Claire McCaskill

Claire McCaskill (born July 24, 1953, Rolla, Missouri, U.S.) is an American Democratic politician who represented Missouri in the U.S. Senate from 2007 to 2019. She was the first woman to be elected senator for that state.

McCaskill’s family lived in several cities before settling in Columbia, Missouri. She attended the University of Missouri, earning a bachelor’s degree (1975) in political science and a doctorate (1978) in jurisprudence. Familiar with local and state-level politics—her mother served on the city council of Columbia, and her father was a state insurance commissioner—McCaskill worked for a few years as a prosecutor before winning a seat in the state House of Representatives. She served from 1982 to 1988, and during that time she married (divorced 1995) David Exposito; the couple later had three children. In 1992 she became the first woman elected county prosecutor for Jackson county, which included a large part of metropolitan Kansas City. She served in that post until 1999, when she became Missouri state auditor. In 2005 McCaskill married Joseph Shepard, a prominent St. Louis business executive who had four children from a previous marriage.

In 2006 McCaskill ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate. After taking office the following year, she became known for her efforts to curb waste and fraud among military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. She introduced legislation to extend whistle-blower protections for defense contractor employees and for employees of contractors working with the intelligence community. McCaskill was considered a moderate Democrat, and she often broke with more-liberal members of her party. In 2007 she notably voted against a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. McCaskill was expected to face a tough reeelection in 2012, but she easily defeated her Republican opponent, who, just over two months before the election, controversially claimed that in cases of “legitimate rape,” a woman’s body would prevent a pregnancy. Her bid for a third term in 2018, however, was more challenging, as Missouri had become increasingly conservative. Although she stressed her position as a moderate—at one point she claimed that she was “not one of those crazy Democrats”—McCaskill was ultimately defeated by Republican firebrand Josh Hawley in what she later said was her last race for public office. She left the Senate in January 2019.

McCaskill’s memoir, Plenty Ladylike (written with Terry Ganey), was published in 2015.