Last Tuesday, Missouri attorney general Josh Hawley won the Republican senate primary, setting him up to take on Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill this November. The race will be one of the nation’s most important in determining whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate in 2019, and right now, according to a new poll, it couldn’t be closer.
A Missouri Scout poll of the head-to-head matchup released Saturday morning finds likely voters evenly split on McCaskill and Hawley, with 47 percent supporting each candidate and six percent undecided. The poll, which was conducted on August 8 and 9, is the first major statewide poll since early July. Each of Missouri Scout’s previous polls, which took place in April and May, showed McCaskill holding a four-point lead.
Hawley is a former professor of constitutional law whom GOP leaders recruited to challenge McCaskill after Rep. Ann Wagner decided to defend her own seat in 2018, has sought to paint his opponent as an out-of-touch Washingtonian more beholden to her party leadership than Missouri voters. McCaskill, in turn, has tried to burnish her credentials as a freethinking moderate while castigating Hawley, who was elected to his current position in 2016, as a politically ambitious upstart.
The poll does not include reactions to Hawley and McCaskill’s first head-to-head event this year, which took place Friday at the Missouri Farm Bureau in Jefferson City. After hearing from both candidates, the Bureau overwhelmingly voted to endorse Hawley.
McCaskill faces an uphill battle for reelection in a state that has veered sharply to the right over the past decade: In 2016, Donald Trump won Missouri by 20 points. But luck seemed to favor her early this year, as Hawley struggled to navigate the scandals surrounding the state’s then-governor, Republican Eric Greitens, who was accused of misconduct ranging from campaign finance violation to sexual coercion. As the state’s chief prosecutor, Hawley found himself unavoidably tied up in the investigation, and was forced to weather accusations from both sides, with Greitens’ allies portraying him as a closeted liberal hell-bent on taking down the governor and McCaskill’s allies painting him as a Greitens stooge.
But Greitens ultimately resigned in May, and Hawley has been happy to put the issue behind him. Meanwhile, new developments have broken more favorably for him: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s surprise retirement and President Trump’s subsequent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh have forced McCaskill into an awkward situation of her own. McCaskill has yet to indicate whether or not she will vote to block Kavanaugh’s appointment to the high court, but she has acknowledged that “no matter how I vote, there’s going to be a lot of people not happy with it.”
The Missouri Scout poll is the second straight statewide poll to project a tie or a lead for Hawley. The previous five polls, taken between March and May, projected ties or a narrow McCaskill lead. Before Saturday’s poll, THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s SwingSeat model was projecting McCaskill’s odds of holding her seat at 55 percent.
