How McGrath Won The Primary, Her Path Forward and Booker’s Next Steps
Amy McGrath won the primary. Narrowly. With less than 50 percent of the vote. She nearly squandered advantages like a huge amount of money donated to her campaign, the endorsement of Washington Democrats and media coverage that for months treated her as if she had already won the primary. The police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd changed the nature of the campaign, shifting it to a set of issues where Booker was better-suited than McGrath. But Booker was able to surge because Kentucky Democrats weren’t particularly excited about McGrath. She ran a very lackluster primary campaign.
We don’t have the kind of data that we would need to definitively prove this, but it looks like McGrath won in part because many voters in Kentucky turned in their ballots fairly early, before they knew much about Booker. That’s not a great sign for McGrath--people were eager to vote for someone else when they knew there was a credible alternative. Her struggles in the last few weeks suggest that McGrath is not a particularly skilled politician---not a great profile for someone taking on Mitch McConnell.
On the other hand, McGrath did win. She can adjust her approach for the general election. And Democrats in Kentucky and nationally, no matter how blah they feel about McGrath, are likely to discover some things that they like about her over the next few months---since they really want to defeat McConnell.
McConnell is the clear favorite
Bruce Lunsford- 47 percent in 2008 against McConnell
Jack Conway- 44 percent in 2010 against Rand Paul
Alison Lundergan Grimes-41 percent against McConnell in 2014
Jim Gray- 43 percent against Rand Paul in 2016.
That’s how the last four Kentucky Democratic U.S. Senate nominees did in the general election. So from a pure numbers standpoint, the more relevant question about this race is probably not, “Will McConnell or McGrath win?” but rather, “Will McConnell win by double digits or single digits?”
In the primary, McGrath won in rural areas and lost the big urban ones. But that is not at all a path she can take in a general election. She needs to get a really high vote margin in Louisville and Lexington, win a few more areas in the state and not get blown out in the state’s more rural areas.
How can she do that? For the Louisville and Lexington part, she will need people like Gov. Andy Beshear, congressman John Yarmuth and Booker to enthusiastically endorse her and convince Democratic activists that they need to mobilize against McConnell, even if their preferred candidate (Booker) did not win. I expect she will get enthusiastic support from prominent Democrats in the state. She needs to figure out a way to speak passionately about this moment where liberals are really thinking deeply about racial inequality, even if McGrath’s policy ideas on racial issues aren’t particularly left-wing. McGrath, running in a red state, should probably avoid supporting ideas like drastically reducing police funding or offering reparations to black Americans. That said, she should probably find a way to soft--pedal her opposition to more liberal ideas on racial equality and emphasize what she does support.
But the bigger task for McGrath is wooing people who aren’t core Democrats. And in that sense, McGrath has it easier than Booker---she has spent the last year mainly trying to court non-Democrats. So McGrath has not taken a lot of risky positions like supporting Medicare-for-all.
Also, McGrath is not taking on a beloved incumbent---McConnell is fairly unpopular. McGrath’s instinct seems to be to relentlessly attack the senator and rely on anti-McConnell sentiment to lift her to victory. I wonder if that is wise. I suspect swing voters in the state already have lukewarm feelings about McConnell. McGrath might be better off explaining to voters why they should vote for her and in ways that talk about their lives (as opposed to constantly talking about her own service in the military.)
The few polls that have been conducted of the Kentucky race do not present the longtime senator as a juggernaut, but suggest McGrath will have a really hard time getting out of the mid 40’s.
McConnell 52-33 over McGrath, 52-38 over Booker (Civiqs, June)
McConnell 43-40 over McGrath, Garin-Hart-Yang 43-40, January)
McConnell tied with McGrath 41-41 (Change Research 41-41, January)
McConnell 47-44 over “Democratic opponent” (Public Policy Polling, May)
McGrath 41-40 McConnell, (RMG Research, May)
Here’s the thing--McGrath could win. The odds are low. But Trump is looking weak right now--with polls right now suggesting he could lose in red-leaning states like Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. Trump is almost certainly going to win Kentucky. But if he is down to 55 or 57 percent of the vote in Kentucky, that’s a potential danger zone for McConnell. There may be some McConnell-Biden voters, but I wonder if white college-educated suburban types who are supporting Biden have largely soured on the GOP as a whole and won’t back the senator either. My big question is whether there is a potential bloc of McGrath-Trump voters---people who kind of hate traditional politicians, backed the president for that reason in 2016, will stick with him in 2020, but might see voting McConnell out as a way to express their dissatisfaction with the political system more broadly.
