LEXINGTON, Kentucky — When most people think of Addison Mitch McConnell and his impact on politics, they think of the U.S. Capitol and the halls of power along the Potomac River.
Often cast as the consummate D.C. insider, McConnell is an equally consummate Kentuckian who regularly tailgates before Louisville football games and hangs out with longtime friends at Cunningham’s Creekside, located along a tributary of the Ohio River. He is also an avid baseball fan, even if his major league team is the Washington Nationals.
His rise in power began in 1985, when he was sworn in as the only Republican challenger to defeat an incumbent Senate Democrat in 1984. Its latest chapter involves his perch as the Republican leader of a Senate conference built up from its modern nadir by the rise of the Tea Party movement.
McConnell is a commanding presence in the Senate, and he intends to remain so. He told the Washington Examiner this week that he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon despite a flurry of wish-casting to the contrary.
Nor does he intend to move out of leadership — not even to the role of appropriations chairman, as West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd did after serving as both the minority leader and the majority leader in the Senate.
“You may know that at the end of this leadership term, I will tie Mike Mansfield as the longest-serving Senate leader in American history,” McConnell said. “And I have no plans to change roles.” He flatly denied rumors that he would seek an early retirement or, if Republicans win back the Senate in 2022, move from his role as leader to head the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Born in Alabama and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, McConnell’s first run for Senate was considered so unattainable two weeks out from Election Day that even his mother thought he would lose. Then, he ran an ad showing a pack of bloodhounds running around, looking for his opponent, Sen. Walter D. Huddleston. McConnell narrowly won that race, and the polio survivor has played catch-me-if-you-can with his Democratic challengers ever since. Last November, he won by nearly 20 percentage points over former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath. She outspent McConnell by millions, but she turned out to be one of his weakest challengers yet.
Every six years, Washington-based pundits miss from their vantage point on Capitol Hill McConnell’s appeal in his home state. They know him as the ruthless tactician who counts noses and twists arms in the Senate. But Kentuckians have a different perspective. Drive through the state, and the evidence abounds that their senior senator is in leadership. Roads and bridges provide the most obvious indication. Less visible are the hemp industry, the guaranteed pensions for retired coal miners, and a declining tobacco industry’s soft landing.
McConnell said when he first went to the Senate, Kentucky had 100,000 of what they called “tobacco bases” in 119 of its 120 counties.
“It was kind of a relic of the New Deal that assigned what they call the quotas to farms,” he said. “But given the controversy surrounding tobacco and the obvious health concerns, the value of those quotas began to decline.”
McConnell explained that the government had created the asset. “It was attached to the land and actually enhanced the value of the land for tax purposes,” he said. “So what I was hoping to do is to figure out a way for the government, which created the asset in the first place, to buy it back and to fund it through a tax on tobacco products. It was kind of a hard sell because a lot of people thought the last thing we needed to be doing was buying out tobacco quotas.”
But in the end, he succeeded.
“So, then, the question for Kentucky agriculture was, what’s next? And even though it’s kind of a work in progress, I’ve created pet projects for hemp before hemp became legal. It looked like it had potential in two ways, to seeds producing a product called CBD and stalks frequently turned into things like car dashboards,” he explained.
McConnell said that in 2018, it looked like it was worth taking a shot at legalizing industrial hemp as part of the Farm Bill.
“It is off to a rocky start, like a lot of new products,” he said. “But I think long-term, it’s an exciting potential for Kentucky farmers.”
Drive through the winding, rolling hills of the Bluegrass region in north-central Kentucky, and it is hard to miss why the commonwealth is the premier home of thoroughbred racing. Behind those quaint, ancient stacked stones and between the mazes of wooden fences are the grounds where breeding and care take place, ultimately leading up to this Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.
