Democratic Senator Who Suffered Midterm Upset Points Blame at Fox News
Echoing the words of former President Barack Obama, to whom Fox News became the cause of all of his political misfortunes, defeated Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill blamed Fox News for her loss Tuesday.
Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley defeated McCaskill Tuesday by a margin of 51.5 percent to 45.5 percent.
In a post-mortem by The New York Times about the election night losses for various Democrats, McCaskill blamed her loss in part on Hawley’s close ties to President Donald Trump, and the way Fox News gave them publicity.
She bemoaned to The Times about seeing Fox News playing at many restaurants in Missouri during the time when Trump was calling attention to the migrant caravan moving toward the U.S. border.
“It’s time we all quit dancing around what is now a state-owned news channel,” she said.
McCaskill’s complaint was similar to one from Obama, who in a November 2016 interview with Rolling Stone said Democrats lost in 2016 because they did not reach rural and small-town voters.
Obama said the Democrats had experienced “failure, to reach those voters effectively. Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country,” he said then.
After a presidency in which he feuded with Fox News, Obama was still trashing the network in 2018.
“One of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we don’t share a common baseline of facts,” Obama said in a January 2018 interview. “If you watch Fox News, you are living on a different planet than you are if you are listening to NPR.”
During the campaign, far from attacking Trump, McCaskill was trying to tie herself to him, at one point saying that she voted with Trump roughly half the time, USA Today reported.
Hawley scoffed at those claims.
“If it’s about renaming the local post office, sure (she’s with the president),” he has said. “When it actually matters to the people of Missouri, she’s with the liberal left of her party.”
During the campaign, Trump made it clear McCaskill — who voted against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — was not on his side.
“The people of Missouri are going to retire far-left Democrat Claire McCaskill, who’s been saying such nice things about me. But you know what? She’ll never vote with me, that’s problem,” Trump said at a rally.
“She’s been saying nice things. I said, ‘I didn’t know she was a Republican,'” he joked.
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