McCaskill’s Intimidation Game The Missouri senator runs attack ads not on her opponent but one of his supporters. Kimberley Strassel
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mccaskills-intimidation-game-1532646222
If you’ve tuned in to this year’s midterms, chances are you know about that hot Senate race in Missouri: McCaskill vs. Humphreys. Oh, wait.
Democrat Claire McCaskill is indeed facing a tough re-election, trying for a third term. She’s had a particularly rough week, after the Kansas City Star reported that businesses tied to her husband had been awarded $131 million in federal contracts since she took office in 2007. Her putative opponent is the constitutional conservative Josh Hawley, the current attorney general and the strong favorite to win the GOP primary on Aug. 7.
Team McCaskill is already employing the Democratic Party’s go-to tactic this midterm: character assassination. There’s not much else. The economy is humming, the party’s centrist and liberal wings are fighting, and the drumbeat of impending Trump doom isn’t finding much accompaniment. So in Missouri as elsewhere, candidates are reverting to personal attacks. But the McCaskill forces are piling on a guy who isn’t even running.
Indeed, they are attacking a private citizen and donor, David Humphreys. Back in March, Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC began plowing millions into attacks on the businessman, who donated to Mr. Hawley’s campaign for attorney general. The pattern is the same: An ad makes a malicious accusation against Mr. Humphreys, then sidles over to tar Mr. Hawley with guilt by association. Just how invested are they in this strategy? Since airing their first spot, 70% of Democratic ads—amounting to $4.7 million—have been focused on Mr. Humphreys.
Ms. McCaskill’s pickle is that the GOP has upped its recruitment game. Her only prior re-election bid in 2012 had her face off against Todd Akin, who self-immolated after his blundering comments on abortion and rape. Mr. Hawley—a savvier, younger man and squeaky clean—hasn’t provided a similar opening. A native Missourian and onetime U.S. Supreme Court law clerk, he arrived on the political scene only in 2016, becoming the Show Me State’s first Republican attorney general in 24 years.
The McCaskill campaign spent early 2018 trying to rap him on his investigation into scandal-plagued GOP Gov. Eric Greitens, but that went poof when Mr. Greitens resigned in May. Ms. McCaskill has been reduced to swiping at Mr. Hawley’s “fancy law school” (Yale). A poll in early July showed Mr. Hawley up by two points, and the senator now has the headache of whether to support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
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