Kentucky lawmaker Charles Booker launches bid to unseat Mitch McConnell in 2020
After more than a month of buildup, State Rep. Charles Booker, D-Louisville, announced Sunday that he will officially enter the race to challenge U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2020.
“Today I am announcing my candidacy for United States senate,” Booker said to cheers. “It’s go time. This is our time. This ain’t about me, this is about us.”
More than a hundred young, diverse supporters crowded into Manhattan on Broadway in Louisville as Booker painted his candidacy as part of a broader political movement that couldn’t wait for a more politically opportune time to run for office.
“We cannot be politically calculating right now,” Booker said. “This is not a time to be poll-testing. This is not a time to dance around and play politics because we’re dying while politics gets played. This is our time to be bold. We can’t be afraid. We must do this.”
Booker will forgo running for a second term in the Kentucky House of Representatives, where he quickly became an outspoken opponent of conservative legislation, in favor of a long-shot bid to unseat McConnell. First, Booker would have to defeat former Marine Corps pilot Amy McGrath in the May Democratic primary.
McGrath, who entered the race in July, has already raised more than $16.9 million for her Senate bid and spent $2 million on television advertisements in 2019. Booker did not say how much he raised with an exploratory committee he formed in November, just that his campaign is “excited about the report they’re filing.”
Money often makes or breaks political ambition and Booker, who is relatively new to Kentucky’s political scene, will need a lot of it to build his name recognition throughout the state over the course of five months. His job as a state lawmaker will require him to be in Frankfort much of that time.
“The reality is that you have to have infrastructure,” Booker said. “But one thing is for sure, you’re not going to beat Mitch McConnell by outspending him.”
The concept of outspending McConnell, which hasn’t been done since McConnell first beat Walter “Dee” Huddleston in 1984, has been a key goal for the McGrath campaign, which sees outspending McConnell as key to drowning out the five-term senator’s message.
McGrath, with her eyes on a general election that will be decided by an electorate that gave President Donald Trump a nearly 30 percentage point victory in 2016, has attempted to take a centrist path on the divisive issues raging on Capitol Hill. To date, she has not said whether she thinks Trump should be impeached.
Booker hopes to court progressives who are upset with McGrath. He took several shrouded swipes at McGrath in an interview with the Herald-Leader, saying Kentuckians don’t need someone who’s running to the “soft-center that doesn’t really take a stand.”
“I think people across the board want someone to fight for them that is honest, is authentic, is not just giving answers based on poll tests,” Booker said.
His approach has been to run an unapologetically progressive campaign, touting support of several controversial liberal policies like the Green New Deal, Medicare For All and impeaching Trump. In his announcement speech Sunday, he touched on tensions with Iran, saying McConnell won’t hold Trump accountable for his decision to assassinate a top Iranian commander earlier this week. That approach could crowd out Marine Mike Broihier, who also has been attempting to court progressives.
“We know Mitch McConnell is terrible,” Booker said. “He knows he’s terrible. He knows we know he’s terrible. This is about us.”
He said past efforts to run against McConnell as a centrist were doomed from the beginning.
“We’ve been running against him (McConnell) the same way,” Booker said. “We’ve never taken the battle to him, we’ve never bridged those divides between urban and rural communities.”
Booker is the first black man to launch a serious bid for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, a state where between 1877 and 1950 at least 168 people of color were lynched. Booker said that history is not lost on him, and has talked about his family’s history on the floor of the House of Representatives and on the campaign trail.
He also touts his experience as a black man growing up on the west end of Louisville, “in the poorest zip code in the state,” as a way to connect to Kentuckians struggling in other areas of the state, such as Appalachia.
“I know how important it is for Kentuckians from every part of life to feel like they matter and I’m happy to take a part in that,” Booker said. “The reality is, no matter what your color is, Mitch McConnell has been scamming you in Kentucky.”
This story was originally published January 5, 2020 at 2:31 PM.
