MSNBC deserves a bit of credit. Despite polling, the electoral map, and midterm turnout patterns all portending a rough November for Democrats, the 24-hour progressive echo chamber remains convinced that the party has serious opportunities to play offense in the Senate this year. This week, after Republican primary voters took yet another opportunity off Democrats’ board in Georgia, the network fixated itself on the last remaining vulnerable Republican Senator — Mitch McConnell, who remains much more an object of fascination than a realistic target.
As I wrote a few weeks back, Democrats’ 2014 strategy seems to boil down to hoping that Republicans would shoot themselves in the foot by nominating weak candidates, with little in the way of a Plan B if the GOP doesn’t defeat itself. Tuesday’s Kentucky and Georgia primaries were two more dominos in this plan that didn’t fall as the DNC hoped, as controversial Republican candidates who received disproportionate attention from the national media fell flat, and GOP voters stuck with more conventional, electable options.
Georgia in particular must sting, as the party’s hopes of picking off a Senate seat in this conservative state rested on Republicans nominating one of two candidates with histories of making controversial statements — Rep. Phil Gingrey, who rushed to Todd Akin’s defense after the Missouri candidate made his infamous remarks about rape, and Rep. Paul Broun, who has referred to embryology and evolution as “lies from the pit of hell.” After both Broun and Gingrey entered the open-seat Senate race, Democrats recruited Michelle Nunn, the well-funded daughter of a popular former Senator into the contest, and spent over a year touting her chances against either Republican on TV, in the Beltway publications, on social media, and anywhere else they could find someone to sit still long enough.
Broun and Gingrey, of course, finished a distant fourth and fifth in the Republican primary this week, as voters advanced businessman David Perdue and Rep. Jack Kingston to a runoff election that will determine the party’s nominee. Either Perdue or Kingston gives the GOP a conventional, safe nominee that fits the state perfectly–and leaves Nunn little to run against. Barring unforeseen developments, all the hot air blown in the Peach State’s direction for the past 18 months will be for naught.
That leaves McConnell’s seat in Kentucky as the last target standing, and the Minority Leader’s re-election bid received renewed attention on MSNBC and in the progressive blogosphere after he easily dispatched a primary challenger who, like Broun and Gingrey in Georgia, fell flat after the media salivated over him for months. Democrats are very optimistic about the candidacy of Alison Lundergan Grimes, but their fixation on Grimes’ challenge to McConnell seems unwise with so many incumbent Democrats in tight races this year.
Grimes has a tough hill to climb. Though it has a proud history of electing Blue Dog Democrats, Kentucky is a very conservative state, and has become more Republican in each recent presidential election, giving Mitt Romney over 60% of the vote in 2012. The state has become even more hostile to President Obama since then, as his recent EPA crackdowns on coal-fired plants stand to devastate its economy.
McConnell has won five Kentucky Senate races under every circumstance imaginable, and is known as one of the toughest campaigners in the Senate. Grimes, for her part, is a lottery-ticket candidate who has been elected only once, in a race that generated little attention and in a year that Republicans did not seriously contest the state.
Grimes could defeat McConnell if everything breaks perfectly for her over the next 6 months, but her chances of winning do not come close to the attention her campaign seems certain to receive — and every dollar spent on her is a dollar that can’t be spent elsewhere. Democrats have their hands full defending Senate seats in red states, but seem more interested in pricking the GOP with a pin than playing defense and protecting their majority. For once, perhaps it’s Republicans who will only have to stay out of the way as their opponents fumble away the Senate.
