Sen. Claire McCaskill blamed her defeat in the November midterm elections on the Democratic Party abandoning centrists.
“This demand for purity, this looking down your nose at people who want to compromise, is a recipe for disaster for the Democrats,” she told NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
“Will we ever get to a majority in the Senate again, much less to 60, if we do not have some moderates in our party?” she said.
The Missouri Democrat, who has served in the Senate since 2007, was one of four Senate Democrats to lose re-election in states President Trump won in the 2016 presidential election.
She also blamed the Democratic Party for failing “to gain enough trust with rural Americans” as reason for her loss.
McCaskill, however, doesn’t believe her vote against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh played a role in her defeat. Instead, she said, Democrats fumbled their handling of the allegations of sexual misconduct against the judge, which harmed her chances of winning re-election.
“I don’t think my vote hurt me as much as the spectacle that occurred. There were mistakes made by my party in terms of how that was handled,” she said, adding that she thinks Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against the judge should have been turned over to the FBI sooner, which “would have absolved [Senate Judiciary Committee ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein] of the very real perception that this was an 11th-hour attempt to gut a guy.”