What’s next for Booker?
By running in this Senate race, Booker didn’t run for reelection for his statehouse seat. So his official political platform will be more limited now. That said, more than 88,000 people have now voted for him in Jefferson County. That’s a big number. (For comparison’s sake, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer got about 178, 000 votes in the general election in the 2018 mayoral race.) Booker is almost certainly a future candidate in Louisville for either mayor (maybe in 2022 with Fischer facing term limits) or for the U.S. House, whenever John Yarmuth opts to retire.
Also, Rand Paul is up for reelection in 2022. If Booker ran for the Senate again, I think he would be the favorite to win the Democratic nomination.
I would assume Booker will campaign for McGrath this fall, encouraging people who may not be that excited to vote for her to be excited about voting against McConnell. Being a good soldier in this process will help Booker position himself for his next run.
What’s next for black candidates in Kentucky?
I tend to think that we should avoid projecting things about an entire race onto one person, so I’m not sure Booker’s performance in this race tells us much about how other black candidates would fare.
But Booker’s emergence might change how the Kentucky Democratic establishment thinks about black candidates. Kentucky Republicans had black candidates running for statewide office in 2015 (Jenean Hampton for lieutenant governor) and in 2019 (Daniel Cameron for attorney general), while the Democrats had all-white slates for the seven main statewide jobs both years. I would expect that to change in 2023. After all, basically all Democrats not named Beshear lost in 2015 and 2019, so the Democrats might as well try some non-white candidates.
Thanks for reading.
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What I would have written if Booker had won the primary
Since this was such a close race, I had written a version of this story if Booker had won the primary.
Booker’s Stunning Win and His Path Forward
Wow. What a victory. We won’t have full data on this for a while, but it’s likely that Amy McGrath outspent Charles Booker by at least two to one--perhaps substantially more. She had the fame from her 2018 House race and the backing of Washington Democrats. The press, both locally and nationally, myself included, covered the primary like it was a fait accompli--of course McGrath would win. The candidate of the national Democratic Party lost to a 35-year-old first-term state representative. A black 35-year-old state representative from West Louisville will now take on Mitch McConnell, the 78-year-old who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984, the same year Booker was born. Wow.
Booker’s win was very surprising. At the same time, it is very easy to understand. McGrath ran a lackluster primary campaign, annoying many Democrats and leaving an opening for a rival to emerge. The protests over the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd meant a candidate who was able to speak about racial issues with knowledge and passion would be best-positioned to take advantage of that opening.
Booker was out of central casting for this moment--young; black; very versed in the challenges that black and West Louisville face; willing to go to the protests, speak at them and embrace their ethos. We don’t have the kind of exit polling that would allow me to say this definitely, but it’s likely that Booker did very well across the state among white Democrats under 45, white liberal Democrats of all ages, and black Democrats, old and young, liberal and more moderate. Those kinds of people tend to be in Louisville and Lexington---so that likely explains the margins in the state’s largest cities that powered Booker’s victory.
McConnell is very much the favorite
Bruce Lunsford- 47 percent in 2008 against McConnell
Jack Conway- 44 percent in 2010 against Rand Paul
Alison Lundergan Grimes-41 percent against McConnell in 2014
Jim Gray- 43 percent against Rand Paul in 2016.
That’s how the last four Kentucky Democratic U.S. Senate nominees did in the general election. So from a pure numbers aspect, the more interesting question is probably not “Will Booker or McConnell win?” but rather, “Will McConnell win by double digits or single digits?”
The challenges for Booker are obvious--he needs to win over some rural voters, white people without college degrees, independents, Republicans and Trump supporters in particular. (Those five groups have some overlap but are also distinct from one another.) I’m not sure Booker should move to the right in the general election--that has the potential of both irritating his core liberal supporters but also turning off swing voters and independents if adjusting his positions makes Booker seem calculating and overly political. But he probably needs to figure out how to present his liberalism on economics in a way that appeals to more conservative voters and present his liberalism on racial issues in a way that connects with Kentuckians who may not be that woke.
