BRANSON, Mo.—Senator Claire McCaskill was 17 minutes into her first town hall of the week when she got her first question about President Donald Trump. Health care is usually tops on the minds of her rural voters, but there’s still plenty of interest in how she’s handling the chaos of the still-new Trump administration.

“We have rules that presidents have honored that covered nepotism, financial disclosures, etc.,” McCaskill said, reading the question out loud. “Have we as Democrats made an effort to install stronger laws to make sure such rules are followed in the future?”


If the person in the audience who lobbed this softball at McCaskill was hoping she’d knock it into Arkansas, he had to be disappointed. McCaskill could have brought up Ivanka Trump taking her father’s seat during a G-20 meeting. Or the ever-expanding portfolio of wicked problems assigned to political novice Jared Kushner. Perhaps the Midwestern populist secretly wanted to slam two ultra-wealthy New York real estate scions as out-of-touch, incompetent princelings, but that’s not what she did.

“The American people see it all, and a lot of people don’t mind,” McCaskill said, explaining why new laws won’t happen. And before you know it, she was actually praising the president’s daughter and her husband, even indirectly comparing them to a liberal icon. She’s met with Kushner on IT acquisition reform, and with Ivanka Trump on paid paternity leave. “They’re contributing, and they’re working, and they’re not taking the salary. And I know it makes some people uncomfortable. It made some people uncomfortable when John Kennedy made Bobby Kennedy attorney general. Remember that? So that door has swung both ways.”

When Trump speaks to a crowd about an hour away in Springfield on Wednesday afternoon, it’s unlikely he’ll treat McCaskill with the same kid gloves McCaskill used against him. He’s already launched an opening salvo at McCaskill, arguably the most vulnerable Democratic senator heading into the 2018 elections, saying “C.M.” is “opposed to big tax cuts.” That tweet marked the unofficial start of what will be a two-year GOP-wide effort to disparage and eventually defeat a woman many of them believe held onto her seat in 2012 only by unethical chicanery.

McCaskill knows what’s coming, and she has chosen not to fire back, even at a president who is as hot a target for her party as Trump. That’s because McCaskill knows the futility of trying to persuade staunchly conservative voters, like the ones at her Branson town hall, who come from a county that Trump won with 77 percent of the vote. In her two elections, including the big Democratic wave of 2006, Taney County never gave McCaskill more than 37 percent. Winning for McCaskill in 2018 means not losing in these rural counties by any more than she has to.

“All I really need to get are the voters I’ve gotten before,” McCaskill told me. “I know there are enough voters in all these counties.”

Over three days in mid-August, McCaskill visited 10 of these counties—all of which voted for Trump by margins of 25 percentage points or more. (McCaskill has now done around 40 town halls this year, and has set a personal goal of 52 by the end of 2017.) Using her most reasonable, adult-in-the-room voice, McCaskill’s goal was to peel off a few votes here, a few votes there. By tamping down the perception of what she calls her party’s “arrogance” about rural voters, by arguing against knee-jerk cynicism about politics and the people who practice it, McCaskill hoped to convince voters she—and Washington, D.C., as a whole—can still improve their lives. In many respects, this is but a variation of the strategy on display in other deep-red states where Democratic senators—Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly among them—are trying to hold back an implacable Republican shift that threatens to turn the Democrats into a more or less permanent minority the party wouldn’t escape for another decade.

The fog starts to lift along Highway Y on Thursday, Aug. 24, 2017, north of St. Robert, Mo. | Whitney Curtis for Politico Magazine

And that means not taking on the president, not even if he directly takes her on. At nearly every town hall, McCaskill makes some form of a promise to work with the president when it’s good for Missouri, and work against him when she thinks it’ll harm the state. She pledges, most of all, to be moderate.

“I want a crowd in the center,” she’ll say later during the Branson town hall. “Our country does its best work in the center.”



***

No matter where she went—the community room of a New Deal-era electric co-op a few miles from the city’s tourist strip, where a sign advertises for “LegZZ,” a tribute show for Tina Turner and ZZ Top; a testy forum at Troy’s city hall; a Methodist Church in Camdenton or a senior center in Bolivar—McCaskill never varied her script.

For the most part, her audience didn’t vary either. The crowds are uniformly older, heavy on senior citizens, and nearly all white. Only the town hall in St. Robert, which is near Fort Leonard Wood, had even a scattering of black attendees. And while the crowds might have tilted liberal, there was always a reliably conservative contingent there to press her on the Democratic Party’s perceived sins.