It is an industry in which McConnell takes great pride and for which he is also deeply concerned. “This is an issue that I think is going to be increasingly important,” he said. “This is the week of the Kentucky Derby. We’re known for horses, and I was alarmed about a year ago, when I saw an editorial in the Washington Post saying horse racing ought to be abolished.” He was referring to an op-ed by Patrick Battuello, the founder of the nonprofit organization Horseracing Wrongs.
McConnell admitted that there have been many problems, but he maintained that abolition is not the solution. “Every state has different rules about doping,” he said. “I pulled together all the various leaders of the thoroughbred horse racing industry and said, ‘Look, you guys have been feuding for years. We have an existential threat here that horse racing may actually be abolished. It’s time to get together.’”
Out of that grew the Horseracing Integrity Act. “I added [it] to a big omnibus bill at the end of last year, which sets up a commission to basically regulate horse racing everywhere,” said McConnell. “So, you don’t have one standard in one state and one standard in another, in order to deal with the health and safety concerns and to pull together an industry.”
Asked about the accomplishments that he considers to be the most important, McConnell names one of a non-legislative variety. “The McConnell Center at the University of Louisville is a program for the best and brightest young people we can attract,” he said. “I set it up 30 years ago, and it has, at last count, 237 graduates and young people in lots of different fields.”
One of those scholars is Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who in 2019 became the first Republican to win that office since 1948 and the first black Kentuckian to be elected independently statewide.
“For states like mine, frequently, the sharper young people go off to school in the East and find where they came from a little too slow after that,” said McConnell.
“So, the idea here was to stimulate youngsters from the state to get a more quality education in the state, in the hopes that they would stay there,” he said. “Out of those 237 graduates, 60% of them live and work in Kentucky. So, I think it’s working.”
On his legacy in Kentucky politics, McConnell is quick to point out that he is from a state in flyover country, giving him a perspective that none of the other congressional leaders share. Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are from California; Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer hails from New York.
“I think that I’m sort of the representative of rural and small-town Middle America and try to look out for our interests, which I think are quite dramatically different from these big population centers along the coasts,” he said.
Kentucky was a pretty blue state when McConnell started his career in the 1980s. “If you looked at the state legislature, [Republicans] had, I think, either eight or nine state senators out of 38, and now, we have 30 out of 38. In the state House, we had 21 or 22 Republicans out of 100. Today, we have 75 Republicans out of 100. … We’ve become increasingly a red state, but it sure was not that way in the early years of my career.”
Indeed, Kentucky’s political realignment came gradually and coincided with McConnell’s rise. It only reached the state House of Representatives in 2016, and to this day, no Republican has held the governor’s mansion for more than one term. Registered Democrats were a majority in Kentucky until 2018. They were still a plurality as of March, but the number of registered Republican voters in the state will likely surpass them within the next year or two. The ranks of GOP voters in the commonwealth have nearly tripled since McConnell’s first election, whereas the number of Democrats has barely budged in 15 years.
“I’m not taking sole credit for any of this, but we’ve built it and built it and built it over the years,” he said rather modestly. “And I’ve tried to be helpful.”
McConnell says he does not think voters have changed their values, but that both parties have changed theirs. Republicans, once perceived as the party of the country club set, have welcomed the working class into its coalition, creating a union that has been not without friction. Democrats, meanwhile, have become an increasingly urbanized and left-wing party that is especially hostile to conservative moral values.
“It’s hard to find a conservative Democrat in Washington anymore, and I think that’s why we’ve increasingly converted people in Kentucky to be Republicans who may have started out in another camp,” McConnell said.
On the business of Washington, McConnell said that the threat of court-packing is more real and more brazen today than when President Franklin Roosevelt attempted it nearly a century ago in order to intimidate the judges who were already on the Supreme Court into ruling favorably on aspects of his New Deal.
“The saying at the time, ‘A switch in time saved nine,’” said McConnell of humorist Cal Tinney’s 1937 quip, a reference to the shift in jurisprudence by Justice Owen Roberts. It was seen as a strategic move to protect the court’s independence from a power-hungry president.
