Sunday is the 80th birthday of Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s most accomplished politician save Henry Clay. McConnell has often cited Clay as his ideal, but Clay was an architect of bipartisan compromises that kept the Union together before the Civil War; McConnell’s history is different.
It’s still being written, but some lines in are etched in stone already. McConnell is the longest-serving leader of Senate Republicans, and chief remodeler of two fundamental institutions: a more partisan Senate that has degraded the chamber he says he reveres and a more conservative Supreme Court, fashioned with a dose of the calculated audacity that has been a hallmark of his career.
The final line will probably have something more complicated to say about McConnell and American democracy in the era of our most anti-democratic president, Donald Trump. After a symbiotic, transactional relationship during Trump’s presidency, McConnell and Trump are now at war, the first battlefield being this year’s Senate races that will determine whether McConnell remains minority leader or becomes majority leader.
Al Cross (Twitter @ruralj) is a professor in the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media and director of its Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. His opinions are his own, not UK’s. He was the longest-serving political writer for the Louisville Courier Journal (1989-2004) and national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001-02. He joined the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2010.
NKyTribune is the anchor home for Al Cross’ column. We offer it to other publications throughout the Commonwealth, with appropriate attribution.
Getting and keeping power is McConnell’s prime directive, but his current battle is also one to keep his party from being completely transformed by Trump into a personality cult with little respect for truth or the norms of a democratic republic – and, by extension, to keep that sort of politics from further infecting American democracy.
Yes, McConnell did say a year ago that he would support Trump if the party nominates him for president in 2024. But that is an obligatory statement for a party leader who wants to remain a party leader, made after he tried unsuccessfully to get his colleagues to read Trump out of the party.
There is no doubt that McConnell will remain leader of Senate Republicans next year, despite Trump’s call for his ouster. It seems clear that most Republican senators can’t stand Trump, but many of them fear his followers and how he could mobilize them.
Thankfully, our nation’s founders gave senators six-year terms to insulate them from demagoguery, disinformation, and other inherent risks of democracy. But Trump is testing the machinery in a way not done since the South seceded, and has had much success since losing the 2020 election – mainly in making most Republicans believe the utter falsehood that it was stolen from them.
From the day after the Electoral College voted in December 2020, McConnell has made clear that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president. He reiterated that last week, along with his earlier blame of Trump for the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, as he said the Republican National Committee was wrong to suggest that the riot was “legitimate political discourse” and to censure Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on the Democrat-appointed committee investigating it.
Earlier, McConnell said he was looking forward to the results of the investigation, even though he had helped block creation of a bipartisan commission to conduct the probe.
McConnell’s maneuverings may puzzle casual observers, but are probably driven by the most fundamental element of democracy: public opinion, or in this case, Republican opinion, as measured by Civiqs, an online polling firm.
The day he called Biden the winner of the election, McConnell’s “favorable” rating among registered Republicans fell from 64% to 50%. On Jan. 6, when he started to read Trump out of the party even before the Capitol was invaded, it was 38%, just above his “unfavorable” number. Two days later, he was under water. Three days after that, his rating among Republicans was 20% favorable and 56% unfavorable. It has remained strongly unfavorable, most recently 25-49.
Those numbers show what happens to your standing among Republican voters when you take on Donald Trump, and why McConnell and his ilk backed off. After the Capitol attack, Trump’s poll numbers among Republicans barely moved; last week, his “fav-unfav” was 84-9.
But there are other polls, which give McConnell hope. He fears Trump’s selection and promotion of “goofball” candidates (a description relayed by The New York Times) will lead to their nomination in primaries and defeat in the fall, leaving Republicans in the Senate minority. In recruiting mainstream candidates, he can point to polls like the Jan. 14-18 NBC survey that found 56% of Republicans think of themselves more as supporters of the Republican Party while 36% think of themselves more as supporters of Trump, down from 54% in October 2020. In an Associated Press survey at the same time, 44% of Republicans said they didn’t want Trump to run again.
Polls like that help show why McConnell now publicly endorses the investigation of Jan. 6 and calls it “a violent insurrection.” As he and Trump battle for influence and power in their party, the senator is on the side of democracy. The outcome could be the most important part of his legacy.