‘The worst of Joe Biden will be over’: McConnell pitches voters on GOP Senate

“I don’t think it means no progress is made with the country,” the Kentucky Republican added. “It means look for things in the center you can agree on and do those.”

The Republicans control 50 Senate seats, putting them one seat shy of the majority amid a favorable political environment that McConnell is confident will not shift much, if at all, in the nine months leading up to Election Day. Indeed, “favorable” might be inadequate to describe how good political conditions are for Republicans. Biden’s job approval rating has sunk to just under 40%, and the GOP leads generic congressional ballot polling by 4 percentage points.

McConnell said the majority runs through eight states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire (which feature vulnerable Democratic incumbents), as well as Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (four states where the incumbent Republican is retiring). As long as the party nominates quality candidates in those states and avoids the likes of Todd Akin, Sharron Angle, Richard Mourdock, and Christine O’Donnell (from the 2010 and 2012 cycles), the minority leader expects to run the table and is bullish on winning the majority.

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“I’m hard-pressed to think of how — of what the Democrats could do to dramatically turn the atmosphere in their direction,” McConnell said. “So, the wind will almost certainly be at our back, but the individual states and candidates do make a difference. And the big lesson in 2010 and 2012 … is it makes a big difference who the nominee is in a statewide race.”

Angle and O’Donnell lost winnable Senate races in Nevada and Delaware, respectively, in 2010, a Republican wave year. Akin and Mourdock similarly tanked winnable races in Missouri and Indiana two years later. Only in 2014, another GOP wave year, when a fed-up McConnell began intervening in primaries to weed out bad candidates, did Republicans finally recapture the Senate majority they had lost eight years earlier.

The minority leader is prepared to do the same thing this year, particularly in Missouri, where disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens is a leading contender in the GOP primary. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is neutral in primaries, a directive of Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chairman. But the super PAC aligned with McConnell, the Senate Leadership Fund, is poised to fill that gap — and utilize the massive war chest at its disposal against Greitens if polling suggests intervention is necessary.

So far, McConnell is keeping his powder dry. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “If I were inclined to intervene, I certainly wouldn’t announce it.” Greitens has pledged to vote against McConnell for Republican leader if he is elected to the Senate this fall. Meanwhile, in just about every targeted state other than Missouri, McConnell sees virtually zero reason for concern.

On Arizona: “Obviously, Gov. [Doug] Ducey would be a star candidate. But I think we have a real good shot at winning in Arizona, period.” On Pennsylvania, where former hedge fund CEO David McCormick and celebrity physician Mehmet Oz are the top GOP contenders: “We have an embarrassment of riches.” McConnell also likes what he sees at the outset in Georgia and Nevada, where he is backing Herschel Walker and Adam Laxalt, respectively.

For every eventual Republican nominee, those McConnell is backing and those he might quietly worry about, he has one critical piece of unsolicited political advice: Focus on the future and talk about the issues voters care about. Avoid parroting the unsupported claims made by former President Donald Trump that the 2020 election was stolen. (The initial signs are that Republican Senate candidates might decline to incorporate this advice into their strategy.)

“It would be hard to defend in a general election. Let’s put it that way,” McConnell said. That certainly was the case last year when the GOP lost control of the Senate after losing twin runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5. “We wanted the race to be about checks and balances against Joe Biden. But there was considerable doubt cast during the runoff about whether Biden was really going to be the president.”

McConnell, 79, was elected to the Senate in 1984. For the last 15 years, he has served as the No. 1-ranking Senate Republican: six as the majority leader, from 2015 to 2021, and nine heading the minority. McConnell has faced no internal opposition or rebellion during the entirety of his tenure at the top, and that includes recently — despite Trump’s aggressive campaign to depose him.

McConnell has lived through his share of midterm election waves, including the eight-seat Democratic gain and recapture of the Senate majority in 1986, the Republican revolution of 1994, the Democratic sweep of Congress in 2006, the historic Republican takeover of the House and recovery of seven Senate seats in 2010, winning the Senate majority with a nine-seat flip in 2014, and the Democrats reclaiming the House and flipping Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada in 2018.

But McConnell, perhaps managing expectations for Republican gains in 2022, wasn’t ready to predict that Biden’s first midterm election might resemble a wave election from recent history. Also missing, strikingly, from McConnell’s election-year pitch were grand promises that Republicans would deliver ambitious conservative reforms, such as past vows to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

The ability to enact conservative legislation will be severely limited by Biden’s veto pen. It is possible McConnell, chastened by experience, wants to avoid a grassroots backlash that would accompany broken campaign promises, as the GOP experienced after winning control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014 under President Barack Obama. Some Republican insiders blame this habit of election-year overpromising for fueling Trump’s rise in the GOP in 2016.

“We won’t be able to achieve our agenda because we have a Democratic president. But the kind of full-fledged progressivism that we saw on display in 2021, which, thanks to [Democratic Sen. Joe] Manchin, stalled out at the end, is over. It may be over, already, for the rest of this Congress, but it certainly would be over in the next Congress.”

So, what does McConnell imagine accomplishing in a government divided, with Biden in the White House and Republicans in charge on Capitol Hill? “Look for the things between the 40-yard lines that you can agree on and try to make some progress for the country,” he said. “That was my attitude on the infrastructure bill.”

That approach would require McConnell to at least attempt to work with Biden in the midst of a presidential cycle with his party campaigning to eject the Democratic chief executive from the White House. It’s certainly possible. McConnell and Biden are quite familiar with each other. They were Senate colleagues for nearly a quarter-century and often negotiated an end to standoffs between Republicans and Obama when Biden was vice president.

But a successful partnership between the “40-yard lines” also would require Biden to attempt to work with McConnell.

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And the Senate minority leader seemed doubtful that much cooperation was in the offing, given their sharp differences on key matters and the president’s leftward lurch since taking up residence in the White House. Indeed, although some independent voters and Republicans unhappy with Trump thought they were getting a centrist when they voted for Biden in 2020, McConnell had no such illusions.

“Well, personally, he’s the same guy. I like him. We haven’t had much to talk about the first year because he pretty much signed up with Bernie Sanders’s view of what America ought to be,” McConnell said, referring to the socialist Vermont independent. “Look,” he added, “every Democratic president wants to be the next [Franklin Delano Roosevelt]. Every one of them.”