Missouri Republican nominee Josh Hawley has attempted to make his Senate race a referendum on Sen. Claire McCaskill’s status as a Democrat in a Trump state. | Charlie Riedel/AP Photo Elections Trump aims to shut the door on Senate Democrats The president is rallying in a half-dozen key Senate states before the midterms, including two trips to critical Missouri.

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. — Claire McCaskill has beaten the odds to win Missouri Senate races before. This year, she’ll have to beat the president, too.

President Donald Trump will rally Missouri Republicans against McCaskill twice in the last five days of the campaign — the final pieces of a months-long GOP effort to nationalize the race against the two-term Democrat in a state Trump carried by 19 points in the 2016 election. The president will appear in Columbia on Thursday, and his final scheduled rally of the 2018 midterms will be here in Missouri’s conservative southeast on Monday, just nine hours before the polls open on Election Day.


Missouri is one of several states where Senate Republicans are leaning on Trump to either cement a victory or shift the tide in their favor just before Election Day. The president will also rally twice each in Indiana and Florida and once in Montana, Tennessee and West Virginia. GOP candidates are pairing the late rallies with Trump-focused closing arguments on TV — the party’s nominees in Indiana, Montana, Tennessee and West Virginia are airing late ads featuring clips of Trump supporting them and bashing their opponents.

“I don’t think he’d be there if he didn’t think we were going to be able to bring it home,” said Todd Graves, the chairman of Missouri’s Republican Party. He added: “Southeast Missouri, that’s probably the strongest Trump country, and that is sending a clear message to the good folks in that part of the state on how important the next day is.”

Perhaps more than any other Senate candidate in the country, Missouri Republican nominee Josh Hawley has nationalized his campaign, attempting to make it a pure referendum on McCaskill’s status as a Democrat in a Trump state. He has relentlessly linked McCaskill to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and focused on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation — even as Hawley, the Missouri attorney general, faces late revelations about alleged mismanagement of his state office.

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Despite those questions, Republicans believe the race has shifted dramatically toward Hawley in the last month and is now his race to lose. Hawley told POLITICO the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings “crystallized” what was at stake in the election and scoffed at a question about whether he disagreed with Trump on any issues, arguing the president’s agenda has been good for the state.

“Senator McCaskill is a party-line liberal Democrat,” Hawley said, standing outside his campaign bus — which is bedecked with massive pictures of McCaskill, Schumer and Pelosi — at a farm and grain storage facility. “That is not what this state wants, that is not what this state told her to do, and that’s why she is sinking in the polls and going to lose in November.”

Democrats view the race as a dead heat, and believe McCaskill is well within striking distance if she can turn out the Democratic base and peel off enough Republican voters to eke out a win. They view Trump’s two visits as a signal that Hawley needs a major boost, not as a sign of Republican strength.

At every campaign stop this past weekend, McCaskill closed by imploring volunteers to pick up extra shifts, saying the race could come down to the number of folks in the room.

“I think the race is really close. I think they do, too,” McCaskill said at a campaign office in Kansas City last week when asked about Republicans’ confidence. “Don’t judge by what they say, judge by how they act. I don’t think they’re acting like they’ve got this race put away. I think they’re acting like it’s very close and it is.”

But Trump’s visits will highlight McCaskill’s narrow path to victory as she fights to both pick up votes in Missouri’s conservative areas and energize her Democratic base. McCaskill has consistently attacked Hawley on health care, specifically for joining a lawsuit to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, which would eliminate insurance regulations benefiting people with pre-existing conditions. Hawley has said he supports protecting pre-existing conditions, but says it should be done outside the confines of Obamacare. McCaskill has also brought in former Vice President Joe Biden Wednesday to rally the base in St. Louis.

But McCaskill also highlights her record supporting Trump’s lower court judicial nominees and touts the number of pieces of her legislation Trump has signed. During a debate last week, she said the president should use “every tool” to enforce security on the border. Hawley, meanwhile, routinely bashes McCaskill for voting against both of the president’s Supreme Court nominees and the GOP’s 2017 tax law.

In the closing days of the campaign, Democrats have also highlighted reports about Hawley’s tenure as attorney general, accusing him of shirking his official duties in order to focus on the campaign. The Kansas City Star reported Wednesday that Hawley’s political consultants helped direct business in his official office starting shortly after he was sworn in, which Democrats say underscores their portrayal of Hawley as a political climber, even as the Republican runs a campaign decrying politics as usual in Washington.

Roy Temple, a former chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party, said the report highlights Democrats’ view of Hawley as a “blindly ambitious politician” and could change the trajectory of the race in McCaskill’s favor.

“I think that’s a pretty strong arrow in the quiver to go into the final edge in the race,” Temple said.

Hawley’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report. Last week, he defended his tenure as attorney general, saying that any suggestion that he’d been “anything other than an aggressive prosecutor is ridiculous.”

Instead, the Republican’s campaign has kept its focus on Kavanaugh. Hawley campaigned Monday with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who became a sudden star to conservatives after his aggressive defense of the justice during the hearing examining allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh.

“If we win here, it will be the most visible symbol that Kavanaugh did matter,” Graham said in Missouri earlier this week.