Despite her campaign cash, McGrath’s loss to McConnell was easy to predict

Mitch McConnell is deeply unpopular. According to a recent poll by Morning Consult, McConnell’s approval rate among Kentuckians is only 37 percent, while 50 percent of Kentuckians disapprove of him. His net approval of -13 percent among his own constituents is the lowest in the US Senate. So how did the Democratic Party manage to lose to him in a landslide yet again?

There’s no denying that McConnell’s power makes him hard to beat. Some voters are swayed to pick him based on the potential he has, as Senate Majority Leader, to help Kentucky – despite the fact that he’s done almost nothing to improve the lives of the vast majority of Kentuckians in over 35 years of “public service,” choosing instead to serve the interests of big business. McConnell continues to lean into culture war issues to distract voters from the fact that he is only in office to help big business and the wealthy, whose donations he uses to fund his airwave attack ads. He is exactly the cancer within our political system that he claimed to oppose when he first ran for the Senate 36 years ago on promises of campaign finance reform and term limits.

Because of McConnell’s power and his network of wealthy donors, any Democrat was going to have a hard time defeating him. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to recruit and support McGrath was so bafflingly stupid that I have to question whether he wanted to win in the first place.

The first sign the McGrath wouldn’t be able to win a statewide election was the fact that, in 2018, she couldn’t beat Andy Barr in the 6th Congressional District. The 6th District, which is home to Lexington, is the second most-liberal district in the state of Kentucky. A Democrat who can’t win the 6th district can’t win a statewide election. That should be obvious.

But McGrath did herself no favors. The most obvious question she would be asked during the 2020 campaign, given the Senate’s role in the judicial nomination process, was how she would have voted on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In 2018, she had issued a statement opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation. In July 2019—just a day after officially announcing her campaign—she said that she would have voted to confirm Kavanaugh. I assume she changed her tune to help brand herself as a “Pro-Trump” Democrat and woo conservative voters. Not only did she fail to gather support from conservatives, but she alienated liberals who were incensed by her support for Kavanaugh. In a weak attempt at damage control, she flip-flopped again later that same day and said that, upon further reflection, she would have voted “no.” Because of that major gaffe, her candidacy was doomed from the outset. How did Schumer decide that backing somebody so incompetent was the right move? She was clearly not selected for her political knowledge or savvy. So what was it?

I think Schumer’s decision to hand-pick McGrath was based on outdated conventional wisdom that general elections are won by the most moderate candidate. That may have been true in the past when politics was less polarized. But in the modern era of deep polarization, winning depends on mobilizing the base and expanding the electorate. As long as Democratic elites prop up milquetoast empty vessels like McGrath, they will lose in Kentucky. For a Democrat to win, they would need to be economically populist. A candidate like that—like Charles Booker—would at least have a chance of winning by energizing liberals and expanding the electorate through appealing to non-voters who feel disenfranchised by politics and (correctly) view the two major parties as institutions chiefly concerned with promoting the interests of economic elites.

Pete Lynch is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Kentucky.