McGrath, McConnell and the coronavirus. How COVID-19 is shaping the U.S. Senate race.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is particular about his public appearances these days.
At the Corbin Center Tuesday, there were blue circles on the floor, imploring people to stay six feet apart. Two large, garage-sized doors were open allowing air circulation through the room. Everyone in the room wore a mask and before the Senate Majority Leader entered the room, people were told to pick a blue circle and stand on it.
He shook no hands. He slapped no backs. No one took off their masks for pictures with the Senator and there was no touching involved.
McConnell has spent the past four years painting himself as one of Trump’s biggest assets in Washington, D.C., the guy who shepherded through Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and defended the President during his impeachment. But as the November election nears, and the White House’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has become a key issue in the race, McConnell has quietly distanced himself from the President’s rhetoric.
By merely following the CDC guidelines when it comes to his “official” events (different, legally, than campaign events), McConnell appears to be taking the pandemic more seriously than many in his own party, including elected Republicans in Kentucky.
At a rally at Whitaker Bank Ballpark last week, Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, was among the prominent Republicans who were mask-less in the VIP room before he took the microphone and denounced the “draconian” lockdown put in place earlier this year. President Donald Trump has been repeatedly criticized for comments that have downplayed the severity of the pandemic.
McConnell did not attend the rally, sending a surrogate instead. He has not held any type of rally over the course of the campaign. In his stump speech, he talks about how he’s put trust in the experts at the CDC, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and how officials shut down the economy this spring on the advice of the experts.
“We were given the most incredible advice, but good advice, by the nation’s top infectious disease experts that we basically needed to shut the economy down and send everybody home,” McConnell said at an event in Georgetown. “So we had both a 100 year health care pandemic and an economic crisis all at once.”
McConnell’s embrace of the scientific consensus doesn’t appear to have hurt him politically, it may even have insulated him.
Democratic nominee Amy McGrath has criticized McConnell over his handling of the pandemic — specifically Congress’ inability to pass an additional COVID-19 relief package — but it’s unclear if that message has hurt McConnell.
With people already voting and less than a month before Election Day, McGrath is running out of time for her message to sink in.
COVID talking points
McGrath wants to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic.
She wants to talk about how it has exposed inequities in health care and the need for “an Uncle Sam plan” — a government option people can buy into. How it has highlighted the need for better broadband internet, as kids across the state have been forced to attend school online.
She wants to talk about how McConnell should be doing more to provide relief for the state, echoing a call from Gov. Andy Beshear to provide relief for state and local governments, and criticizing his role in negotiating the next wave of COVID-19 relief in the Capitol.
“I think people are tired of a man that has built a dysfunctional system where even in a national crisis, we can’t come together to do what’s right for Kentucky and this country,” McGrath said in Lexington. “By January 1st, we will have more Americans dead of COVID-19 than in combat deaths in WWII. And we have a senator who’s leading a Senate right now, who still doesn’t have a plan to tackle this coronavirus.”
That’s the message she’s flown across the state shouting — to groups of socially distanced people in parks, to people spread out in coffee shops, to people huddled at picnic tables under outdoor pavilions to avoid a driving rain.
And yet — as more than 80,000 Kentuckians have been infected with COVID-19, leading to more than 1,200 deaths — her message hasn’t seemed to resonate. In a polarized political environment, voters have hunkered down in their respective silos. McGrath is still an underdog in a race where public polling in September had her down double digits (there has been no public polling in October).
There are signs that support for President Donald Trump has been slipping across the country, in part due to his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially after he tested positive for the virus. But in Kentucky, where Trump won by 30 percentage points in 2020, the president’s support has room to fall.
McGrath — who has taken to elbow bumping supporters and often wraps her arms around them in photos — has still criticized McConnell for not taking the virus seriously, but it has been about the inability of the Senate to pass a relief bill, not his personal precautions.
“I think it’s an absolute dereliction of duty to not be negotiating and working on this,” McGrath said in the debate on WKYT Monday. “This is the first time in a century, in 100 years, where we have a major international crisis where no one in the world is looking to the United States for leadership.”
McConnell has pointed the finger at Democrats in the House of Representatives, criticizing their relief package for having add-ons like repealing a $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions. The day after the debate, though, he said he would bring the Senate Republican version of the bill, which has $500 billion in relief, to a vote next week.
McConnell listed several areas the bill targets — more money for unemployment insurance, schools, replenishment of protective equipment and hospitals — as coronavirus cases surge both in Kentucky and across the country.
The economy
Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky, said there is one main factor that drives voters: the economy.
Although a record number of people filed for unemployment in Kentucky when public health experts advised shutting down the economy in March, it’s not certain what effect that has had on voters.
“The economic effects of the pandemic have yet to really hit home,” Voss said. “If the economy had gone into the tank, I think McConnell would be in trouble. That just hasn’t happened.”
A September Quinnipiac poll found that 36 percent of the respondents said the economy was the most important issue in the election this year and 77 percent of those respondents favored McConnell over McGrath.
The economy slightly recovered, in part, because of the federal CARES Act passed this Spring. McConnell has spent several months touting his role in passing the bill and the money it injected into Kentucky’s economy, including a $1,200 check to each adult, the paycheck protection program for businesses, and an extra $600 in unemployment insurance.
Since then, the extra unemployment insurance money has run out, the $1,200 checks covered less than two months of the average mortgage payment in Kentucky, and the restaurants and other small businesses that benefited from the PPP loans face uncertainty as colder weather hits.
Also, there are signs that Kentucky’s economy is slowing. While Kentucky’s 5.6 percent unemployment rate in September was lower than the national average of 7.9 percent, only 500 jobs were added to the economy last month and the economy is down 117,200 jobs from September of last year, according to the Kentucky Center for Statistics.
Voss said there is no research on how a pandemic affects voters, but thinks it seems similar to a foreign policy crisis.
“The longer these things drag on, voters blame the president’s party,” Voss said.
Even though McConnell has said he will bring the Senate Republicans’ relief package to the floor for a vote, he’s admitted it’s unlikely to go anywhere. Not only do House Democrats want more than the Senate Republicans are offering, the White House seems to indicate it would like to see more stimulus money as well.
That said, the mere act of getting a vote in the Senate may assuage concerns of some Republicans with three weeks left to go in the election.
“I am trusting the politicians to act as Americans and see what’s in the best interest of the American people,” Karen Breier, 67, of Lexington said of the stalled COVID-19 talks at the GOP rally at Whitaker Bank Ballpark.
This story was originally published October 16, 2020 at 11:11 AM.
