As her SUV pulled up amid a scrum of pickups, the man Republican Party leaders hand-picked to unseat her — Josh Hawley — was already inside shaking hands, a Stanford- and Yale-educated constitutional law scholar nevertheless looking very much at home in jeans and cowboy boots.

Fully aware that Hawley, a conservative Republican who serves as Missouri’s attorney general, was the favorite among the gathering of farmers, McCaskill acknowledged to the crowd, “Sometimes this job is all about showing up,'’ even if “not everybody’s for you.”

McCaskill, 65, is playing to tough audiences these days as she faces the political fight of her life. She has come a long way from the McCaskill & Son feed mill her family once operated in the southern part of the state, moving up the ranks of Democratic politics in Missouri and then to Capitol Hill, where she has served for nearly 12 years. Along the way, she also became wealthy by virtue of her second marriage to a St. Louis developer.

Now her opponents are seizing on that wealth, pouring millions of dollars into one of the most hotly contested races of the midterms in an effort to paint McCaskill as out of touch with Missourians, co-opted by the liberal Democratic establishment and corrupted by the business arrangements of her husband. Everything from her Washington condo to her use of a private plane is under attack.

“D.C. changed Claire McCaskill,” said one ad paid for by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. Hawley has accused McCaskill of being the “ultimate D.C. insider,” saying she wants “liberals in charge.'’

“He has me shining Chuck Schumer’s shoes and doing Nancy Pelosi’s hair,” said McCaskill.

In a largely rural state that has trended increasingly red as conservative voters abandoned the Democratic Party — President Donald Trump won here by 19 points in 2016 — being labeled “out of touch” is something McCaskill can ill afford, particularly with a vote looming on whether to confirm Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

Polls show McCaskill in a statistical tie with Hawley in a race Republicans view as one of their best opportunities to pick up a Democratic seat. With Republicans holding a fragile 51-49 lead in the Senate, the outcome in Missouri could prove crucial in determining who controls the chamber.

But the election is not only a test of McCaskill’s popularity and endurance. It is also a referendum on whether fealty to Trump will be a winning strategy. Hawley, like many other Republican candidates across the country, has closely aligned himself with the president and his priorities, but Trump’s popularity here has declined since 2016, with a recent NBC News/Marist poll showing his unfavorable rating at 50 percent.

Illustrating the importance to both sides, more than $30 million from outside advocacy groups — the most of any race this year — has been spent for or against the candidates, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Of that money, more than $14.5 million has gone into ads opposing McCaskill, several of them focusing on her family. Since her second marriage in 2002 to Joseph Shepard, she has been one of the richest members of Congress. The couple’s net worth is estimated at more than $25 million.

Some of the political advertising inundating Missourians, as well as an opinion piece in the Kansas City Star this month appearing under Hawley’s byline, have suggested that there’s something unseemly about Shepard’s business, which relies on the use of government subsidies to develop low-income rental housing around the country.

Since McCaskill took office, Shepard’s companies have been granted about $131 million in subsidies. Most of that money is intended to cover the gap between what low-income tenants pay and the apartments’ market values.

While there is no evidence that McCaskill had done anything in Washington to advance her husband’s real estate interests, that is not the implication of the ads, which portray the couple’s actions as an unseemly attempt to profit off a public program.

“They both get rich and you pay for it,” proclaimed an ad from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“What the voters hear, and what they remember, is $131 million,” said Gregg Keller, a Missouri Republican operative who believes McCaskill needs a major tail wind to win.

This being politics, the pro-McCaskill forces have spent nearly as much on advertising against Hawley. One ad funded by the Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic group with ties to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that has promised an $80 million TV investment in nine battleground states, targets Hawley for being “part of the problem in Jefferson City” — a reference to the resignation and indictment this year of Missouri’s former governor, Eric Greitens. Another Senate Majority political action committee ad criticizes Hawley for taking “large contributions from the insurance industry.”

Attacks on Shepard have cropped up previously during McCaskill’s campaigns, but this year they have reached a particularly vicious level.

One controversial ad financed by a conservative group called Club for Growth Action Missouri revisited a 1998 police complaint filed against Shepard by his first wife following a domestic dispute.

