Hello there, I'm Chuck Todd and this is the Chuck Todd Cask.

One of the more interesting Senate midterms this year is taking place in Missouri where

nearly a dozen Democrats and 21 Republicans, you heard that right, 30 plus candidates

total in the two major parties, entered the primary to replace retiring Senator Boyd Blunt.

As listeners to this podcast note, we're also tracking the race of an independent candidate

John Wood, who's officially an independent as far as the ballot is concerned, but does

identify as conservative, cause himself a pro-democracy Republican, would enter the race later

than most after former Missouri Senator John Danforth, sort of helps encourage him to run

to shake up this rate, Danforth created a super PAC and his pledge to spend up $20 million

to get Wood elected come November.

So joining me today to talk about the Senate race and why he decided to get involved is

former Senator Jack Danforth, he represented Missouri in the Senate for three terms till

1995 before that he was the state attorney general.

Senator Danforth, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Jack, good to be with you.

So I got to ask, a lot of people thought your effort was all about stopping Eric Gritons.

Well, Eric Gritons has been stopped, it's now Eric Schmidt, who's the Republican nominee.

What is that due to your effort?

Well, Gritons had a lot of, say, personal problems and a number of people thought that would

make him more vulnerable in a general election, but that really hasn't, has never been my

focus, my focus has been to try to change what's gone wrong in American politics and what's

going wrong is that both parties have become extreme.

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