MO-Sen: McCaskill likely to vote against Trump's next SCOTUS nominee. Will it help or hurt?

Missouri's senior U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D) was asked by Politico this week about how she might vote on President Trump's upcoming (and yet unannounced) Supreme Court nominee.

She responded: "Am I optimistic that he's going to nominate somebody that I would feel comfortable with? No, I'm not."

Her likely opponent in the general election, Attorney General Josh Hawley said of the upcoming SCOTUS vote, "It is the defining issue of this campaign."

So, what's the situation?

McCaskill and Hawley have been neck-and-neck in the polls. Hawley has the advantage that Missouri as a whole has been leaning to the right for quite a while, and voters favored President Trump in the 2016 election by nearly 20 points. Trump has endorsed Hawley.

While most all of rural Missouri tends to vote Republican, McCaskill has the advantage of the state's major cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, which are overwhelmingly blue.

The question is, politically, would McCaskill be better off to vote for the president's nominee in hopes of still keeping some independents and conservatives in her corner, or to vote against the nominee and hope it will keep some Dems from staying home on election day?

McCaskill says it doesn't matter — telling Politico that she will "do everything I can to not make this a political calculation."

Although McCaskill is seen as one of the most vulnerable incumbent Democrats in the Senate — she's touted her willingness to work with President Trump. But Hawley notes that she's voted down party lines 83 percent of the time during her tenure in the Senate.

Even though McCaskill's facing a tough race this fall, she voted against President Trump's first SCOTUS nominee, Neal Gorsuch, who she determined to be an activist judge. Her colleagues facing similar election circumstances, Joe Manchin (D-West Va.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) both voted for Gorsuch.

Prior to the Gorsuch confirmation, leaked audio hit the press of McCaskill discussing her thought process and the political aspects regarding the upcoming vote regarding the nominee at the time. Not only did she eventually vote against Gorsuch, the tone she took in that conversation indicated that she's willing to draw an even harder line against whichever nominee replaces Kennedy.

She told fellow Democrats at a fundraiser, "God forbid, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies. Or (Anthony) Kennedy retires. Or (Stephen) Breyer has a stroke or is no longer able to serve. Then we're not talking about Scalia for Scalia, which is what Gorsuch is, we're talking about Scalia for somebody on the court who shares our values.

"And then all of a sudden the things I fought for, with scars on my back to show (for) it in this state, are in jeopardy."

As if that didn't give enough insight to which way the senator might lean, Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (R-Mo.) weighed in further when speaking of how McCaskill should vote for Trump's next SCOTUS pick: "Nobody is going to say, 'I was going to vote for a Republican, but now that she voted for Trump's nominee, I'm going to vote for her now.

"I don't think she would risk alienating her voters in a matter that would not bring in new voters on the other side. She cannot in any way [afford to] dampen turnout."