Before results came in on Tuesday, the front page of the Times called the Missouri Senate race “a statistical tie,” but, in the event, the Republican candidate, Josh Hawley, won easily, and Senator Claire McCaskill’s long political career came to a painful end. It’s hard to avoid giving credit for that result to Donald Trump, who visited Missouri seven times since August, 2017, including twice during the final week, and held his final campaign event there—a raucous rally in Cape Girardeau, Rush Limbaugh’s home town, with Limbaugh and Sean Hannity as the secondary featured performers. Trump spoke for an hour and a half, striking his usual notes for the adoring crowd—“They want America to be a giant sanctuary city for gang members and MS-13 killers!”—and offering Hawley only the briefest turn on the stage. Trump put McCaskill in his sights, and he relentlessly took her down. Hawley, formerly a conservative intellectual, behaved like Trump’s Mini-Me, using all of the master’s rhetorical tropes.

The 2018 Midterms Read all of The New Yorker’s election reporting and commentary.

Not all Missourians love Trump, but a lot of them do: he carried the state in 2016, by nineteen points. McCaskill, a tough, hardworking moderate Democrat, had been beating the odds for years as her state became increasingly Republican. It may have been impossible for her to keep the King Canute routine going, especially after Trump himself chose to be heavily involved in the campaign this year. One has to wonder in retrospect, though, whether it was wise for her to spend as much time as she did barnstorming through deep-red rural Missouri. McCaskill’s Twitter feed is a long stream of photographs of her in low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit meeting rooms, explaining to a few dozen usually older voters that she had delivered, and delivered for them, and would keep delivering if reëlected. That was true, but on Election Day she carried four urban counties, only one more than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and Hawley carried the other hundred and ten, sometimes by fifty-point margins.

McCaskill grew up in rural southern Missouri. Her father’s family owned a feed mill in a small town, and her mother’s family owned a pharmacy in another. She has always felt that if she got a chance to talk to people like herself, she could persuade them to choose her practical, provincial, service-oriented politics over the hot rhetoric that Trump and Hawley were dishing out. Also, she believed that her single previous political defeat, in the 2004 governor’s race, had been her own fault, the result of overconfidence and a failure to spend enough time campaigning in rural Missouri. In a statewide election, it makes a big difference how much you lose by in the areas where you are weak. McCaskill never thought she’d carry those parts of Missouri, but she did hope to lose many counties by 60–40, instead of 70–30, margins. That didn’t work in 2018. She may have over-learned the lesson of 2004.

Now Missouri has only one statewide Democratic official, Nicole Galloway, the young state auditor (a position that McCaskill held before she became a U.S. senator), who squeaked by on Tuesday with 50.5 per cent of the vote. The state, which, from 1904 to 2004, voted for the winning Presidential candidate every time but once, now looks irretrievably red. It will be tempting for the Democratic Party to write off Missouri—and to assume that white, working-class exurban and rural voters are not part of any conceivable Democratic future. That would be a tragedy. People are complicated, and there are many whose overwhelming experience over the past generation has been one of economic loss and uncertainty. Trump and the equally unlikely Bernie Sanders were the only candidates in 2016 who were able to signal successfully that they understood how such people felt. Trump did it in a venerable and malign way, by playing to resentment and fear, and by demonizing immigrants and liberals.

That is not the only way of playing to the hearts and minds of such voters, as Tuesday’s victories in Trump states by the Democratic senators Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Debbie Stabenow, and Bob Casey demonstrated. The better part of the Democrats’ complicated history is their long-term advocacy for people whom the market economy has left behind. If the Democrats become the party of college-educated suburbanites, who’s left to fight for such people, as opposed to offering up a series of cartoon villains for them to blame and to hate? Fighting for them, believing in them, is what Claire McCaskill went down doing.