SPRINGFIELD, Mo. _ Riding a red wave that began in 2016 with Donald Trump in Missouri, Josh Hawley defeated Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill Tuesday night in one of the most closely watched and consequential Senate races of 2018.
Hawley, the state's attorney general, built up Trump-like margins in rural and small-town Missouri to defeat the two-term incumbent McCaskill, whose ability to hold office against a rising surge of Republican victories in Missouri finally came to an end after a political career that began in 1982.
Although returns were still trickling in after midnight, Hawley's victory was shaping up as more decisive than polls that showed the race virtually tied. It was part of a Republican Senate wall against a surge of blue that allowed Democrats to reclaim control of the House. And its rural and small town vs. urban split mirrored, to a large degree, the split in the country under Trump as he and a Democrat-led House enter the second half of his current term.
The 38-year-old Hawley will now become Missouri's youngest senator since the Civil War and the youngest member of the current Senate.
But he framed his victory as part of a more conservative, traditional Missouri than the one framed by McCaskill's Democratic Party.
That was a framework of a combative and confrontational national party that the consensus-seeking McCaskill could never quite separate herself from over a long, and often bitterly fought campaign.
Hawley told jubilant supporters in Springfield that he had received a concession call from McCaskill and a "very nice call from the president of the United States."
"Tonight the good Lord and the people of Missouri have given us victory," he said, while supporters crowded the stage where he stood to take cellphone photos and video.
Hawley pledged to fulfill campaign promises to secure the nation's borders, nominate "pro-Constitution and pro-America judges," bring back jobs from overseas and "stand up" for the state's farmers and small businesses.
"This election has been about our way of life, it's been about heartland values," Hawley said. "We believe it's not the past. It's the future ... Our way of life and our values are going to renew this country."
McCaskill, speaking at a St. Louis hotel from a stage filled with her family, told emotional supporters that "it has been an honor" to serve Missourians, in a career that began with election to the State House of Representatives in 1982.
"This state drives me crazy," she said, "but I love every corner of it," she said.
"So many times the experts said we couldn't win and because of the people of Missouri we did so I want to thank (them) from the bottom of my heart," McCaskill said.
Then, referencing two dozen primaries and general elections that have had her name on a ballot, she said: "My record ends at 22 and 2. Not a bad record."
It was not an easy road to victory for Hawley. He struggled initially to raise money to compete with McCaskill's national fundraising prowess, and he constantly confronted questions about why he was running for a higher office less than two years after he famously posed on a step-ladder in an ad in his attorney general's race and vowed not to let his ambitions push him to the Senate step.
But now Hawley will be the youngest senator in a body that will have a slightly larger Republican majority than it currently does, depending on the results of late-breaking and close races around the country.
In the end, McCaskill was unable to climb a 19-percentage-point hill _ the margin of Trump's victory in Missouri in 2016. She tried to avoid the strident attacks on the president made by other Democratic candidates around the country.
But Trump's frequent appearances in the state _ and Hawley's relentless attachment to Trump and his policies _ lined up more with the direction of Missouri, one of the fastest-trending Republican states in the country.
The geography of 2018 was always bad for McCaskill and Democrats. Her party had to defend 10 Senate seats in states Trump won, including Missouri. And while Democrats nationally appeared to win enough seats to take the U.S. House, Hawley's victory in Missouri will be one of the major Republican pushbacks on predictions of a "blue wave" of Democrats sweeping to victory Tuesday across the nation.
Missouri Republican Party Chairman Todd Graves connected Trump to Hawley in a statement.
"In 2016, Republicans brought home a historic victory in Missouri, from the presidency down the ballot," Graves said. "Tonight, we kept the winning streak going with Josh Hawley's incredible defeat of Claire McCaskill."
Hawley, who turns 39 on New Year's Eve, will be the youngest Missouri U.S. senator since John Brooks Henderson, co-author of the 13th Amendment banning slavery, was appointed to replace an expelled senator who sided with the South during the Civil War.
Trump made the state a prime focus of his unprecedented fight to maintain his party's Senate and House majorities.
The president made five trips to Missouri since March, two in the last five days of the campaign, including his final rally in Cape Girardeau on election eve, where he again introduced Hawley as a rising star in the GOP. "No president in the history of the country has made this kind of effort for a ticket he is not on," Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said.
McCaskill focused on protecting health care for those with pre-existing conditions; Hawley mirrored Trump's focus on illegal immigration and economic progress under Republicans.
Portraying herself as a moderate, McCaskill parlayed the notoriety of the contest into raising close to $40 million, by far a record for Missouri campaign spending. Hawley has spent about a fourth of that amount.
But outside groups _ particularly super PACs tied to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer _ bombarded the airwaves with unprecedented independent advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts. When it's all counted, outside group spending will exceed what the candidates themselves spent. More than $120 million had been spent, overall, in the race as of mid-October.
When establishment Republicans, such as former Sen. John Danforth, convinced Hawley to run, it set up a classic generational, personality-driven election that also turned on big issues such as health care, immigration and the economy.
McCaskill had to be careful about who she associated with. Former President Barack Obama raised money for her, but he did so in California, and McCaskill did not invite Obama to the state to campaign.
Hawley called her a liberal in moderate's clothes; she argued that she wasn't one of the "crazy Democrats" who disrupted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's nomination hearings and shouted Republican politicians out of restaurants.
