Last Call For Mitch Finally Gets Infrastructure Week

A semi-truck hazmat accident on the lower decks of the Brent Spence Bridge has closed one of America's busiest bridges and wrecked traffic in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, with the bridge now closed for weeks. 

The Brent Spence Bridge closure isn't going away anytime soon so it might be time to find a permanent detour.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear told Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky residents to prepare for its primary river crossing to be closed into December.

"We are looking at weeks, perhaps more than a month," Beshear said Thursday. "We have repairs that will take weeks to execute."

Beshear offered some relief for local travelers in Northern Kentucky Friday afternoon.

One lane of I-75/I-71 north between I-275 and the Brent Spence Bridge will be opened sometime Friday night, Beshear said in a Facebook video.

“This lift in traffic restrictions will help local traffic get closer to Downtown Covington on I-75,” Beshear said.

Beshear also announced the Roebling Suspension Bridge would be reopened to traffic at 8 p.m. Trucks will not be allowed.

Governors in both states said the bridge won't reopen until it's safe enough for them to transverse the river.

Beshear said he believes the bridge can be repaired, but he is not sure how long that will take.

 

Mitch McConnell has failed to get funding to replace the Brent Spence Bridge for his entire Senate career. He's used it as a stalking horse to repeal government reform, or as a ploy to attack Democratic political opponents, and he's always blocked any real effort to replace the bridge. 

 

FOX News famously accused President Obama as using the bridge as a prop when he introduced his 2011 JOBS act and McConnell couldn't wait to sneer at him over it...and the JOBS Act never got a vote.

 

Amy McGrath made replacing the bridge one of her major policy issues and she was destroyed in the election anyway. She lost Campbell and Kenton counties by double digits and Boone County by almost 30 points and McConnell frankly admitted that he would never help get funds from Washington, and that Kentucky taxpayers are going to have to pay every penny themselves.

Politicians have spent more than a decade campaigning on the promise of a replacement for the Brent Spence Bridge connecting Cincinnati to Northern Kentucky. Speaking Wednesday in Florence, Sen. Mitch McConnell said Kentuckians should look for a solution from Frankfort — not from offices like his in Washington.

“There’s never been an earmark big enough in the history of America to build that bridge,” he told the small crowd of mayors, business leaders and journalists who gathered at Kona Ice headquarters Wednesday afternoon.

McConnell, who hopes to win a seventh Senate term on Election Day, said the federal government will not set aside the funds necessary to replace the ailing span. If commuters want a replacement, he said, the money will have to come from inside their state. Gas taxes, maybe. The current plan involves tolls.

His opponent, retired Marine Corps pilot Amy McGrath, disagreed in an interview the week before.

“Brent Spence Bridge is America’s number one infrastructure emergency,” she said on Oct. 25. “We have to fix this, and we can do it without tolls, and that is what I am saying I will do.”

She said she sees the Brent Spence as a national issue that should be remedied with national funds — potentially by a cut of the Moving Forward Act, a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill passed by the House of Representatives on July 1.

The Senate, under McConnell’s leadership, has not held a vote on the act. On the day it was passed by the House, he criticized its broad scope, which includes funding for roads, water projects, and affordable housing while pushing for “deep reductions in pollution.”

 

Matt Bevin lost Boone, Kenton, and Campbell counties last year to now Governor Andy Beshear over this, promising Kentuckians would do just that, in particular Northern Kentucky, and Beshear's margin of victory came from winning here on this issue. 

And a year later, the same voters happily voted for McConnell saying the same thing.

 

The bridge is getting emergency repair relief funds now, but it took a devastating accident that may have damaged the bridge beyond its safety capacity and is going to hurt businesses all around the region when we're already in the middle of the worst pandemic in decades.

But that's how it goes here in the NKY. We line up around to block to vote for the guy abusing us, promising to tax and toll us to the tune of $3 billion in one of the poorest states in the nation.

The GOP Suburban Strategy

The first night of the Republican convention was predictably bonkers and a mess of lies and mistruths.

The Republican National Convention started off with a parade of dishonesty, in stark contrast with last week's Democratic convention. While CNN also watched and fact-checked the Democrats, those four nights combined didn't have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republicans' convention.

That wasn't the point.  The point was the McCloskeys.

The couple that chased Black Lives Matter protestors away from their front lawn in St. Louis at gunpoint hit up the Republican National Convention on Monday night. And what they had to say was downright dark.