But no matter the location, McCaskill opened with an ode to bipartisanship, tailored perfectly to her elderly listeners: a recently passed bill making it easier for World War II-era veterans to get treatment for mustard gas poisoning, and another law aiming to make hearing aids less expensive. She gives copious credit to Republicans for both.

“How many have you heard about the hearing aid bill?” she asked in Branson. A single hand went up. “I’ve bet you’ve heard about a lot of other things.”

McCaskill said both bills are examples of how Washington, and she, are still getting things done amid the noise caused by Trump’s Twitter tantrums and the stridency of the Democratic response to his presidency. But the crowd’s topics of choice are a little more hot-button than mustard gas or hearing aids. Across the state, the questions hit surprisingly similar notes: a little immigration, a smattering of ISIS and veterans benefits and education, a taste of Charlottesville and Klu Klux Klan. But at every stop, health care dominated. And at every stop, there was always a question about single-payer.

“I’m not for single-payer,” McCaskill said in Ozark. She said she wants to allow people over the age of 55 to buy into Medicare. “That would be kind of a public option for that age group.”

And this is when McCaskill sounded most like a Republican, or at least a Democrat from the Bill Clinton era: “Our debt right now, people don’t like to talk about it. … Our debt right now could swallow the prosperity of our nation whole.” But just as quickly she would mount a reasoned defense for Obamacare that managed to work in a reference to motorcycles.

When someone would attack President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, McCaskill would invariably invoke a carefully crafted hypothetical. Imagine a 27-year-old without health insurance. He gets a raise, and has some extra cash. What’s he going to buy, McCaskill would ask: Health insurance or a Harley? The crowd knows the answer: the Harley. Then, she would twist the fact pattern: He skids out on the highway, has a traumatic brain injury, has no insurance to pay for it. So costs go up for everyone.

Democrats tried to fix this problem with Obamacare, McCaskill said. But the “mistake” they made—yes, she used the word mistake—was doing it with only Democratic votes. That made it political. And Republicans made the same mistake with their failed attempts to repeal the law. Here, McCaskill stopped to tell attendees exactly how much the GOP bill would have increased premiums in their county.

Scenes from around St. Robert, Missouri. | Whitney Curtis for Politico Magazine

“If you have any ideas on how to solve this, let me know,” she would tell attendees. “Let Paul Ryan know.”

And this was often the moment when McCaskill would drop her speech into fifth gear and hit cruising speed.

“When you do it with one party, it’s political. Not policy,” she said in Troy. “It’s 'the Democrats did this to you!’ Or it's 'the Republicans did this to you!’ So here’s the glass-half-full opportunity I see. I see an opportunity now to work on a bipartisan basis.”

She said she’s working with Republicans on creating lower-cost “copper” plans, strengthening health saving accounts, making sure cost-sharing payments are made. “I think we can get out from under health care being a political football in this country,” she said. In some counties, this was an applause line. In Troy, it was more muted.

At the end of the week, I had a chance to ask McCaskill what she learned from the town halls. “In Washington, it’s easy to think there’s just one side and then the 180-degree opposite side. These town halls have reminded me there is a wide spread of people in the middle who want us to focus less on emails and Russia, and more on health care and their concerns.” While she wasn’t necessarily wrong, her generous assessment glossed some overt displays of partisanship she encountered during the week.

A veteran in Camdenton asked her about battling ISIS and prosecuting Hillary Clinton over the email scandal; she ignored the second half of the question. A woman in Troy insisted the government has no role to play in health care and should stick to national security. In St. Robert, Helen Beydler, an 82-year-old wearing an American flag sweater, stood up and said “Our survival as a nation is under attack,” adding how hurt she is about political rhetoric that labels her a “racist.”

McCaskill responded: “I don’t think you’re a racist.”

“Your party has told me that,” Beydler responded. “We were also told we were deplorable, and unredeemable.”



***

When the chattering class chatters about Democrats’ geography problem, it typically means Democratic clustering in major cities makes it harder for the party to win control of the House of Representatives, or to make gains in state legislatures. Or, in the context of the 2016 presidential election, that the concentration of white working-class voters who loved Trump in swing states doomed Clinton.

But the bigger long-term geography problem for Democrats might be in the Senate. Reapportionment and redistricting can limit the damage of clustering, but the lines of the 50 states are fixed. And when Republicans win, they tend to win a lot of states. Each of the three successful GOP presidential campaigns this century won 30 states or more. Obama won 28 and 26 states in his two presidential victories. Translate that to the Senate, and it’s easy to see Democrats’ struggle.

