McConnell’s last campaign? Kentucky leader again at center of Senate campaign fight
It wouldn’t be the throes of a Senate campaign cycle if politicians in both parties weren’t disparaging Mitch McConnell.
With control of the chamber’s majority hinging on just a couple of seats, the Senate GOP leader is once again at the center of Democrats’ campaign tactics and Republicans’ consternation.
“Mitch McConnell is hellbent on beating me,” complained Montana Sen. Jon Tester in fundraising emails to supporters this week. “I need your help to stop Mitch McConnell and his wealthy friends from buying this election wholesale.”
Tester has good reason to be sounding the alarm. Polls show him trailing in the Montana Senate race that could prove to be the majority maker for the GOP. And it’s McConnell’s super PAC that is trying to drive the final nail in the political career of the three-term Democrat.
But some in McConnell’s own party are also taking umbrage with their leader, who has just a month left in his tenure atop the Senate GOP.
Ted Cruz, who finds himself fending off a fierce challenge to his reelection in Texas, complained that McConnell has left him hanging out to dry as Democrats pour cash into his defeat.
“Mitch McConnell runs the largest Republican super PAC in the country. It has $400 million dollars. But that super PAC is used to reward the Republican senators who obey him and to punish those who dare to stand up to him,” Cruz told Fox News’ Mark Levin.
A recent poll conducted by McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund, found Cruz ahead by only a single percentage point.
Cruz, who has been a consistent McConnell critic and voted against him for leader two years ago, said he’s being penalized for standing up to leadership.
“[Chuck] Schumer’s spending millions and yet he’s spent zero,” Cruz said of McConnell.
“People wonder at home, how come no Republicans stand up and have courage and stand up to Mitch in leadership. And the answer is, if you stand up and say no, it costs you $10 or $20 or $30 or even $40 million dollars. I’m not willing to just obey his orders.”
Cruz famously called McConnell a liar on the Senate floor in 2015, accusing him of misleading Senate Republicans on cutting a trade deal.
McConnell doesn’t personally direct the Senate Leadership Fund as it operates as an independent expenditure. But the super PAC is run by former McConnell chief of staff Steven Law, who the Herald-Leader profiled in 2021 and McConnell has praised for his “razor-sharp political instincts and brilliant strategic thinking.”
A spokesperson for the McConnell PAC Torunn Sinclair said, “We think Sen. Cruz is running a great campaign, and we’re continuing to keep an eye on this race.”
Law told the Wall Street Journal he isn’t worried Cruz will lose, adding “If it gets tough, we’ll be there for them.”
McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in history, has long been simultaneously seen as a kingmaker who controls power and purse-strings inside Washington and a pariah among the masses, including a vast swath of the MAGA movement.
“Mitch is a convenient target, but he’s a grown up. I think he takes it mostly in stride and is ready to be done with all the chaos,” said Terry Holt, a former Republican staffer who now runs a communications firm.
It explains why Democrats continue to raise his name in vain even as he plans to step aside as GOP leader next month following the election.
In a Maryland Senate race debate this week, McConnell popped up as an issue the Republicans sought to run away from.
Even though McConnell helped recruit former Gov. Larry Hogan into the open-seat race, Hogan ran away from associating himself with the Kentuckian in his blue state of Maryland.
“I’m not a MAGA, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell person,” Hogan implored.
Angela Alsobrooks, the Democratic candidate who polls show with an advantage, said if Hogan was truly independent of McConnell and the GOP he could’ve run as one.
“When Mitch McConnell called him he put the jersey on, he ran into the game,” Alsobrooks said.
“The reality is, his mere election would empower the people whose policies he says he disagrees with so strongly and there wouldn’t be anything he could do about them calling votes.”
On the other side of the country, conservatives are fuming that McConnell and the leadership fund haven’t dropped a dime to help Kari Lake, an election denier who is trailing Rep. Ruben Gallego in Arizona’s open seat Senate contest. Lake, who previously derided McConnell as an “old bat,” has since cooled her rhetoric, even if her allies have not.
“He is an adversary of America First, a functionary of the system, not supporting Kari Lake or Ted Cruz,” Republican commentator Monica Crowley said of McConnell.
Above all, McConnell is about winning and he’s stated his goal is to leave whoever his successor might be with a Republican majority, even if it’s a narrow one.
He is on the precipice of making that happen, needing to flip only two seats into the GOP column, with West Virginia and Montana looking to be the most likely conversions.
But don’t expect to see him pop up anywhere on the campaign trail in the final few weeks, even though it is likely to be the last he will command significant power over. McConnell acutely understands the politics of his presence as much as Democrats do — which is why he wields his counsel quietly and behind closed doors.
“Mitch McConnell is the most unpopular political leader in the country. Even Republicans dislike him,” veteran Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said plainly.
This story was originally published October 17, 2024 at 4:45 AM.
