Senator Hawley opposed the Affordable Care Act — the very law that enabled Missouri’s Medicaid expansion, which he now claims to defend. He backed Trump-era budgets that proposed deep cuts to Medicaid. Now, with polls showing broad public support for programs like Medicaid, he’s repositioning himself as a populist champion of the working class.

A little over four years later, Hawley is very much still a conservative, fighting to ban abortion access and take away basic rights for transgender people. But he has also emerged as perhaps the Democrats’ most unlikely ally in fighting Republican efforts to slash the social safety net and reward the billionaire class that put President Donald Trump,