A panel on CNN’s Inside Politics criticized the beginning of Amy McGrath’s senate run, in which she backtracked after saying she would have voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
McGrath, who is running against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, initially told the Courier-Journal Wednesday that she would’ve voted in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, but then changed her mind on social media after facing backlash for the remark.
“There are some things a candidate gets a pass on in the minutia of policy. You’re running for Senate against Mitch McConnell. You’ve got to have an answer on Brett Kavanaugh. That’s kind of campaign 101, right?” CNN’s John King asked.
Carl Hulse of the New York Times answered, “If you’re running against Mitch McConnell, judges is the thing you’re going to want to be talking about. What a disaster. This is just a disaster. I’m not sure what was worse, being for Kavanaugh or having to flip so quickly and say you weren’t.”
“I mean Mitch McConnell and his people are ruthless,” he added. “She was going to have a really hard time anyway with Trump on the ballot in Kentucky and this kind of mistake, they were just rubbing their hands together.”
“This whole thing kind of shows how Democrats have to twist themselves into a pretzel to run in a state like Kentucky. I mean part of Amy McGrath’s message is that President Trump won Kentucky by a big margin and she wants to work with him on things like infrastructure and draining the swamp. She’s painting McConnell as a threat to getting Trump’s agenda passed,” Sahil Kapur of Bloomberg said. “None of it really computes here.”
Earlier this week, McGrath was asked to explain her 2017 comparison between Donald Trump’s election and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks during an interview on CNN with Jake Tapper.
Despite the negative attention, the retired Marine fight pilot received $2.5 million in donations within 24 hours of her campaign launch, setting a record for first-day campaign fundraising.
