COLUMBIA, Mo. — When the first $150,000 check showed up in his campaign account, Shane Schoeller was locked in a tight Republican primary for the unheralded office of Missouri secretary of state, battling two fellow lawmakers with virtually identical platforms.
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Emily Rasinski for The New York Times
Shane Schoeller, a Republican running for secretary of state.
An additional $250,000 arrived in August, after Mr. Schoeller had nearly run out of money and faced a tough general election campaign against a well-financed Democratic opponent.
Mr. Schoeller’s angel is a retired investor and chess enthusiast named Rex Sinquefield, who in recent years has emerged as the biggest political donor in Missouri and one of the most prolific anywhere in the country.
Since 2008, when Missouri abolished contribution limits,Mr. Sinquefield has donated more than $20 million to local candidates and political action committees, driving the political debate on issues like education, upending the political world here and making him perhaps the most influential private citizen in the state. More than half of that money has gone to advance his signature cause: eliminating state and local income taxes in Missouri, a major source of government revenue, and replacing them with sales taxes.
But efforts this year by a Sinquefield-backed group to abolish the state income tax by referendum stalled amid a dispute over ballot language issued by the current secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, a Democrat. Now, with Ms. Carnahan stepping down at the end of her term, Mr. Sinquefield, 68, has a chance to revive the issue and has invested heavily to help Mr. Schoeller, who as a state representative voted to eliminate Missouri’s income tax, succeed her.
The no-limits giving that has let him do it might soon be coming to a campaign near you. The lawyers and activists who played a critical role in abolishing limits on contributions to independent groups — culminating in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision two years ago — now hope to persuade Congress to repeal the federal caps on direct contributions to candidates, one of the last vestiges of the post-Watergate reforms.
Legal and legislative challenges to contribution limits are already proliferating at the state level and federally. This month, the Republican National Committee asked the Supreme Court to consider its lawsuit challenging limits on the combined amount an individual can give to party committees in each election cycle.
The future of unlimited giving has already come to pass in Missouri, which in 2008 became one of four states that do not limit contributions to candidates. Mr. Sinquefield’s millions financed a successful 2010 initiative that banned new local income taxes and required citizens in two of Missouri’s largest municipalities, St. Louis and Kansas City, to reauthorize their earnings taxes every five years. His contributions to lawmakers and political action committees have propelled efforts to end teacher tenure in Missouri and to end state oversight of St. Louis’s police department.
“He has been able to change the debate,” said Chuck Hatfield, a lawyer who helped lead a court battle several years ago to preserve Missouri’s contribution limits. “He’s gotten the state to consider issues that everyone considered dead.”
Mr. Sinquefield has contributed about 40 percent of the money raised by Mr. Schoeller. Next week, Mr. Sinquefield will hold a fund-raiser for Mr. Schoeller at his home in St. Louis.
The Democratic candidate in the race, Jason Kander, raised more money than Mr. Schoeller through the beginning of September, largely from unions and trial lawyers, but no single donor has given nearly as much.
In an interview at a coffee shop here, Mr. Schoeller said he shared Mr. Sinquefield’s views on the income tax. But if elected, he said, he would treat his largest donor no differently from any other constituent.
“I’m grateful for the support that Mr. Sinquefield has given to me, certainly,” Mr. Schoeller said. “But I think it’s important to say that everybody has a voice in the way that I look at government. Because you’re there to serve.”
Mr. Sinquefield declined to be interviewed for this article.
