missouri’s emergence as the epicenter for dark spending in recent elections, including campaign contributions funneled through political action committees that aren’t legally required to disclose their donors. So far, more than $60 million has flooded into the Missouri Senate race, by far the biggest target for outside spending in the midterms (the next closest is the $54 million spent in the Florida Senate race). That pile of cash is among a set of triggers galvanizing an unprecedented debate in Missouri on dark money that’s shadowing one of the most competitive Senate races in the nation. | 
