McConnell is one of America’s most disliked politicians. Here’s why he keeps winning.
Sen. Mitch McConnell has been called the grim reaper. He’s been called “cocaine Mitch” and Darth Vader. He’s been called a swamp turtle, an apex predator, a hypocrite, heartless, mendacious and words too colorful to print in this newspaper.
As one of the most powerful Republicans in the country and the architect of the conservative strategy to reshape the federal judiciary, McConnell is one of the most despised politicians in the country.
He just won his seventh term in Kentucky by 20.4 percentage points.
Since squeaking out a victory against then Democratic Sen. Dee Huddleston to win his first term in 1984, McConnell has steadily accumulated political power, becoming the longest serving senator in Kentucky history and the longest serving Republican leader in Senate history. In the process he’s reshaped politics in Kentucky, bending it in his favor and remaining undefeated in his Senate campaigns.
“While I don’t agree with a lot of McConnell’s policies, he is the most effective political operative in Kentucky,” said former Democratic Gov. Paul Patton.
His political power has earned the contempt of Democrats both inside and outside of Kentucky.
“He has richly earned the scorn of national liberals because he has been the most significant impediment to a progressive, leftist view of the world for years,” said Josh Holmes, a former McConnell chief of staff and campaign manager. “For years. They obviously hate him for it.”
While support for McConnell trailed support for Trump by around 7 percentage points on Tuesday, the seven-term senator’s margin grew from the 14 percentage point victory he won over former Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in 2014 and the 14.7 percentage point victory Sen. Rand Paul won over Lexington Mayor Jim Gray in 2016.
Kentucky, once a Democratic stronghold, is now a firmly Republican state. In a press conference Friday, Republican party leaders attributed the shift to McConnell.
So do Democrats.
“He has made Kentucky a Republican state,” Patton said. “He has singlehandedly made Kentucky a Republican state.”
Knowing the state
McConnell began running for U.S. Senate in 1984 long before he announced his candidacy. As Judge Executive in Jefferson County, McConnell toured the state’s Lincoln dinner circuit, making speeches and accumulating the support of Republican party chairs across the state.
It was a much different time, one where Democrats controlled supermajorities in both chambers of the state Capitol and Gov. Martha Layne Collins had just beat future Sen. Jim Bunning by double digits.
Over 36 years that dynamic has shifted. Republicans are firmly in control of Kentucky, with super-majorities in both the House and the Senate.
Now, if McConnell were to go to a Lincoln Day Dinner, many of the speakers would be products of a pipeline he built. Two constitutional officers were McConnell scholars at the University of Louisville (Secretary of State Michael Adams and Attorney General Daniel Cameron). One was an intern for McConnell (Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles).
“He has helped the vast majority of local official Republicans get their start, he’s got relationships with the vast majority of Democrat officials,” Holmes said. “Like good relationships. The county judges and the like. And that is something that is truly different, is truly different.”
Holmes said having so much influence in the Republican Party has allowed McConnell to be connected with his base in a way that many politicians aren’t, which helped him weather the early years of the Tea Party movement.
In 2012, McConnell watched former Secretary of State Trey Grayson, his handpicked replacement for former Sen. Jim Bunning, go down to party outsider Rand Paul.
While McConnell beat former Gov. Matt Bevin handily in a primary in 2014, it was part of a larger, anti-establishment movement in the Republican Party that made McConnell particularly vulnerable. When he talks about being undefeated in Senate races, McConnell counts his victory over Bevin.
“He’s really able to go in the direction he needs to go politically without alienating other supporters and that’s a skill,” said Joel Turner, a political science professor at Western Kentucky University. “You have to be able to read rooms, you have to be able to read people.”
Since 2016, that direction was toward Trump. While McConnell denounced Trump after the Access Hollywood tape, where audio caught Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, he remained silent about the Republican nominee through the rest of the 2016 campaign and into Trump’s presidency. He often says he won’t provide “a running commentary on the president.”
McConnell denied that he’s chosen not to speak out on some of Trump’s actions because of the president’s popularity in Kentucky.
“He is different, there’s no question about it,” McConnell said. “I choose to focus on the things that we agree on and the progress that we’ve made right of center of the country.”
To McConnell, that has meant using the Trump presidency to achieve some of his longstanding conservative goals. Not only was he able to pass a tax reform bill (though McConnell said that was more important to former House Speaker Paul Ryan), but McConnell was able to fundamentally reshape the judicial system, through putting young, conservative justices on the courts at every level.
Plus, he has used his power to bring in money for the state. McConnell noted on the campaign trail that this year Kentucky was approved for more money in BUILD transportation grants than any other state (McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, is the secretary of the Transportation Cabinet).
“I believe I can make the case that I’ve been extremely effective for Kentucky and for the nation as a result of being in my leadership positions, not hiding under my desk,” McConnell said. “And dealing with the criticism that comes with that.”
Defining his opponents
There is a relatively basic playbook for all of McConnell’s senate elections: raise as much money as possible, then use that money to define your opponent.
“Every race is a binary choice, you of course notice she’s busy trying to define me as well,” McConnell said earlier this year. “That’s the way campaigns are. Each side points out the deficiencies of their opponent.”
McConnell’s team is particularly adept at it.
Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot, swept onto the national political scene during her race in central Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District in part because she was perceived as authentic. McConnell’s team quickly deconstructed that authenticity as she introduced herself to the rest of the state, rapidly painting her as a radical liberal and a wishy-washy one at that.
“McGrath... has a tape a mile long about how she views the world,” Holmes said. “And much of that, if not all of it, is pretty fundamentally out of step with the center of political thought in Kentucky, so simply highlighting that is pretty self explanatory.”
Kentucky’s turn to the Republican Party has matched a national trend, as a focus on the culture wars in the early 2000s (often shorthanded as “God, guns and gays”) helped bring rural voters into the Republican Party. Trump accelerated the trend, speaking directly to rural voters who felt left behind by politicians in Washington.
Eastern Kentucky, which long supplied the leaders of the state Democratic Party, now only has a handful of Democratic lawmakers in Frankfort.
“Ideologically the state hasn’t changed. The state is the same,” Holmes said. “The problem the Democrats have is that the ideology of the Democratic Party has drifted a lot further left than the ideology of your average Democrat in Kentucky.”
Democrats have attempted to run moderates at McConnell, people who can win in the state’s largest cities and keep the margins down in other parts of the state. They often pointed at McConnell’s approval rating as a sign that he was weakly positioned for reelection.
“I think the so-called approval rating statistic is vastly overrated as a measure of whether or not you are an effective representative of your people,” McConnell said.
McGrath’s campaign portrayed McConnell as an ineffective leader, someone who is more focused on accumulating political power than helping the people of Kentucky. McConnell helped popularize the criticisms of environmental regulations as a “war on coal” yet when Trump loosened those restrictions, the coal industry didn’t come back. McGrath often referenced the state’s lack of infrastructure and poor health statics like cancer and diabetes rates.
McConnell dismissed those issues, saying “you can always argue that whatever problems haven’t been solved, are your fault,” and pointing to his role in the tobacco buyout as something that helped reduce cancer rates.
“What people miss out on is that when he runs, he doesn’t pitch himself as being Mr. Popularity,” Turner said. “Instead, he pitches himself on his effectiveness, as Mr. Effective.”
The courts, in particular, made McConnell unpopular with Democrats across the country, particularly his maneuver to prevent former President Barack Obama from replacing former Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. But in Kentucky, it energized McConnell’s support.
“I think people, when they think about McConnell, they’re looking at the wrong things, especially the out of state folks,” Turner said.
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 3:17 PM.