In 2018, Democrats are defending Senate seats in 10 states that Trump won. While the party is on offense for House seats in California and Texas, and for governors' mansions in Georgia and Illinois, Senate Democrats are playing a grim game of defense. If Republicans swept all 10 states—a possibility that got measurably more unlikely the second Trump was inaugurated—they’d have a supermajority. But even a smaller pickup of three, four or five Senate seats in states where Trump romped would make Democratic control of the Senate hard to imagine until at least 2022, if not later.

And so Democratic senators across the country are focused on winning voters in rural areas. Joe Manchin in West Virginia is touting his support of coal and guns, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp is putting her folksy persona to use, and Montana’s Jon Tester is flying Montana steaks with him to Washington.

And even as Democratic National Committee and scores of House candidates embrace the #Resistance and boldly drop F-bombs when talking about the president, Manchin and Heitkamp considered joining the administration. And so McCaskill’s gentle approach to the president might not end up being the exception for Democratic senators in 2018. It might be the norm.

McCaskill has been in office, with a lone five-year break, since 1982. She was born in the university town of Rolla but grew up in rural Houston and Lebanon. (McCaskill pronounces Lebanon as “Lebanin,” and, like most Missouri politicians, often calls her state “Missourah.”) When she’s asked about gun rights at town halls, she likes to mention that her mother kept cream of mushroom soup in the cabinet to pour over whatever her father shot that day for dinner.

“They told me it was rabbit,” she says with a laugh. “I wasn’t always sure.”

She moved to Columbia when she was in high school, stayed for college and law school at the University of Missouri, and then moved to Kansas City to work as a prosecutor, using a four-day winning streak on the game show “High Rollers” to pay off her student loans. She won a state House seat and prosecutor’s job there, but a divorce and an election as state auditor eventually moved her to the capital of Jefferson City, and a remarriage moved her to St. Louis. As auditor, she decided to challenge the state’s sitting Democratic governor in a primary in 2004. With the help of more than $1 million in campaign funds from her husband, she won the primary. But she lost the general election to Republican Matt Blunt.

“As I went over the returns, I realized that my hunt for support should have included rounding up independent voters everywhere, not just in the urban and suburban areas,” McCaskill wrote in her memoir, Pretty Ladylike. “I began to grasp how many independent voters there were and how spread out they were. I needed to quit looking at a campaign in Missouri as it occurred only along the I-70 corridor. It was not about driving back and forth from St. Louis to Kansas City with stops in Columbia.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill speaks to constituents during a town hall meeting on Thursday, Aug. 24, 2017, at Hampton Inn in St. Robert, Mo. | Whitney Curtis for Politico Magazine

In 2006 and 2012, when she defeated incumbent Sen. Jim Talent and then Rep. Todd Akin, McCaskill won over the rural counties. In Pike County, one of her stops this week, she beat Talent by under 200 votes. She topped Akin by about 60 votes, even as then-President Obama lost by 2,000. Trump won Pike County by nearly 3,500 votes. Tweak the numbers a bit, and the pattern repeated itself across Missouri. So what happened to Democrats here?

“We’ve done a terrible job of listening,” McCaskill told reporters. “We quit showing up. We allowed the conversation about politics in rural areas to be dominated by topics like abortion and guns.”

McCaskill’s prescription for what ails the Democratic Party isn’t particularly innovative. She doesn’t think the party needs to adopt Bernie Sanders-esque stances, just put more emphasis on kitchen table issues. She wants to make the terms of broadband auctions more favorable to rural electric co-ops before $680 million in broadband expansion funds become available next year; the co-ops have done a better job at delivering broadband to the so-called last mile than traditional phone companies. McCaskill says it could mean more and better jobs. In Bowling Green, one woman excitedly says if she can get high-speed internet, “maybe my grandchildren will come to visit.”

She emphasizes her work for veterans, asking technical questions about their problems and making sure anyone with a problem gives their contact information to a staff member before they go. She pledges not to lower taxes on anyone making more than $1 million. She wants transparent pricing for medical procedures, and to crack down on prescription drug prices.

And she acts as a bipartisan mother hen, telling town hall attendees not to unfriend family members or acquaintances or family members who voted the other way in 2016. She blames gridlock on partisan gerrymandering, and instructs Fox News or MSNBC viewers to watch the other channel on occasion.

She waxes poetic about how her parents used to make her watch the Huntley-Brinkley report in the days before partisan news. Now, she jokes, 30 percent of her constituents watch Fox News and Sean Hannity every night, while another 20 percent watch MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. The rest? They’re watching “Dancing With the Stars.”

“I try to focus on the folks watching 'Dancing with the Stars,'” she says.