McConnell said that he thinks Democrats are doing the same thing, trying to intimidate the justices in order to affect their rulings. “You’ve seen Chuck Schumer, for example, go over in front of the Supreme Court and actually seemingly threaten the court if it didn’t rule the way he particularly wanted them to on an issue, which is really quite noteworthy and unusual,” he said. “Having said that, I also believe they’d pack the court if they could. And I think the fact that Joe Biden did not rule this out, just eliminate it — he could have quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer and said, ‘We’re not doing it.'”
McConnell expressed some disappointment with Biden’s administration and its political skew. “[T]here’s nothing, nothing moderate about this administration,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind doing some business with them, but I can’t find a single issue upon which there’s any chance of doing a bipartisan deal.”
The senator says the whole cast and crew are just too left-wing. “It’s sort of Biden’s bait-and-switch,” he said. “His bait was, ‘I’m going to be a moderate,’ but the switch is what in fact they’re advocating across the board.”
Despite losing the presidency last November, Republicans made healthy gains down-ballot — particularly in state legislative chambers and in the House. They also held Democrats to an even Senate split despite predictions of much worse losses. McConnell said he was proud of the outcome.
“All the pundits thought we were going to lose the Senate,” he said. “We ended up at 50-50. Pelosi was predicting a 10- to 15-seat pickup in the House. She barely held it. We didn’t lose a single state legislature. We gained two and gained a governor. And that’s noteworthy because Obama’s first attorney general headed up a project over the last three or four years to flip state legislatures in the census year, in order to give them a better chance of winning the [U.S.] House back. And that failed. It failed miserably.”
He was referring to Eric Holder’s million-dollar operation to flip state legislative chambers so that Democrats could control more of the redistricting process.
“So yes, it’s true, there’s a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic House,” McConnell said. “But not by much. I know what a grim situation looks like. It was the first year after Barack Obama, and we had 40 [senators]. It took us six years to get the majority back. Fifty is a helluva lot better than 40.” He added that he believes his party is more robust today than it was in early 2009, not only in Washington but all across the country.
“The notion that America is a hard-left nation is not at all demonstrated by last November’s election,” he said. “It was a close outcome. A 50-50 Senate and a handful of seats that makes the majority in the House indicates that America is still a 50-50 nation. And I think that means our races for president are going to continue to be relatively close,” he said.
McConnell said that despite the forces of Big Tech, the cultural curators attempting to nudge the nation’s politics leftward, Republicans have an excellent chance of winning both the House and the Senate back in 2022. He pointed especially to the backlash Democrats are now receiving in Georgia after Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star Game out of Cobb County based on the surrounding rhetoric about the state’s new voting law.
“I think we’ve certainly seen that on recent display here, as the CEOs of these companies, who decided to get outraged over the Georgia law, clearly haven’t read it,” he said. “They don’t know what’s in it. And I think it’s also based on the false assumption that somehow votes are being suppressed. We had the biggest turnout last year since 1900 — a 7-point increase over 2016. Voters are not being denied an opportunity to vote anywhere in America. And I think these corporations got sold a bill of goods by the Democrats, who want them to help them pass a bill called HR 1, to make it more likely Democrats always win elections and Republicans lose.”
McConnell had no desire to discuss Donald Trump or the very public feud that the former president has tried to carry on with him. On the events of Jan. 6, he said that the two speeches he gave that day, before and after the attack at the Capitol, speak for themselves. One was a forceful rejection of the idea that the Senate should overturn states’ electoral votes based on Trump’s flimsy allegations of a stolen election. The other was a powerful condemnation of the rioters at the Capitol that day.
But the senator adds that he finds the lumping together of everyone who voted for Trump with the relative handful of bad actors in January to be ridiculously unfair. “You have an awful lot of people who voted for the president and voted for all of us,” he said of the 70-plus million people who voted for Trump last year. “I mean, I had a rather whopping reelection last year as well. And there are a whole lot of Americans right-of-center.”
