WASHINGTON _ The maneuvering around the 2018 fight for Sen. Claire McCaskill's Senate seat in Missouri touches a larger story of eruptions inside the national Democratic and Republican parties.
For Democrats, those fissures were exposed in an exchange between McCaskill and NBC "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd late last month.
Todd asked McCaskill whether self-professed moderates, like McCaskill, still have a home in the Democratic Party.
McCaskill gave a long answer about the minimum wage, protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other pocketbook issues that she says unite Democrats. They have been staples of Democratic campaign promises for more than 30 years, and they often work when social issues or war don't intervene.
But when Todd pressed, McCaskill said that one reason she spent so much time in rural Missouri this year was because President Donald Trump had connected, culturally, to Missourians in those parts of the state.
"Those people watching 'Dancing with the Stars,' they're not getting into the details of what we're doing on Pell grants," McCaskill said. "They are rather saying, 'Hey, I can't afford college, you know, give it to me straight.' And they don't think they've gotten it straight. ... And the cultural issues divide cities and the rural areas."
McCaskill was acknowledging a criticism of the national Democratic Party: that it has lost connections with working-class Americans while waging campaigns based on identity politics.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked Democratic National Chairman Tom Perez, who was elected this year after a bitter struggle between remnants of the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns, the same question about McCaskill that Todd did.
"What she has been doing is something that the Democratic Party needs to do more of," Perez said. "She has been all over the state, in every ZIP code. We didn't pay enough attention to certain parts of all too many states, and we have to do that."
Perez said this two days before excerpts of a new book by longtime Democratic operative Donna Brazile came out that sent new sparks through the smoldering Sanders vs. Clinton factions. In it, Brazile admitted what Sanders supporters had long claimed: National Democratic Party operatives decidedly favored Clinton over Sanders in last year's presidential primary.
McCaskill supported Clinton in 2016. But the senator had been exiled from Clinton Land after she supported Barack Obama for president in 2008. Now, most recently tied to the Clinton faction in a state Clinton lost by 19 percentage points last year, she will have to maneuver between the Clinton wing, friendly to Wall Street even while campaigning against it, and the Sanders faction, progressives who want to pull the party left on everything from universal health care to free college for everyone.
As an illustration of how that split now plays out in the Senate, only 16 of the 48 senators in the Democratic caucus signed onto a Sanders "Medicare for All" bill this year. But they included Democrats said to have presidential ambitions, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
McCaskill was not one of them. She would rather "fix" what was wrong with Obamacare, she said. But she and other centrists in both parties have made little headway getting there.
McCaskill has drawn a novice Democratic primary challenger. Angelica Earl, a former Obamacare marketplace worker who seems to fall into the Sanders camp, at least on one issue. She told the Post-Dispatch this summer that "my stance is single-payer health care for all."
