As we suggested to our reporter friends last week, this is where the real rift will be this fall. Just wait and see what happens when resources are shifted to rural Missouri instead of urban St. Louis and Kansass City.

By Matthew Murray

“Raise your hand if you’re from rural Missouri,” McCaskill told the early morning crowd. “Now raise your hand if you’re from rural Missouri and you’ve ever seen this much [political] activity before.”

Once bent on running up high margins in and around St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri Democrats say their urban-only strategy finally is a thing of the past, an outdated electoral approach that bottomed out four years ago, when presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) abandoned the state three weeks before the election.

That year, Missouri Democrats won only two of seven statewide elections. Kerry’s decision to decamp for Ohio and Pennsylvania less than one month before Election Day 2004 infuriated McCaskill, who described her discussion with Kerry soon after as “short and not pretty.”

“It’s the only time I’m ever aware of that a presidential candidate left Missouri before it was over,” McCaskill recalled in a recent interview with Roll Call. “Missouri has always been a state where campaigns have gone to the bitter end.” Read more…

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