Josh Hawley, Missouri’s incumbent Republican attorney general, secured his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate Tuesday night by a healthy margin.
Early returns saw Hawley with a clear majority of primary votes, with none of his ten opponents with more than ten percent of the vote. The results line him up for a November showdown with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), widely considered one of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats. Missouri went for President Donald Trump by more than 18 points in 2016. McCaskill only secured reelection in the Democratic wave election of 2012 after her GOP Republican challenger Todd Akin’s candidacy imploded with a disastrous interview segment on rape and abortion.
Recent polling puts the race at a true tossup. Hawley’s campaign announced in their victory statement:
Tonight the conservative people of Missouri sent a message loud and clear to the Washington elites. Missouri sent a message in 2016, but Claire McCaskill was so comfortable in her Washington condo that she couldn’t hear it. The hardworking people of our state voted in favor of conservative judges, middle class tax cuts, more jobs, secure borders. Claire McCaskill didn’t listen then, and she refuses to listen now. This fall, we have another chance to make our voices heard – and send her home for good.
The same statement challenged McCaskill to a series of one-on-one unmoderated debates in the leadup to November’s vote.
Hawley, 38-years-old, a graduate of Yale Law School and a former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court, is seen as one of the young Republicans with the most potential to break out on the national stage.
As Missouri’s top law enforcement official, he has set himself apart with his willingness to take on Big Tech. In November last year, he opened a potentially historic restraint of trade investigation into search giant Google, immediately aligning him with industry rebels like PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a donor to his campaign. This April, he followed up with a similarly groundbreaking privacy investigation of social media mega-corporation Facebook. He later urged his potential future colleagues in the Senate to go harder on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley.
In an exclusive Breitbart News interview last month, Hawley slammed McCaskill’s apparent willingness to follow up on her no vote on now-confirmed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch with a blanket refusal to consider any of President Trump’s potential nominees to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. We now know that nominee to be Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
LISTEN:
“Here she doesn’t even know who the nominee is, and she’s already telling reporters, ‘Oh I think it’s going to be very hard to get to yes,’ but that ought to be no surprise to anybody,” Hawley told Breitbart News Washington Political Editor Matt Boyle. “She voted no on Neil Gorsuch, she voted no on the president’s regulatory rollback for farms and small businesses, she voted no on tax cuts, she voted no on Gina Haskell for the CIA for heaven’s sake, because Haskell’s too tough on terrorists.”
“Claire is focused on open borders. She has endorsed legislation that would open our borders — allow any illegal immigrant who brings a child with them to the border to be released into the American interior, no questions asked,” Hawley told Boyle, lining up closely with President Trump’s tough talk on immigration enforcement. “She is focused on making sure … illegal immigrant teenagers have access to abortion with federal help.”
Republican Attorneys General Association Chair and Arkansas AG Leslie Rutledge offered her congratulations Tuesday night. “Josh has been a fantastic attorney general, protecting consumers from fraud and defending the rule of law. While I am proud to have Josh as a colleague, I’m confident he will defeat Senator McCaskill in November,” she wrote in a statement.
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