McGrath Courts Booker's Base; McConnell Courts Non-Trumpers

Amy McGrath Courts Booker’s Base

Crimson MacDonald, the chair of the Democratic Party in Campbell County in Northern Kentucky, said that she backed Charles Booker in the recent Kentucky Democratic Senate primary because she really felt inspired by him. But she noted that Amy McGrath’s approach made the choice fairly easy. 

“I was not inspired by her campaign. I thought it was arrogant,” MacDonald said of the way McGrath ran during the primary. 

But a recent phone call has MacDonald thinking a bit more positively about McGrath. The candidate called MacDonald and asked to talk about the campaign. They ended up speaking for more than 40 minutes, MacDonald told me in an interview this week. And McGrath, according to MacDonald, made an appealing argument to a Kentucky Democrat. McGrath suggested that now-Gov. Andy Beshear had run a fairly safe, centrist campaign in 2019, but is acting boldly as governor. The implication was that MacDonald might like how McGrath acts in office as a senator, even if her campaign is not exciting to an unabashedly-liberal person like MacDonald. 

“She was a lot more personal and authentic in that call,” said MacDonald. MacDonald added of McGrath, “I was shocked. I was not too enthusiastic. She kind of won me over.” 

MacDonald isn’t the only Democrat or one-time Booker supporter hearing personally from McGrath. The former Marine ran a lackluster primary campaign that nearly ended with a stunning defeat, as Booker excited younger, more liberal and Louisville-based Democrats in particular. So McGrath, in the more than two weeks since she was officially declared the winner of the Senate Democratic primary, has been doing a lot of outreach to key figures in the party, including those who backed Booker. State Sen. Gerald Neal, one of the few black state legislators in Kentucky, Kentucky Senate Democratic Leader Morgan McGarvey and congressman John Yarmuth are among those who have been in contact with McGrath. Neal said that McGrath had come to his house to meet with him. McGrath has also been calling county party chairs like MacDonald across the state, as well as meeting with black leaders in Louisville and Lexington like Neal.

“Amy McGrath called me on Friday, July 3rd and we had a great conversation about her race and State House races across the Commonwealth. I told her I would do any and everything I could to help,” Kentucky House Democratic Leader Joni Jenkins told me in an email message. “I have a Zoom meeting with her campaign folks scheduled next week to talk about Southwest Louisville.” 

Jenkins had been a major Booker supporter during the primary. 

None of this is particularly unusual--candidates often want to unify their party after a tense primary. And activists who supported a candidate other than the nominee have some incentive to suggest that the candidate has placated them--after all, core party activists aren’t going to abandon their party and back the other party’s candidate in the general election. 

But traditionally, candidates focus on appealing to their party’s activist base during the primary, and then move to the center in the general election. But the Democratic Party, both in Kentucky and nationally, currently has a real fissure between its younger and more progressive wing and its older and more moderate bloc. McGrath ran to the center in the primary, not trying at all to match Booker’s liberalism. So now, one of McGrath’s first steps in the general election is to assure more liberal Democrats like MacDonald that McGrath has progressive values. 

On the national stage, this is very similar to how Joe Biden spent the early period after he had effectively won the Democratic presidential nomination trying to appeal to Bernie Sanders’ supporters. 

“She wants everyone who came out and demanded change to know she hears them, she wants change too, and she will fight for change in the Senate. The only way to do that is to vote out Mitch McConnell,” said Terry Sebastian, a McGrath spokesman, in an email message.

I asked Sebastian specifically about McGrath appealing to black voters and addressing racial issues, two hallmarks of Booker’s campaign.

“The status quo is not acceptable, and though as a white woman she will never know what it is like to live day by day as a Black American, it is her priority to listen and understand, so Black Kentuckians know she will be a voice for them in Washington and will address the many forms of inequity in our society,” Sebastian said.

To be sure, MacDonald isn’t totally satisfied---she wants McGrath to emphasize Democratic values and positions and worries the candidate at times sounds like a moderate Republican candidate. And some Democrats, particularly those who were very aligned with Booker, aren’t yet really coming around to McGrath. 

“I believe Amy had all the time in the world before Booker got in the race to speak to Black people and she never has. ...She is lukewarm, a flip-flopper and trying to cater to people that aren’t going to vote for her anyways,” said Hannah Drake, a local writer and activist who was a strong Booker supporter. Drake said she had declined when asked if she wanted to speak to McGrath’s campaign about the general election. 

“Amy inspires no one. If by any chance she wins and I highly doubt it on any level, it will be because people hate Mitch that much, and in Kentucky they don’t,” she added. 

“I'm the mom of a Black son and a Black daughter. If your agenda doesn't center their lives, we have a problem,” Kentucky State Rep. Attica Scott said in a recent Twitter message, referring to McGrath’s campaign. Scott was one of Booker’s earliest supporters. 