McCaskill accuses Hawley of “purposely distorting the facts to demonize a good man that I love.”

“The worst is the lies, the factual inaccuracies about my husband’s business and my activity in the Senate,” she said in an interview on her RV following a Labor Day picnic in Springfield. “It’s very clear that I’ve done nothing in the Senate to help my husband’s business. That money doesn’t go to him.”

Also under attack are McCaskill’s $2.7 million condo, cited as a symbol of Washington excess, and her use of a private plane. A Republican-sponsored Twitter account, @AirClairMO, depicts McCaskill’s RV being directed around various Missouri campaign stops by a faux airline ground crew. It is an effort to poke fun at McCaskill’s decision in May to fly instead of drive on a portion of a three-day RV tour of the state.

Acknowledging that she is in a tough election fight, McCaskill said: “I’m in a hard state. I worry about all of it. I worry about everything because everything has to go well in a race like this.”

In a tweet last week, she called the campaign a “pressure cooker,” and included a photo of a low-calorie salad.

“And yes I eat too much under pressure (in case you haven’t noticed I’m overweight), so tonight when I got home I whipped up a healthy noodle salad,” the tweet said.

McCaskill nevertheless says she senses an emotional energy in the electorate.

She is loath to call it a blue wave, but this year reminds her of 2006, she says, when Democrats took control of both the Senate and House. Volunteers are up — many of them women who show up at rallies wearing #TeamClaire stickers. Small individual contributions are up. Crowds are bigger.

“People are tired of cussing the TV and want to do something,” McCaskill said.

In past elections, she has been able to pick off rural and Republican votes with her image as a common-sense Missourian, tough on law and order as a county prosecutor and tough on public expenditures as state auditor. She has frequently invoked the populist Missourian Harry S. Truman and emphasized her moderate voting record and her small-town Missouri roots, endearing herself to Missourians with brash talk, sometimes off message — once telling Tim Russert that she did not want her daughters around Bill Clinton.

Many Missourians saw that as a breath of fresh air, but her opponents say that this side of McCaskill has been supplanted by someone who toes the party line.

“We’re a long ways away from saying she wouldn’t leave her daughters alone with Bill Clinton,'’ said Jeff Roe, a Republican political strategist who advises the Club for Growth. “That’s a lot of Claire ago. Her curb appeal for Republicans has been squashed.”

McCaskill has survived tough fights before.

Six years ago, she was labeled the Senate’s most endangered incumbent. But that was before her opponent, Todd Akin, the former congressman, suggested that women rarely get pregnant from a “legitimate rape.” His campaign imploded and McCaskill won easily.

There is no indication she will get such a gift from Hawley, but Democratic operatives, citing her long record in the state, even wonder if negative advertising can work against McCaskill.

“Almost everything the Republicans are running right now is negative, and I don’t think it’s moving any independent voters,” said Abe Rakov, the campaign manager in 2016 for the Democratic Senate nominee Jason Kander. “Missourians know Claire, so it’s going to be hard to convince them of something that isn’t true.”

At a barbecue restaurant in Sikeston, McCaskill stopped to talk with Richard Toon, a retired low-voltage contractor who recently moved back to his home state from Georgia. Toon described himself as “pro-life, pro-gun and pro-Trump” but said he is keeping an open mind. “She used to be state auditor and she takes care of money very well,” he said.

On campaign stops, McCaskill focuses mainly on consumer and pocketbook issues. Among the farmers, it was Trump’s trade war — which Hawley supports — and its effect on agriculture prices.

In Sikeston, she accused Hawley of hypocrisy on the health care law. He is working with other attorneys general in a lawsuit to dismantle the law.

At the same time, Hawley recently said he supports coverage for pre-existing conditions, a concern for many voters and one that McCaskill can relate to — she was treated for breast cancer in 2016. Even in this stance, however, McCaskill found a target to exploit; turning the tables on Hawley, she portrayed him as a Beltway operative.

“I’ll tell you what, he’ll fit right in in Washington because that’s called the Potomac Two-Step,” she told the crowd, to laughter and applause.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Stephanie Saul © 2018 The New York Times