Can Mitch McConnell stand against Donald Trump and still control the Kentucky GOP?
On his first day back in the U.S. Senate after a mob of pro-Trump supporters disrupted a vote to certify the election of President-elect Joe Biden, Sen. Mitch McConnell made it clear where he placed the blame.
“This mob was fed lies,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “They were provoked by the President and other powerful people. And they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.”
The statement — arguably the strongest denouncement McConnell has made of former President Donald Trump to-date — comes as the top ranking Republican in Washington faces a backlash at home. This weekend, more than 30 local party leaders are forcing a special meeting of the Republican Party of Kentucky’s State Central Committee in hopes of passing a resolution urging McConnell to support the former president during his second impeachment trial in the Senate.
The meeting is set for Saturday and it’s unclear whether the group has the votes to pass the resolution — there are around 300 members of the State Central Committee, including McConnell, every other Republican legislator (both in Congress and the statehouse) and statewide elected officials.
Some local leaders, such as Marie Childers, the chairwoman of the Pike County Republican Party, are still standing beside McConnell, illustrating the divide in the Republican Party. Trump won Pike County with nearly 80 percent of the vote.
“You look at the money that Mitch McConnell has funneled into the state of Kentucky,” Childers said. “I’m behind Mitch McConnell and Hal Rogers.”
To be behind both McConnell and Rogers is to stand over a crack in the Republican Party.
Both men have been in office for more three decades, serving as major figures in Kentucky’s Republican Party as the state went from royal blue to crimson. Yet after McConnell stood on the Senate floor and urged his colleagues to certify the election, which Democrat Joe Biden won, calling it one of the most important votes of his career, Rogers was the only member of the Kentucky delegation who voted to challenge the results in both Arizona and Pennsylvania.
In a statement he put out after the vote, Rogers said he based his vote on “hundreds of phone calls and emails” from his constituents. He also has put out statements against invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office and voted against Trump’s second impeachment in the House of Representatives.
McConnell, who was just elected to a six-year term at 78, has a different political calculation to make than Rogers, who is 83 and will be up for reelection two years from now. But the disparate approaches to handling Trump’s final days in office — and whether there should be a political consequence for riling up a base intent on disturbing or delaying the certification of his successor — mark a growing divide as the Republican Party figures out how to move forward after four years of Trump standing in the spotlight.
“We didn’t end up here in a day and it’s going to take more than a day to get this figured out,” said Scott Lasley, a political science professor at Western Kentucky University and former Warren County Republican Party chairman. “It exposes fault lines that have been there for an extended period of time.”
A divided base
Dan Coates, the chairman of the Simpson County Republican Party, is one of the 30 people hoping to pass a resolution urging McConnell to support Trump. He said “there are a lot of people that are really upset” that McConnell did not shut down the second impeachment the way he did the first, which he vocally opposed.
“In our part of the country, we strongly support President Trump,” Coates said. “We expect our senators to support him too.”
Tensions are high. The Nelson County Republican Party voted to censure McConnell over his statements on the Senate floor Tuesday, passing a resolution that called on McConnell to retract his comments. Don Thrasher, the Nelson County Republican Party Chairman, said he felt that McConnell impugned the integrity of Trump on the Senate floor.
Coates has never been a huge fan of McConnell. He’s voted for him, but says he “kind of held my nose and did it.” He said he didn’t like what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, but he suspects Black Lives Matter or Antifa may have been involved (there is no evidence that Black Lives Matter protesters or Antifa activists were involved. The FBI has made more than 100 arrests and has an additional 250 suspects).
“I do not blame [Trump] for the people actually rioting and getting into the Capitol building,” Coates said. “Because I don’t think that’s what he’s saying.”
There is no clear path of what will happen to the Republican Party now that Trump has left office. It’s unlikely that the man who has filled arenas across the country over the past five years, including three in Kentucky (2017 in Louisville, 2018 in Richmond and 2019 in Lexington), will just disappear. Trump has flirted with the idea of running in 2024 and national polls of potential top Republican contenders in 2024 include Trump’s children.
In many parts of the country, when Trump made his campaign symbol a trucker hat, he became a symbol himself. He brought people who had often felt left out of politics into the political fold. When he picked fights in Washington, it was with people they didn’t like.
Whether McConnell and the Republican Party can hold on to those voters now that Trump is out of office remains to be seen.
“That’s going to be the question,” said Tres Watson, a Republican strategist. “Can you walk the line and still make these people feel comfortable, while saying ‘you can’t do what he did.’”
When pressed about how he felt about Trump, Coates said he didn’t really like Trump’s personality, but he liked how he led the country. He said in the future he’d support someone who carried Trump’s policies but didn’t have the same “baggage.”
