WASHINGTON _ It's the maverick election.
With Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley entering the 2018 Missouri Senate race, what was once anticipated to be a contest between two established female politicians is now adorned with wild-card candidates and laden with intrigue, and even a touch of the bizarre.
Veteran Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill faces a field of relative newcomers on the Republican side in one of the nation's premier Senate elections of 2018.
The GOP nomination fight could be more messy than Republicans hoped for, opening the door for McCaskill to play strategically in the GOP primary, as she did the last time she ran in 2012.
In Hawley, Missouri Republicans have a Washington outsider who is a relatively new Missouri insider. He was elected on a change-politics message but now runs with the backing and cajoling of the state's Republican establishment as well as anti-establishment figure Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump who runs conservative website Breitbart.com.
Unlike McCaskill, Hawley has no congressional voting record to defend. But he will have to defend. While winning his attorney general's campaign last year, he ridiculed career politicians who seek step-ladders to higher office.
Hawley will have to clear a Republican primary field that involves even lesser-known announced candidates in ex-Libertarian presidential candidate Austin Petersen, retired Air Force pilot Tony Monetti and political newcomer Courtland Sykes, whose 1950s-era pronouncement that he expects a home-cooked dinner from his girlfriend caused some to wonder if he's engaged in political performance art.
Trump thumped Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 in Missouri, and the sheen of Washington, D.C., remains toxic for the state's politicians. McCaskill, whose favorable-vs.-unfavorable ratings never have paved an easy path to election, faces an anti-incumbent atmosphere in a state that has increasingly trended Republican.
The door to all this uncertainty was opened wider with Rep. Ann Wagner's surprise June announcement that she would not seek the GOP Senate nomination, thereby thwarting a historic match between two of the most powerful women in Missouri political history.
One Missouri political operative said Wagner-McCaskill would have been an epic contest to see which ended up on the state's "political Mount Rushmore," with the loser going home and not likely seeking office again.
But Hawley is at the beginning of his elective career, and a win or loss in 2018 would not necessarily be his last rodeo. Hawley was the top vote-getter in Missouri last year, topping Trump by roughly 13,000 votes.
Hawley talked last week with Bannon, who has vowed to recruit challengers in 2018 primaries against Republican senators who have not moved adequately on Trump's policy agenda. A Hawley associate said Hawley and Bannon talked about mutual acquaintances, and Hawley portrayed himself as a new and different kind of Republican uniquely bridged between the Republican establishment and those, like Bannon, who want to shake the status quo to its core.
Bannon's threats have thrown a tempest into the national Republican Party's effort to maintain control of the Senate in 2018.
McCaskill's actions since Wagner announced she would not run have been deliberately aimed at Trump voters _ if not to win them over, to at least soften their opposition in this toxic, anti-incumbent environment.
McCaskill has toned down her criticism of Trump while other Democrats in more blue states have ratcheted theirs up. She will hold her 46th town hall meeting of the year Wednesday in Washington, Mo., about an hour southwest of St. Louis, in a county where Trump trounced Clinton, 71-25 percent.
For McCaskill, the meetings have been the message, her way of showing she is tending to grassroots in places where Trump was popular while Hawley privately consulted with GOP kingmakers.
Republicans will attack McCaskill as the ultimate insider, Hillary Clinton clone and moderate in sheep's clothing, pointing out that she owns a multimillion-dollar condo halfway between the White House and the Capitol, and that she voted against Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But McCaskill also has cast votes and taken positions to make a middle-road case. For instance, she opposed Harry Reid as Senate Democratic leader and she supported the Keystone Pipeline, which her party largely opposed.
McCaskill first became known to many Missourians by being the only candidate in state history to beat a sitting governor, fellow Democrat Bob Holden, in a primary. She lost that 2004 general election to Republican Matt Blunt, then became the state's first elected woman senator by knocking off a Republican incumbent, Jim Talent, two years later.
She was re-elected five years ago by defeating Republican Todd Akin after McCaskill ran ads and shared information designed to help Akin _ whom she perceived as her weakest possible opponent _ win the Republican primary.
"It would be a mistake to confuse Claire's experience with being an insider," argued Democratic operative Richard Callow. "She primaried and beat a sitting Democratic governor and regularly gives heartburn to some of the party's most loyal supporters. Likewise, it would be wrong to confuse Hawley's short tenure with being unfamiliar to the party's best-heeled donors. This will be maverick vs wanna-be maverick campaign."
And a supremely unpredictable one.
Hawley "is an automatically strong candidate," said Jeremy Walling, a political scientist at Southeast Missouri University. "He's already run statewide. Wagner did not have that. The question is going to be all this Trump and Bannon and Courtland Sykes _ all those wild cards _ and whatever comes of that."