The McCloskeys, a pair of personal injury lawyers who famously pointed guns at demonstrators in front of their palatial residence this summer, instantly went down as one of the most unusual appearances in the history of presidential conventions. They’re a pair no other president would have invited — but Trump.

Mark and Patty McCloskey warned that in an America under a future President Joe Biden, other Americans would likewise be forced to defend themselves from protestors on their own front lawns.

“No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America,” said Patty McCloskey.

The couple beamed into the convention from their Renaissance palazzo-style mansion in St. Louis, seated on a couch in a room richly-paneled with dark wood, and spoke straight to the camera.

They warned other Americans that they, too, may soon have to wave their own weapons at unruly gangs of demonstrators if Donald Trump loses the 2020 election.

“What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods across this country,” Patty McCloskey said. “And that’s what we want to speak to you about tonight.”

The one thing that will nearly guarantee a Biden loss is if the college-educated White suburban women that voted for the Democrats in 2018 and supported Black Lives Matter over the last three months turn on him over Fear Of Those People In My Neighborhood™.

Patricia McCloskey: They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single family home zoning. This forced re-zoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low quality apartments into now thriving suburban neighborhoods. President Trump smartly ended this government overreach, but Joe Biden wants to bring it back. These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you. So make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats America.

Mark McCloskey: At this moment in history, if you stand up for yourself and for the values our country was founded on, the mob spurred on by their allies and the media will try to destroy you. You’ve seen us on your TV screens and Twitter feeds. You know that we’re not the kind of people who backed down. Thankfully, neither is Donald Trump. President Trump will defend the God given right of every American to protect their homes and their families. But more than that, Trump’s vision for America is a country where you have an opportunity to work hard and build the life you dream of with a job you love, with your children being educated in great schools in a community where your family can play in the backyard without fear, worship in a church without shame and express your beliefs without retribution. Trump brought us the greatest economy our country had ever seen. The Democrats have brought us nothing but destruction.

Patricia McCloskey: When we don’t have basic safety and security in our communities, we’ll never be free to build a brighter future for ourselves, for our children or for our country. That’s what’s at stake in this election and that’s why we must re-elect Donald Trump. God bless you. God bless the president and God bless the United States. 

This right here?  This is the real GOP Suburban Strategy.

The only question is how well it will work, and how many votes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and down-ticket Democrats, are going to lose because of it. Look, I've told you before that the weakness in liberals is NIMBY stuff, and Republicans have always been able to prey on that weakness.  It's why Republicans have won the white vote since before I was born.

But how well will it work?  There's evidence that maybe, just maybe, it's not going to this time. Not even in the Charlotte suburbs like Cornelius, as Politico's Michael Kruse found out.

The suburbs, like this one, just up Interstate 77 from the official site of the start of this week’s Republican National Convention, make up the terrain on which the coming election almost certainly will be decided. The suburbs almost always are a political battlefield, or at least have been for the last generation or more. And if Trump can’t win or even loses a sufficient slice of his support in Cornelius, one of the whitest and most reliably Republican of the key suburbs in this critical swing state, he probably can’t win North Carolina, according to pollsters and strategists. And if he can’t win North Carolina, they say, he probably can’t win reelection. Hence the message he’s been delivering with increasing frequency and ferocity of late, appealing to the “Suburban Housewives of America,” charging that Joe Biden wants to “destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream,” and stressing that residents of American suburbia want “security” and not “low-income housing” forced “down their throats.”

“Why,” he asked in a tweet over the weekend, “would Suburban Women vote for Biden and the Democrats when Democrat run cities are now rampant with crime … which could easily spread to the suburbs?”

It was a prominent and recurring theme on the opening night of the mostly virtual RNC. “They want,” said Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple from St. Louis who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their house earlier this summer, referring to Democrats and echoing language used repeatedly by Trump himself, “to abolish the suburbs.”

The response I got from actual suburban women here on Monday, though, was a mixture of eye-rolls, laughter and confusion. “It’s not something I’m afraid of,” said Connie Searle, 61, retired from a human resources job at a bank.

“I haven’t heard anyone voice concerns about being afraid that angry mobs are going to come out this way,” said Sue Rankin-White, 72, who worked for the Department of Education in Washington and lived in northern Virginia before moving here.

Afraid of the city? “I’m here because of its proximity to Charlotte,” said Camerin Allgood McKinnon, 36, a mother of two who teaches dance.

