ST. LOUIS _ Josh Hawley on Tuesday officially confirmed the worst-kept secret in Missouri politics: He's running for the U.S. Senate.
Hawley, the state's Republican attorney general _ who has been spending money like a candidate, talking with national party officials since early summer and who formed an exploratory committee in August _ was set to release a video Tuesday announcing his intent to seek the GOP nomination in the 2018 August primary.
In the video, he talks in general terms about issues on which he believes the status quo has failed, including jobs, taxes and health care costs. "Erin and I have decided we have to do something about it," Hawley says in the ad, referring to his wife. "And that's why, next year, I'm going to run for the United States Senate."
Although several other Republicans are seeking the party's nomination, Hawley, in the video, looks past them to directly take on Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who is seeking a third term on the November 2018 ballot.
"Senator McCaskill _ she's been in D.C. forever. She's turned her back on farmers. She's ignored working families," Hawley says in the video, which is set in a kitchen with his wife and two young children and employs a casual, conversational style.
"(McCaskill) has been wrong on every Supreme Court nominee for the last 11 years," Hawley says in the video. "She doesn't represent us."
McCaskill first took office before Missouri's dramatic transformation in recent years from battleground state to solid-red Republican bastion and she is widely considered one of the Senate's most vulnerable incumbents. The theme in Hawley's announcement, presenting her as out of step with Missouri values, is likely to be a key campaign strategy going forward.
But in making his long-expected announcement of candidacy, Hawley will face some challenges of his own in Missouri's rocky political terrain.
The 37-year-old legal scholar and nationally known conservative writer is viewed by many in the Missouri GOP as the party's future. But he sits on a fissure between hard-right Republicans who support President Donald Trump and anti-Trump establishment GOP leaders such as former Sen. John Danforth, a Hawley mentor and one of his biggest boosters.
Danforth has publicly excoriated Trump as a "hateful man" and has called on Hawley to repudiate the president. In response, pro-Trump conservatives such as Ed Martin, the former Missouri Republican Party chairman and now a CNN commentator, have called on Hawley to repudiate Danforth.
So far, Hawley has done neither, keeping his head down amid the intraparty controversy. As an attorney general just doing his job, he's had that luxury. As a formally announced Senate candidate, he won't.
"He's caught in the crossfire between Trump supporters and the Republican establishment," said Dave Robertson, political scientist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. In a state that Trump won by almost 20 points last year, Robertson said, the danger for Hawley is that "he's going to be seen being supported by the establishment" because of ties to Danforth and others.
That may explain why Hawley reportedly talked last month with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser associated with the populist-nationalist movement among the most conservative parts of Trump's base. The conversation apparently paid off. Breitbart.com, Bannon's conservative news website, gave Hawley some fawning coverage over the weekend, with a piece headlined: "The League of Extraordinary Candidates."
Hawley also will have to contend with the fact that his announcement seeking his second elective office comes not even a year into his first. He won the attorney general's race last year in part with a lauded campaign commercial, in which he shamed "career politicians just climbing the ladder, using one office to get another."
With Hawley climbing that ladder himself now, the ad may prove even more effective for the Democrats than it was for him _ once they start playing and re-playing it, as they almost certainly will.
Hawley's new ad announcing his candidacy seems to subtly acknowledge the issue. "This isn't something we were planning to do," he says in it, referring to himself and his wife, "but we believe we have to do all we can to win a better future for our country."
As recently as June, Hawley was declining to even discuss a Senate run on the grounds that, as he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in June, "It's awfully early to be talking about other jobs or elections." But there were indications even then that he was considering it, including spending patterns from his state campaign committee that were unusual for a newly seated state official.
As Hawley was downplaying thoughts of a campaign, Republican activists in Missouri and nationally already were lining up behind him, sometimes in ways that blatantly contradicted the official line. In July, one national anti-abortion group touting a Hawley meeting referred to him in social media as a "Senate candidate," then quickly deleted the reference.
Hawley formed an exploratory committee in August, which allowed him to begin raising money under Federal Election Commission guidelines while not yet officially announcing his candidacy. Though he technically wasn't yet a candidate, the state and national parties quickly coalesced in support, including GOP Senate leaders, the party's main senatorial fundraising entity and even Vice President Mike Pence.
The national conservative super PAC "Club for Growth" already had raised $10 million to spend on behalf of the still-unofficial candidate as of August, according to one report.
Other declared Republican Senate candidates include 2016 Libertarian presidential candidate Austin Petersen; Tony Monetti, a retired Air Force pilot and assistant dean at the University of Central Missouri Aviation Department; and Courtland Sykes, a Navy veteran.
McCaskill has spent much of this summer visiting rural Missouri counties _ Trump strongholds _ apparently trying to blunt the GOP narrative of her as a liberal elitist. She will conduct her 44th town hall of the year on Wednesday.
