 on his presidency.
That is not going to come from Josh Hawley.
More women vote Democratic or are independent than are Republicans and the party's complete and total backing of President Trump during a time when he has made a number of disparaging and disrespectful comments about women appears to have caused a few Republican women to reconsider voting for the party's candidates. It is not many of them, but in order for it to make a difference in the Senate campaign, it does not have to be.
There is also a growing understanding that much of the most vehement opposition toward Claire McCaskill comes from people who are simply not comfortable with having an outspoken woman in any position of power. You hear Chuck Schumer's name mentioned in some of the negative advertising, but the real venom in those ads is reserved for Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. That is no accident.
He conducted an investigation that was not really an investigation, which meant he did not please those who thought Greitens was the subject of a witch hunt and he did not go far enough for those people, including many Republicans, who thought Greitens' activities and these allegations were demeaning the state.
When he announced his Senate bid, he made it clear that he had to be talked into it, for the good of Missouri, of course.
Recent reporting by the Kansas City Star makes it clear that decision had already been made, probably even at the time Hawley made that ad. Hawley was working with consultants right from the start to position himself to run for the Senate. That included decisions on what cases the attorney general's office should pursue.
In other words, Hawley's argument that McCaskill has sold out to Washington and no longer represents Missouri seems a bit hollow.
McCaskill is a seasoned campaigner who bounced back from a narrow loss to Matt Blunt in the 2004 gubernatorial race to win two hard-fought Senate races.
While Josh Hawley may well turn out to be a solid politician at some point in his career, he has not arrived there at this point. His campaign has been awkward, consultant-driven and he appears to be a pre-fab candidate.
Admittedly, it was an earlier point in the campaign, but when I had a chance to watch Hawley in action, but from what I could see, he is not comfortable meeting with constituents. That can be worked on, but it will have to be in a future campaign or as he conducts his business as Missouri's attorney general.
Josh Hawley's campaign is Trump-driven and consultant-driven.
Claire McCaskill will be elected to her third term in the U. S. Senate Tuesday.
It was late September and 10,000 people in a basketball arena in southwestern Missouri were screaming Brett Kavanaugh’s name.
Josh Hawley backed away from the podium as the wave of sound hit. He could feel the stage shaking.
The 38-year-old Republican Senate candidate turned to President Donald Trump, who stood by his side in the packed JQH arena at Missouri State University in Springfield.
“Wow,” Hawley said.
“Wow,” Trump said back.
Hawley’s campaign manager, Kyle Plotkin, was standing in the back of the rally, near the TV cameras and journalists, thinking to himself that he’d never seen anything like this before in Republican politics.
It was like a rock concert. The wild energy of the crowd, the deafening volume.
“This is significant,” Plotkin thought to himself.
For the first time in a bitterly fought campaign, Plotkin felt it in his bones: Claire McCaskill was done.
This is the story of how Josh Hawley, a man who won his first election two years ago, defeated a veteran campaigner seeking her third Senate term. It is based on interviews with more than a dozen senior operatives and strategists from both parties — in Missouri and Washington, DC.
Together, those operatives describe a campaign that managed to pull off what some thought impossible: Unite the Trumpian and country club wings of the Republican Party. It delivered the win for Hawley, and it has all but destroyed the Democratic Party’s foothold in Missouri.
He wasn’t even supposed to be the one to run against her.
That was Republican Congresswoman Ann Wagner, the former co-chair of the Republican National Committee.
But Wagner had a problem. She had disavowed Trump during the 2016 campaign, after the revelation of an Access Hollywood tape that captured Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women.
Hawley had earned even more votes than Trump statewide in 2016. As a newcomer to politics, he had no lengthy record for McCaskill to attack, as Wagner did.
But his status as the standard-bearer for the Trump movement in the Midwest wasn’t assured.
Even though Hawley had cast himself as an outsider in his successful 2016 run for attorney general, in many ways, he was a darling of the GOP establishment.
A square-jawed product of Stanford University and Yale Law School, he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and helped represent Hobby Lobby in its successful lawsuit against Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate.
In the spring of 2017, former Sen. Jack Danforth, an early mentor of Hawley’s, spearheaded an effort to recruit Hawley to challenge McCaskill.
Danforth’s role was to encourage Hawley to run publicly — and to discourage others from entering the race. Also involved in the effort to recruit Hawley were Steven Law, a former chief of staff for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, former ambassador Sam Fox, former GOP Sen. Kit Bond, and Missouri’s sitting Republican Sen. Roy Blunt.
McCaskill, Todd knew, was vulnerable. Her approval rating hovered at 45 percent. Trump had re-energized the GOP base. Republicans didn’t want to blow their chance. Not this time.
Wagner withdrew her name in early July 2017. A week later, Vice President Mike Pence personally reached out to Hawley to urge him to run in a phone call brokered by Blunt and Nick Ayers, Pence’s chief of staff. Hawley announced an exploratory committee the following month.
The trick that Hawley had to pull off was to convince both the populist, Trumpian wing of the Republican Party and the country club establishment that he was secretly one of them — and that he was just humoring the other guys.
The support from Danforth and other party elders tied Hawley to the establishment early in the race, prompting suspicion from some in Trump’s base.
It didn’t help that when Trump first came to Missouri that August, Hawley didn’t show up.
Hawley took a drubbing on conservative talk radio in Missouri for skipping Trump’s visit for a “family vacation.” And he refused to comment about Danforth’s criticism of Trump. Even Wagner slammed Hawley for shunning the president.
Former state GOP Chair Ed Martin was mulling his own run. He had emerged as a pro-Trump voice on cable news panels, and said publicly that if Hawley was unable to condemn Danforth’s comments, he should not run against McCaskill.
Hawley needed to shore up support with the populist wing of the GOP, and fast. Within weeks, his nascent campaign reached out to Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and then-Breitbart executive, to ensure there would be no rebellion from the right.
“The danger was a Trump-esque fire-breather comes in and gets to Josh’s right culturally, so getting Bannon involved and getting the Trump MAGA stamp of approval early on was very important,” said Gregg Keller, a St. Louis-based Republican strategist.
Bannon met with Hawley twice early in the campaign. The meetings were set up by Dave Bossie, the president of Citizens United and Trump’s 2016 deputy campaign manager. Bannon came away from the meetings convinced that Hawley would support the Trump agenda and that he was the one person who could be competitive against McCaskill.
Bannon agreed to stay out of Hawley’s way even as he engaged in a self-described war against McConnell-backed candidates.
“He had tremendous support from Trump-type people who saw him and said ‘Hey, although Mitch McConnell signed off on him, he’s actually one of us,’” Bannon told McClatchy.
McConnell wasn’t pleased. Especially when Hawley declined to say whether he would vote for McConnell as majority leader despite the fact that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate GOP leadership, had already established a joint committee to fundraise on Hawley’s behalf.
“Hawley and other candidates around the country — not just Hawley — created this whole façade that didn’t exist: that Bannon was this big kingmaker. And he wasn’t,” said Chris Pack, spokesman for the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC with ties to McConnell.
Hawley’s top campaign consultant, Brad Todd, defended the outreach to Bannon.
“There were a lot of people who were not happy he met with Steve Bannon. There were a lot of people who were not happy he met with Mitch McConnell,” Todd said.
In addition to courting Bannon, Hawley also worked to persuade Martin that he would be a loyal soldier for Trump.
“When I made the noise I made, I heard from a lot of folks, including Josh, about ‘Hey what’s your concern?’” Martin said.
Martin was blunt. He told Hawley he wouldn’t win if he didn’t take on the Trump mantle, Martin said.
The next time Trump came to Missouri,