With one week to go before the elections, U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander rode his campaign bus into Jefferson City Tuesday morning and encouraged about 50 supporters gathered at Oscar's Restaurant to continue talking with their friends and neighbors about getting "a new generation of leadership" in Congress.
Kander, a Democrat and Missouri's current secretary of state, told the crowd one of the issues in this year's election is "a Congress that is so gridlocked that now our national conversation seems to mirror that gridlock. After decades of this, where it seems like we can't talk to each other as a country, we're looking for more people who we feel can break through that."
Kander's campaign to unseat first-term Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican who served eight years as Missouri's secretary of state and 14 years in the U.S. House, has focused on the issue of change.
Freshman U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-North Dakota, joined Kander on Tuesday's bus ride, telling the Jefferson City supporters: "I think there's been no better campaign in the entire country than the one Jason's run, with one simple idea - 'You can't change Washington unless you change the people you send to Washington.'"
Heitkamp - who turned 61 on Sunday - served as North Dakota's attorney general from 1992-2000, then ran to be that state's governor in 2000.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer on Sept. 15, in the middle of that campaign, she recalled Tuesday morning.
"So, I went into treatment and surgery, then went back on the campaign trail," she said. "I didn't quite make being governor.
"After it was all over, my oncologist looked at the statistics and said, 'You have a 28 percent chance of living 10 years' - and that was 16 years ago."
When she ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012, she recalled, she was given an 8 percent chance of winning the race - the day before the election.
"I didn't think how truly miraculous, incredible that was," she said, "until the day I presided over the U.S. Senate for the first time. I got so emotional, standing where all these great people have stood before me.
"And I thought, 'Never forget this - because you live in the greatest country!'"
Heitkamp said the heroes of her story were "the people of North Dakota who said they wanted change," and Kander can benefit from the same kind of movement that helps people across the country.
Kander acknowledged Blunt has passed some bills by working with Democrat co-sponsors, but he repeated the charge that most of Blunt's work in Congress is focused "on figuring out what he can do for the special interests" and doing what GOP leaders want him to do.
Kander told his supporters another issue is "whether or not we're going to value the middle class."
He said Congress needs to focus more on economic issues like the costs of college and college loans, and "that it's wrong when women are paid less than men for doing the exact-same job."
Kander predicted voters will see "no shortage of special interest money coming in, to flood the airwaves to try to help Sen. Blunt - because they've made an investment in Sen. Blunt."
But, he told reporters, he's "very, very confident" about his chances in next Tuesday's elections.
Most polls show the race for Missouri's U.S. Senate seat to be very close, and a Kander win could change the power balance in the now-GOP-controlled Senate.