Since his loss, Booker himself has largely given perfunctory, somewhat unenthusiastic comments about McGrath’s candidacy, while also emphasizing the importance of beating McConnell. 

McConnell Courts the Non-Trumpers 

President Trump has been reluctant to urge Americans to wear masks to fight the spread of COVID-19--and almost never wears a mask himself, at least in public. The president and his White House team are in a tense battle with Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

But McConnell, often aligned with Trump, isn’t taking the president’s approach in terms of dealing with COVID-19. The senator has become a constant booster of mask-wearing. And McConnell recently said that he had “total” confidence in Fauci. McConnell may be saying those things simply because they are in the best interest of both his own personal health and the nation’s. That said, the Kentucky senator surely knows that he is breaking with the president’s positions, even if he is not directly criticizing Trump.

McConnell is in the midst of a two-week trip across Kentucky where he has stopped in nearly two dozen cities and small towns and talked about specific initiatives in those places that were funded by the so-called CARES Act, the economic stimulus bill that was adopted in March in reaction to the virus outbreak. The senator had a big role in crafting that legislation. This is a familiar electoral move for McConnell--reminding Kentuckians that he is a power player in Washington who will probably have more clout in bringing federal dollars back to the state than a freshman senator who might replace him. 

McConnell also said recently that he is fine with changing the names of military bases that currently honor people who served in the Confederate Army, a move opposed by Trump.

Taking COVID-19 seriously, talking about bringing home the bacon and removing the names of Confederate generals from military bases aren’t particularly brilliant political moves—lots of elected officials are doing the same. But these moves illustrate that McConnell isn’t going to run a self-destructive campaign that makes it easy for McGrath to win, as then-Kentucky Gov Matt Bevin arguably did in 2019 against Beshear and Trump is doing to some extent in his race against Biden. 

By taking COVID-19 seriously and touting his ability to bring money home to the state McConnell, in my view, is opening up the possibility for more moderate Republicans and swing voters in Kentucky who are exhausted by Trump to perhaps be Biden-McConnell voters. And McConnell, as the top Republican in the Senate and perhaps the party’s most influential figure besides Trump, may be signaling to the broader GOP that the party does not need to align with Trump’s more unpopular and unorthodox stands and may in fact want to distance itself from the president at times as Trump becomes more unpopular. 

Are You Wasting Time By Reading About This Senate Race?

Maybe. If you only really care about this race in terms of whether McGrath or McConnell wins, I can assure you that McConnell is a heavy favorite and is very likely to remain so. Kentucky is a red state that last elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 1992. 

McGrath’s campaign on Thursday released a poll that showed McConnell ahead 45-41. So that’s pretty close. That’s consistent with some other surveys that suggest McGrath is in the lower 40s and McConnell is below 50 percent. Yes, technically, considering the margin of error in the poll, you could argue that McGrath is effectively tied with McConnell. But a candidate whose own campaign puts out a poll showing that she is losing is probably, well, losing. It would be one of the biggest upsets in modern politics if McGrath defeated McConnell. 

And the fact that McGrath outraised McConnell over the last three months ($17.4 million compared to $12.2 million) isn’t much of an indicator of McGrath’s electoral strength. We know that Democrats across the country are deeply interested in defeating the longtime senator, so of course McGrath is able to raise a lot of money. We know that McGrath can raise a ton of money, use it to run a lot of tv commercials and have all that spending not really motivate voters to get behind her. (See the recent Senate Democratic primary, where McGrath ran commercials for months, those ads made little imprint on Kentucky voters and she nearly lost a primary to an underfunded upstart in Booker.) Also, if having an enthusiastic base of donors was super-important, Bernie Sanders would have been elected president--or at least won the Democratic nomination in either 2016 or 2020. 

All that said, it’s worth tuning into this race for two reasons. First, McConnell is one of the most powerful people in America, so even the fairly small chance that he could lose reelection is a big story. Secondly, the campaign process often has effects beyond who ultimately wins or loses. (For example, Elizabeth Warren and Sanders’ candidacies arguably resulted in Biden adopting more liberal policy ideas.) For example, it’s possible that McGrath, by being somewhat competitive in polls against McConnell, effectively forces the senator to govern less conservatively in Washington, so that he can court more centrist voters back home.  

Democrats think the Northern Kentucky area, including MacDonald’s Campbell County, is increasingly fertile territory for them, because that region has a lot of white, college-educated suburbanites (it’s close to Cincinnati, Ohio) who might be turned off by the Trump-era GOP. McGrath is expected to spend a lot of money and time in that area, and such an investment could strengthen the Democratic Party in that region long-term, even if McGrath loses this campaign. 

Thanks for reading. 

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