MONROE CITY, Mo. — Claire McCaskill has sought to cultivate a familiar brand during her decade in the Senate: the dogged investigator, eager to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse.

And the Missouri Democrat has found her next target in the pharmaceutical industry.


Talking to voters earlier this month in this tiny, deep-red rural town, McCaskill compared the drugmakers who deny the addictive properties of opioids to cigarette-makers that “told people for years that tobacco is not bad for your health.”

“We can’t do nothing,” she added at a sweltering seniors center during what was her eighth appearance in a 10-stop town hall swing.

As the top Democrat on the Senate’s governmental affairs committee, McCaskill is using her oversight authority to probe the opioid industry’s marketing, trying to decipher how the highly addictive drugs sparked a wave of overdoses across the country.

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Her scrutiny of the opioid epidemic, which has raged across her Midwestern state, also offers McCaskill a chance to burnish her credentials on an issue of bipartisan concern. She’s going to need it ahead of what’s shaping up as a bitter reelection battle in a state Donald Trump won by 19 points.

But the probe may not be easy to conduct for the 63-year-old former state auditor, who has never mounted a major investigation with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress and amid a fierce GOP effort to defeat McCaskill. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the governmental affairs committee, has declined to sign on to some of McCaskill's efforts.

“Will they try to thwart this because I’m running and they don’t want to see me doing this kind of work? Yeah, they might,” McCaskill told POLITICO in between town halls. “But I’m not going to be shy about calling them out.”

For Republicans in her home state, McCaskill’s claims to be an apolitical straight talker are belied by a voting record in which she has aligned with her party on most major votes under Trump. McCaskill voted against confirming eight Trump Cabinet nominees, though she supported more than half of his overall slate. She also opposed all but two of the 13 measures the GOP has teed up so far this year to roll back Obama-era regulations.

“You can’t continue to vote with Elizabeth Warren 86 percent of the time and expect Missourians to continue to be hoodwinked,” Austin Stukins, executive director of the Show-Me State’s GOP, said in an interview.

In good news for McCaskill, two of the Republicans' top 2018 prospects have already declined to run. Missouri GOP Reps. Ann Wagner and Vicky Hartzler both passed on challenging McCaskill, and Republicans are now focused on courting the state’s 37-year-old attorney general, Josh Hawley, to enter the race.

With libertarian Austin Petersen her only declared foe, McCaskill’s sales pitch back home focuses less on her votes in the gridlocked Senate and more on her less-heralded bipartisan achievements — opioid oversight included.

McCaskill more than once reminded rural voters in Missouri that their state had long been the only one without a prescription-drug monitoring program (its governor created one by executive order just last week), even as state data show the number of opioid-linked deaths rising faster than the nationwide rate. She also questioned the wisdom behind the medical-industry push in the 1990s to treat pain as a vital sign, which has helped make opioids a standard fixture in hospitals.

“By the way, you’re supposed to have a little pain when you’re in the hospital,” McCaskill told the audience in Monroe City, drawing nods from some constituents as she recalled her own mother suffering possible withdrawal pain from opioid prescriptions before her death in 2012.

McCaskill began her probe by seeking sales and marketing data from five leading opioid manufacturers, aiming to map the industry’s role in misrepresenting the extremely habit-forming drugs as not addictive. The Missourian plans to eventually widen the lens to look at opioid distributors, she told POLITICO. She added that she didn’t necessarily foresee a legislative push to effect changes in drug industry behavior.

“Sometimes investigations have a way of making things better without legislation,” McCaskill. “That’s not a bad thing.”

The same methodical approach paid off for McCaskill during previous oversight efforts, from her years-long push with former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) to overhaul wartime contracting to her nearly two-year investigation with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) into Backpage.com’s enabling of online sex trafficking.

Portman and McCaskill began their Backpage.com work while helming the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations and have continued it this year, cosigning a request for a criminal referral to the Department of Justice last week.

Portman described McCaskill in a statement as “a persistent and determined investigator" and "a good partner” throughout their Backpage investigation.

McCaskill also worked with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to conduct oversight of the prescription drug industry when they led the Aging Committee in the previous Congress.

McCaskill has sought to keep things cooperative with Johnson, but the duo lacks the same sort of productive relationship she has had with Portman or Collins.

Johnson joined with McCaskill on an oversight letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration but did not sign onto a related request for an inspector general’s investigation. Nor did Johnson sign onto McCaskill’s bid for internal marketing information from private-sector opioid manufacturers.

Sources told POLITICO that difficulties McCaskill’s staff has faced with Johnson’s are believed to stem more from broad partisanship than any personal animus between the two, but the overall opioid investigation has progressed slower than it might were the committee more unified.

Johnson “does some separate things, I do some separate things,” McCaskill said. “But at the end of the day, we’re trying to not to have a division based on either my reelection or politics, so I’m hopeful we can keep that up through next year.”

Johnson's office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, are trying to tear down McCaskill’s self-made image by pointing to previous stumbles, including her 2011 repayment of almost $300,000 in back taxes on a private plane she later sold and her March reversal of a Twitter declaration that she had never met then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

“Claire McCaskill is quick to conduct oversight on everyone but herself,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Michael McAdams. “Whether it’s McCaskill lying about her interactions with the Russian ambassador or using taxpayer funds to pay for her private plane, Missourians know she has a serial problem with transparency and the truth.”

McCaskill explained her contact with Kislyak to voters, including her family foundation’s $1,000 donation to a nonprofit for which he served on the board, with the dry humor she often flashes on the Hill and the campaign trail.

“It won’t surprise any of you to know that Twitter sometimes lacks context,” she quipped to an audience in Ashland, the only stop on her town hall swing that went for Hillary Clinton in November.

And in an interview between public meetings, she downplayed the prospect of her opioid investigation reaching any major conclusions before voters decide whether to give her a third term.

"There were a lot of investigations before tobacco [companies] finally had to acknowledge that in fact their product caused cancer," she said. "They went years fighting every case, years saying it’s not bad for your health."

CORRECTION: Petersen's candidacy was originally omitted from this story.