Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he’s advising senatorial candidates to limit their time at this summer’s GOP convention or avoid it entirely in order to protect Republicans’ majority this fall.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Examiner about his memoir The Long Game, McConnell acknowledged that Senate Republicans have “a lot of exposure” in 2016 as they face very competitive races.
“We always counsel candidates who are running in the year of a presidential convention to either minimize their time at the convention or don’t go at all because there’s no new voters at the convention,” McConnell said.
McConnell insisted that “it’s not unusual” for senatorial candidates to skip the convention, and noted that it has happened in previous presidential election years. But several GOP senators have decided to skip the convention as the prospect of Donald Trump’s forthcoming nomination grew more likely.
Among those who have stated their intention to skip the Republican convention are Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 GOP nominee.
Other Republican senators, such as Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have expressed reservation about attending the convention because of Trump’s presence.
Trump is reportedly planning a convention filled with entertainment unlike any other, and may look to fill an open-air stadium in Cleveland — where the city’s NFL and MLB teams play — on the night of his nomination.
McConnell, however, is primarily focused on his effort to keep Congress in Republican hands, which includes a large push to draft Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to run again for re-election. McConnell would not put odds on the chances that Rubio reneges on his decision not to run, but said a Rubio re-election bid is “important, I think, for Florida, for the nation and for our Senate majority.”
“We’ve got a lot of members up in very competitive states: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois. Illinois is a very blue state, the others are all purple,” McConnell said. “They can go either way in a presidential election. No matter who’s at the top of the ticket, we knew these were going to be challenging races.”
McConnell added that he expected Republicans to compete in Nevada and Florida as well, which he described as purple states. He said he thinks the Senate races are big enough for the candidates “to make their own arguments,” as opposed to relying on the arguments of other Republicans running for higher office.
In The Long Game, McConnell revealed intimate details about his “slow and steady” effort to earn the majority leader position, which he described as his top goal.
“While I would venture a guess that the ultimate goal of many of my colleagues was to one day sit at the desk in the Oval Office, that wasn’t my goal,” McConnell wrote. “When it came to what I most desired, and the place from which I thought I could make the greatest difference, I knew deep down it was the majority leader’s desk I hoped to occupy one day.”
Now that McConnell has earned that top spot, he’s looking to work with a President Trump to lead a Republican-controlled federal government. The majority leader’s thoughts about his preparation for a potential Trump presidency and his thoughts on the future of the Republican Party will appear in a forthcoming article.
