Claire McCaskill Is Being Challenged From The Left

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"Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, has developed a reputation with progressives for reducing and criticizing several progressive policies that are growing in popularity.

During a town hall in April 2017, she told her constituents that policies like free college tuition are too expensive to enact; “Free college tuition is a great goal except it’s really expensive,” she said. “It’s really expensive, and we are struggling over how we’re going to pay in terms of what we have right now for Medicare. We can’t just start having the government pay for everything. When people talk about that and they point out countries where that happens, people are paying 70 percent of their income in taxes.”

Just weeks earlier, she pleaded for help from Bernie Sanders supporters to help her get re-elected. “All of you who are Bernie supporters … I need you. I want you. I want to talk to you. I want you to be part of our effort,” she said, hoping to stave off a progressive primary challenger. During the 2016 Democratic Primaries, Bernie Sanders received 49.4 percent of the vote, losing by just 0.2 percent to Clinton. McCaskill, a Clinton surrogate, frequently criticized Sanders and his supporters throughout the primaries. Earlier this year, she complained about the prospect of facing a primary challenger, “I may have a primary because there is, in our party now, some of the same kind of enthusiasm at the base that the Republican party had with the Tea Party,” she said in a February 2017 interview. “We are seeing that same—and many of those people are very impatient with me because they don’t think I’m pure. For example, they think I should be voting against all of Trump’s nominees and of course I’m judging each nominee on its own merit.”

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