Missouri Republican Senate candidate Josh Hawley on Tuesday unseated vulnerable red-state Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill in one of the closest races of the 2018 midterm elections, giving Republicans a seat they were hoping to pick up in their bid to hold onto their narrow Senate majority.
Fox News called the race in Hawley’s favor Tuesday night, when he was ahead with 53.27 percent of the vote and 67 percent of precincts reporting. McCaskill phoned Hawley to concede, later addressing supporters in St. Louis, Mo.
“I feel like we have run a lot of elections together, Missouri and me. My record ends at 22 and 2. Not a bad record,” McCaskill said. “For now it’s good night, but it’s not goodbye.”
The McCaskill-Hawley match-up became a marquee contest of the 2018 election cycle when multiple polls of likely Missouri voters put the pair in a dead heat. RealClearPolitics’ poll average before voters began casting ballots on Tuesday had Hawley, the state’s 38-year-old attorney general, ahead by less than 1 percentage point.
Hawley presented McCaskill with her first viable opponent since she defeated Republican Jim Talent by only 3 points in 2006. She won her race against Republican Todd Akin in 2012 by a landslide of 16 points after he said the bodies of women who were victims of a “legitimate rape” often rejected pregnancies. But McCaskill — a two-term, 65-year-old incumbent — faced an uphill battle six years later against Hawley in a state that has trended Republican for about a decade.
Healthcare and immigration became the two competing policy platforms at the center of McCaskill and Hawley’s campaigns. McCaskill constantly hit Hawley for joining 17 other Republican attorneys general and two governors in a lawsuit seeking to repeal parts of Obamacare and its impact on protections for preexisting conditions. Hawley, a Trump ally hoping to tap into a base that helped Trump seize Missouri by 19 points, attacked McCaskill over her border security voting record, including a bill that granted illegal immigrants with a pathway to citizenship.
Both McCaskill and Hawley’s runs for the Senate were not without controversy. McCaskill was criticized for her use of a private plane to fly her to stops on her supposed three-day RV tour of Missouri. She also took heat for surreptitious recordings made in her field offices by Project Veritas, an organization linked to a right-wing provocateur.
Hawley was scrutinized for his management of the state’s attorney general’s office, particularly his recruitment of out-of-state political consultants to advise his staff. He previously approved of an ad in 2016 when he was jostling to become attorney general, taking down “career politicians just trying to climb the ladder, using one office to get another.”
Hawley will become the youngest sitting senator, beating Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who is 41.