***

Republicans view McCaskill as an impossible survivor, a woman with a liberal voting record on guns, abortion and Obamacare hopelessly out of step with her increasingly red home state. They believe she was toast in 2012 before she fiddled in their primary, “attacking” Akin as “too conservative” for Missouri, which helped him win. Not long after, Akin melted down with some offensive and infamous commentary on rape and abortion. One top Republican Senate strategist said earlier this year he had had “Vietnam War flashbacks” about McCaskill’s tactical interference in the primary, and feared she would do it again.

At first, Representative Ann Wagner was seen as McCaskill’s most likely challenger. A prolific fundraiser and former ambassador and Republican National Committee co-chair, she would’ve been able to raise the necessary cash to take on McCaskill. But she opted against a run, and GOP eyes turned to fresh-faced 37-year-old Attorney General Josh Hawley, a Stanford- and Yale-educated legal wunderkind who won his office only last year. Hawley has formed an exploratory committee but hasn’t officially entered the contest. (His campaign declined to make him available for an interview.)

Some Democrats in Missouri fear Hawley, and D.C. Republicans adore him. They think his lack of a voting record, his background fighting in court for religious freedom, his youth and his ties to major conservative donors from Peter Thiel to David Humphreys—the Club for Growth has $10 million waiting to back him—will be a potent combination of an outsider’s profile and an insider’s cash. He isn’t clearing the field, with a former state party chair, GOP state legislators and a former libertarian presidential nominee either in the race or considering bids.

Republicans have already released polling showing Hawley with a slender lead over McCaskill, and the incumbent agrees she’s an underdog. But she isn’t exactly intimidated by her state’s attorney general. She met him for the first time at this year’s Missouri State Fair, noting she had a “cordial and polite conversation” with him at the annual Governor’s Ham Breakfast.

“He seems like a nice enough guy,” McCaskill says, adding: “It’s going to be a tough race. I’m not sure Josh Hawley really, fully understands what he’s getting into.”

Earlier this year, a Democratic outside group ran radio ads calling McCaskill “a daughter of rural Missouri,” focusing on her father’s work at a local feed mill and her mother’s work at a corner drugstore.

In 2014, McCaskill bought a condo in Washington, D.C., for $2.7 million. Republicans plan to turn the condo into a symbol of McCaskill’s insider status. The condo, in the almost-too-fancy-for-D.C. CityCenter development, is above Hermes and Gucci stores. McCaskill also owns a part of Centrolina, a restaurant in the development, which sells $14 Negroni cocktails and a $325 bottle of pinot noir. She and her husband reported assets valued at $26 million or more in her latest financial disclosure, including a share in a private plane worth $3.5 million.

How, the GOP will ask, could a “daughter of rural Missouri” live in an upscale development literally named “CityCenter”? McCaskill, who has been dealing with attacks on her husband’s wealth for more than a decade, laughs off the critiques.

“It’s inexplicable that they think they can disqualify me because my husband is a successful businessman in the era of Donald Trump,” she said in an interview. “If my husband were married to a Republican U.S. senator, they’d hold a ticker-tape parade for him.”



***

McCaskill’s last stop was in Bolivar, at a senior center across the street from a YMCA named after GOP Sen. Roy Blunt.

Throughout the week, she managed to avoid saying anything harsher about Trump than some Republican senator hadn’t already said. She praised his national security team, saying it would block the president from anything too “impulsive,” though she criticized Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. She said he missed an opportunity to unify the country following protests in Charlottesville. She batted aside questions about impeachment and said no one should censor the president’s tweeting. She’s said Trump’s behavior and comments are sometimes “unpresidential.” No one is going to confuse her with a certain female senator from Massachusetts.

The last question of the week came from an older man in overalls named Steve Glenn, who had earlier identified himself as someone who would “absolutely never vote for” McCaskill. That admission had earned him the right to select the questions that had been tossed into a basket. With that duty, under McCaskill town hall rules, comes the right to ask the final question.

Over the course of the week, McCaskill had a decidedly mixed record on winning over the basket holders. One man essentially ended the town hall by accusing her of sympathizing with the radical left antifa, or anti-fascist, protesters. Another, a small business owner in Ozark, ended by thanking her for coming and told local media outlets he thought she understood his problems.

Glenn’s question, however, was more of a comment. “I was just hoping the Democratic Party could bring a man or woman forward who would be a more desirable candidate than they who they ran last time,” he said. “There’s a lot of smart Democrat people, and you didn’t pick a smart one this time. You had a lot better choices.”

“Well, some people would say you guys did, too,” McCaskill responded.

The room erupted in bipartisan laughter. It was probably the harshest thing McCaskill said about Trump all week.