Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., swatted away the importance of Steve Bannon in 2018 and dismissed him as a major player on the political scene after Judge Roy Moore’s loss in Alabama this month.
“I don’t have anything to say about him at all,” McConnell said when pressed about Bannon Thursday morning at an event hosted by Axios. “I don’t have any observations about him at all.”
“No, there are others,” McConnell said, declining to name others he doesn’t have an opinion about. He also expanded on why he doesn’t concern himself with Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and current head of Breitbart News.
“It’s not a factor in my life. It has no impact on our ability to function in the Senate, nor will it have any impact on the campaigns,” McConnell said. “Look, the key thing if you want to win a campaign, you have to have a candidate who can win. It’s not complicated.
“The kind of people you’re talking about — that element — just managed to blow a Senate race in the reddest state in America,” McConnell said. “That is not a formula for victory. So to the extent that there are people running in primaries around the country who have no chance of winning the election, we will oppose them. We did that successfully in ’14. We did it successfully in ’16 and kept the Senate. We were more passive about primaries in 2010 and 2012, and we threw away races in Delaware and Nevada and Missouri and Indiana. We’re not doing that anymore.”
Moore fell to Senator-elect Doug Jones in deep-red Alabama, a state that had not elected a Democratic senator since Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., in 1992. Shelby became a Republican two years later.
Bannon was one of the few in the conservative sphere to back Moore despite allegations of sexual assault and misconduct.