“I think that’s the general consensus of most people I know,” Coates said. “They’re not in love with President Trump. They’re in love with what he’s done.”
Coates was willing to back a petition asking the Republican Party of Kentucky to pass a resolution effectively chastising McConnell, but others are keeping their powder dry.
William Turpen, chairman of the Pulaski County Republican Party, denounced the violence at the U.S. Capitol and said he felt like it was overshadowing Trump’s accomplishments, specifically citing economic gains before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump Administration’s work in the Middle East and on immigration. He urged people to wait and see what McConnell does.
“I think Sen. McConnell has always been cautious and I think he will represent Kentucky well,” Turpen said. “I’m not sure how he’s going to vote on that yet, but I’ll leave that to him.”
Ben Lawson, chairman of the Warren County Republican Party, didn’t say where he stood on the vote to urge McConnell to support Trump, but made a statement echoing some of McConnell’s sentiments.
“Unfortunately on the national level we have allowed those binding values to be obscured; and on January 6th we saw the results of what lies and misinformation can lead to,” Lawson said.
Lies and misinformation, though, have already established deep roots in some parts of the state GOP. When asked if he felt the election was stolen, Coates said he didn’t know what to believe.
“I can’t help but believe that the complaints are legitimate because you saw so much on TV,” Coates said. “I can’t help but believe that there was a lot of fraud going on. I don’t put anything past anybody.”
A John Sherman Cooper Republican
It is rare that McConnell loses sway with the Republican base in Kentucky, but it has happened before.
In 2014, McConnell easily beat back a primary challenge from then-political newcomer Matt Bevin, but four years before, his preferred candidate for U.S. Senate, former Secretary of State Trey Grayson, was defeated in a primary by Rand Paul during the height of the Tea Party movement.
In both cases it was primary voters, not party leaders, who bucked McConnell.
Staunch supporters of McConnell don’t think discontent from the Kentucky Republican base will have much influence on his eventual vote in the impeachment trial. (McConnell has said he “looks forward to hearing the evidence” in the trial).
“There are going to be people who don’t like it,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican commentator who is close to McConnell. “But for 36 years, he’s done things people don’t like. Sometimes it’s the Democrats. Sometimes it’s Republicans. Sometimes it’s the press.”
There are three guiding principles that are often brought up when members of the McConnell political machine are asked about their political leader.
The first is that elections have consequences.
McConnell won his seventh term in November. He’s the longest serving senator in Kentucky history and the longest serving leader in Republican Party history. When his term is up, he’ll be 84-years-old and there’s already speculation about who will be his successor in 2026.
Historically, the people who are mad at McConnell are not his base. During a 2017 Trump rally in Louisville, McConnell was booed when he was introduced by the president.
“As an observer, it sounds to me like he’s laying down a marker that says we need to tell the Republican Party the truth,” Jennings said. “He is telling people the truth about the election, which is quite simply: President Trump lost.”
Another guiding principle is that he believes strongly in the institutions of government.
Billy Piper, a former chief of staff for McConnell, said the institutions of the American government did their job. People elected a president. The judiciary ruled on legal challenges to the election results. The legislative branch certified the election.
“I think his actions make clear that, in his mind, the Trump era is over,” Piper said.
Jennings said the institution McConnell cares most about was “directly assaulted” and he feels the country is in danger of future election cycles in which people feel the election was stolen if their candidate lost.
“The failure to accept the result of the election is more than a water cooler debate,” Jennings said. “People are dead.”
The third principle is that McConnell tries to conduct himself in the mold of former U.S. Sen. John Sherman Cooper.
McConnell was an intern for Cooper, working in the mail room when Cooper helped pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In his memoir, McConnell recalls sorting through thousands of letters from Kentuckians who opposed the bill and asking Cooper how he supported a bill so many Kentuckians opposed.
“I not only represent Kentucky,” McConnell recalls Cooper saying. “I represent the nation, and there are times you follow and times you lead.”
This appears to be one of those moments for McConnell.
“It’s a vote of conscience,” Piper said. “There’s no amount of pressure from the right or the left that’s going to have undue influence on how he votes moving forward.”
While he might be preparing to take a vote of conscience, McConnell’s hands are not exactly clean. He waited months — until the Electoral College cast their votes — before recognizing Biden as the president-elect.
In an interview with the Herald-Leader in October, McConnell was asked whether he felt like he had made a “corrupt bargain” by using Trump to achieve his policy goals, such as filling the courts with conservative judges. McConnell balked at the question.
“I don’t know what the corrupt bargain would be,” he said. “The president won the election and it presented an opportunity for those of us who prefer an America right of center to achieve some important things that have been on our list for a long time.”
This story was originally published January 20, 2021 at 11:22 AM.
