Mitch McConnell didn’t have much to complain about on the night of November 4, 2014. In that day’s elections, Republicans gained a net nine Senate seats, securing a majority and ensuring McConnell would become Senate majority leader. This was a crowning achievement in a turbulent year for the Kentucky senator, who had faced a tough primary challenge from businessman Matt Bevin. After dispensing with Bevin, McConnell had a real fight in the general election against supposed rising Democratic star Alison Lundergan Grimes. He beat Grimes by 16 points in the general.
Plenty to be pleased about, but McConnell saw something in the election returns he didn’t like. He had carried all but 10 of Kentucky’s 120 counties, the GOP won all but 1 Louisville-centered congressional district, and the party had held on to its majority in the state senate. But the state house of representatives had remained out of Republican reach—a drought of more than 90 years, and the last state legislative house south of the Mason-Dixon line to resist GOP control since the 1920s. What’s more, McConnell learned, in some state house districts where he had won 60 percent or more of the vote, Republicans hadn’t even bothered to run a candidate.
So a month later, on December 6, McConnell called a meeting in Louisville of the state’s Republican legislative leaders to set a goal: In the next election, the GOP would win a majority of the 100-seat state house. On November 8, 2016, that’s exactly what happened—and it was bigger than any Bluegrass Republican could have expected. By night’s end, Republicans went from holding 45 seats to holding 64—making Kentucky the 25th state to have both the legislature and the governor’s office under Republican control. To top it off, the state’s imperious Democratic speaker of the house, Greg Stumbo, lost his bid for reelection. The banner night for Kentucky Republicans wasn’t a surprise, but the sheer size of the wave sure was.
“Most of us observers figured Republicans would take the house, but none of us expected them to win the supermajority,” said Al Cross, a veteran political journalist in the state who is now director of the Institute of Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.
“Getting to 64, it was just. . .” Scott Jennings, a GOP operative with ties to McConnell, said before bursting into laughter.
What’s so remarkable about Kentucky going deep red? After all, the state is culturally conservative and has been voting for Republicans at the top of the ticket for decades. Since 1980, Kentucky has voted for just one Democrat for president—Bill Clinton, in 1992 and 1996. Since the 1990s, both of Kentucky’s U.S. senators and a majority of its U.S. House delegation have been Republican, as has the majority of the state senate. Kentucky was overdue for a Republican house, it seems.
An examination of how Republicans took over the Kentucky legislature demonstrates in just what dire straits Democrats find themselves among what used to be part of the party’s core base: the rural white working class. It’s still true that the majority of Kentucky voters are registered Democrats, but the national party had become so out of touch with its voters, on economics and culture, that any organized opposition was enough to topple its regime.
“Organized” is the operative word here, and what Mitch McConnell found following his 2014 victory was anything but an organization equipped to win the house back. At his December meeting, he tapped a young representative from the central part of the state, Jonathan Shell, to lead the house Republicans’ electoral efforts—the party’s first formal election chair ever. McConnell’s own super-PAC, Kentuckians for Strong Leadership (headed by Scott Jennings), reoriented its mission to the goal of electing a GOP majority.
“We professionalized all aspects of the campaign to win the state house,” said Jennings. That meant coordinating with other outside groups, like the Republican State Leadership Committee and GOPac, as well as with the Kentucky Republican party. Kentuckians for Strong Leadership spent $2 million in the 2016 cycle. And McConnell took a personal interest in candidate recruitment. The Senate majority leader saw to it that none of the entrenched rural Democrats in the state house would run unopposed in 2016, meeting with potential candidates to encourage them to run.
Republicans in Kentucky say the biggest hurdle for recruitment was finding people willing to take the plunge. After all, Kentuckians may not have been thrilled with the national Democratic party of late, but that suspicion wasn’t guaranteed to trickle down to the state level. “These are local races,” said Cross. “People are reluctant to throw out people they know.”
McConnell’s direct appeals helped get candidates on board, but so did the 2015 gubernatorial election in which McConnell’s old primary foe, Matt Bevin, defeated Democrat Jack Conway. Bevin is just the third Republican Kentucky governor since World War II, and his election presaged what was to come in 2016.
“That was a momentum change,” said Jennings. “The governor controls the agenda, controls the conversation, and can raise a lot of money. It provided that confidence booster for Republicans.” Despite fears that Bevin’s promise to roll back Medi-caid expansion in the state would hurt the GOP, the issue actually worked in Republicans’ favor after insurers announced another round of rate hikes for 2017.
Kentucky Republicans had all the tools and preparation for their fight in 2016, but one of their greatest assets was the Democratic party and its presidential nominee. Audio of Hillary Clinton’s declaration earlier this year that she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” found its way into thousands of homes in Kentucky’s eastern coal-mining region, through the form of a mailer paid for by Kentuckians for Strong Leadership. Republicans were eager to point out that the same trial-lawyer associations and unions donating to Clinton were funding the state’s Democratic candidates.
The other boon for Republicans was the top of their own ticket, Donald Trump. The New York businessman earned 62 percent of the vote in Kentucky, the biggest margin for a presidential candidate there since Richard Nixon’s landslide in 1972. Trump ran up his margins in Kentucky’s rural counties, bringing the Republican house candidates along with him. Al Cross, who still writes a regular political column for the Louisville Cour-ier-Journal, says he heard a common refrain from Democratic candidates in the state: “My opponent can’t beat me, but Donald Trump can.”
Michael Warren is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