I will admit I wrote off Booker to some extent earlier this year in his race against McGrath. Maybe he could pull this off. But while beating a well-funded candidate like McGrath in a primary was a big challenge, defeating McConnell will be much harder. The electorate in the general election will probably be about 2 million voters, more than double the number of people who voted in the Booker-McGrath primary. The percentage of people who live in Lexington or Louisville, have college degrees and/or are black will almost certainly be lower in a general election compared to a Democratic primary. The percentage of voters who want to vote for black a candidate to affirm their bona fides on racial equality and who embrace the protests of the last two months will also be significantly smaller than in the primary.
And Booker could face the same kinds of financial disadvantages that he just narrowly overcame in the primary. With Democrats in good shape to win the presidency and the U.S. House, expect major GOP donors to pump in a ton of money to defend GOP-held Senate seats and make sure the party stays in control there. That’s a potential advantage for McConnell. On the other hand, Democrats nationally might at some point decide that they are better off concentrating their resources in Senate races in states like Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, and Texas, where Democratic Senate candidates probably have a better chance of winning than Booker does. And that would hurt Booker.
The few polls that have been conducted of the Kentucky race do not present the longtime senator as a juggernaut, but suggest the Democratic candidate will have a really hard time getting out of the mid 40’s.
McConnell 52-33 over McGrath, 52-38 over Booker (Civiqs, June)
McConnell 43-40 over McGrath, Garin-Hart-Yang 43-40, January)
McConnell tied with McGrath 41-41 (Change Research 41-41, January)
McConnell 47-44 over “Democratic opponent” (Public Policy Polling, May)
McGrath 41-40 McConnell, (RMG Research, May)
It’s not just about who wins
The general election will play into debates happening both in Kentucky and nationally about what kinds of candidates Democrats should run. Booker is a unique statewide candidate for Kentucky in part because he is black. But in my view, the most interesting wildcard, at least electorally, will not be Booker’s race but his ideology. Booker has adopted an unabashedly left-wing platform in a way that Kentucky Democrats running in statewide races usually avoid.
So if he gets 42-45 percent of the vote, it would be the kind of standard performance for a Democrat in a statewide race in Kentucky. That would be good for the left wing of the Democratic Party (both in Kentucky and nationally) and kind of bad for the party’s more centrist wing---it would suggest that a liberal candidate does about as well as moderate, even in a red state like Kentucky. If Booker got 47-48 percent that would be even better for the party’s left wing.
On the other hand if Booker loses to McConnell, say 62-38 and gets little support outside of Louisville and Lexington, that will make Democrats more leery of running a progressive candidate in future statewide races in Kentucky and in other Southern states.
I think people should avoid concluding that black candidates can’t win this state if Booker loses big in a general election. After all, a black Republican, Daniel Cameron, resoundingly won last year’s attorney general race. A black Republican, a black moderate Dem and a more liberal black Dem like Booker are very distinct kinds of candidacies.
The general election will be important to Booker’s future, even if he loses. Booker is almost certain to win big in the Louisville area against McConnell. So at least right now, he seems well-positioned for a U.S. House run if Rep. John Yarmuth retires or a mayor run in 2022, if he doesn’t win the Senate seat.
But lots of other people have long been planning to run for those two jobs (the House seat and mayor.) So If Booker loses really badly, makes some kind of weird gaffe or tacks really hard to the center, he may not look as well-positioned for future office as he does right now.
The general election will probably tell something about Kentucky’s political climate. My suspicion is that the number of people who would have voted for McGrath but won’t back Booker is fairly small (and I think the reverse is true as well.) The outcome to expect is that a U.S. Senate Democratic nominee in Kentucky will get between 42 and 46 percent of the vote and lose.
But the nature of the campaign will be different with Booker as the Democratic nominee, compared to McGrath. What kinds of questions will more conservative voters ask Booker at his events? How will Booker react to questions that have racial or perhaps even racist undertones? How will the media cover the racial parts of the campaign? How does McConnell navigate an electoral environment where everyone is talking about racial issues, he has a black opponent who is talking about them a lot and he is allied with a president who is often accused of doing racist things? Does Cameron, the black McConnell protege and Kentucky attorney general, play a heightened role in this campaign, emphasizing that the Kentucky senator has at least one prominent black ally and defending McConnell’s record on racial issues? Does Booker invite some of the national figures who embraced him, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, to come here and campaign with him?