While Searle, Rankin-White and McKinnon are all Democrats, the prospect of lawlessness in the suburbs doesn’t appear to be a top-of-mind concern, either, for women who aren’t Democrats. On Monday evening, I knocked on the front door of Meredith Wolverton, because the school teacher had posted on the Nextdoor app a string of anti-mask comments and a read of her Twitter timeline confirmed her support for Trump, even though she’s registered as unaffiliated. Standing on her porch, though, when I asked if she was frightened by a possible “invasion” of crime coming up from Charlotte, she flatly said no.

“I’m not concerned about that,” she told me. And she also wasn’t afraid of the coronavirus pandemic. What she was afraid of, she suggested, was the Democrats’ overreaction to it. “I want to be able to go to church,” she said. “I want to be able to go to the gym. I want to be able to go do all these things and have my rights as an American citizen.”

Affixed to her house was an American flag. Ditto for the houses around her. Cornelius started more than a century ago as a mill town. Its growth along with the rest of the area in the last few decades has been dizzying—population less than 3,000 in 1990, still not quite 12,000 in 2000, almost 25,000 in 2010 and now more than 30,000 and still going, with people moving in from the Northeast, the Midwest and elsewhere. But it’s maintained a largely Republican character. The mayor is a Republican. All but one of the five-person town board are Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis started his political career here as a member of that town board.

In 2008, in the four Cornelius precincts, John McCain beat Barack Obama by an aggregate 2,663 votes. In 2012, Mitt Romney beat Obama by 4,043 votes. And in 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 2,984 votes.

The last midterms, though, ushered in a hard-to-ignore change, a byproduct of court-ordered redrawing of districts but also the shifting demographics and political preferences of the many newcomers. Going into the 2018 election, people here were represented in the state house, the state senate and the county commission by three Republican men. After? Three Democratic women.

And this summer, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police, citizens have clamored to have removed a monument of a Confederate soldier in front of a church on one of the town’s main drags — and marched for racial justice in a peaceful protest organized by a trio of local high school students.

“That is something that would not have happened even five years ago, I don’t believe,” Pam Jones, a founder and leader of a group called Unity in Community, told me.

Being from this part of NC, the blood-red foothills of Catawba County, I can tell you the shift from working-class white Democrats to Trump Republicans began 40 years ago with Ronald Reagan and was cemented in 1997 when the GE transformer plant in Conover moved to Mexico under Bill Clinton's NAFTA.  The plant was demolished in 2016 but the damage was done.

And if people here are even considering Joe Biden?

Trump is screwed.

I would love to see some Democratic women in an ad about what Republicans have really done to school funding and failed infrastructure.  And you know who is doing just that?  Amy McGrath, here in Kentucky.



This is a good ad.  For all his "bring home the bacon" stuff, Mitch McConnell hasn't lifted a finger to fix the Brent Spence Bridge and Rand Paul wants to make it into a toll project.

We need more, much more of this to counter the Republican fear card. This is how you do it.

Graham Cracked-up

Over at Cook Political Report, Jessica Taylor moves Sen. Lindsey Graham's race from Likely Republican to Lean Republican as Democratic challenger and former state party chair Jamie Harrison is closing the gap in South Carolina.

Ever since he launched his underdog bid against veteran GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison has needed a lot of things to go right to be genuinely competitive in a place as heavily Republican as the Palmetto State.

One of those was proving he could match the three-term incumbent from a fundraising standpoint. Harrison has now outraised Graham for two consecutive quarters. He has pulled nearly even with Graham for amount raised throughout the cycle, with $30.9 million brought in by Graham and $29 million total raised by Harrison through the end of June.

The second was a more favorable electoral climate that could help the Democratic challenger boost African-American turnout and woo white, college educated suburban voters to his side; now, the uncertainty and anger amidst the COVID pandemic — including a surge last month in South Carolina — has done just that. Racial injustice protests that swept the nation in early June also give Harrison, who is Black, further motivation for turning out African-American voters in the state. Were Harrison to upset Graham, South Carolina — the first state to secede from the Union in 1860 — would become the first state in history to have two Black senators serving at the same time, joining Republican Sen. Tim Scott.

Polling shows that possibility is no longer a long-shot, though the race fundamentals still give Graham an advantage. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted from July 30-August 3 showed the race tied at 44 percent a piece. Graham’s job approval was also narrowly underwater (47 percent disapproving and 43 percent approving), and he was losing independents by 10 points to Harrison. The Democratic nominee is also winning women by 5 points, but that slim advantage seems to be driven by Black women, since Graham is still winning white women by 26 points. Republicans also argue that the poll undersampled GOP voters and said their own polling shows a more sizable lead for Graham.

Two Democratic surveys last month also suggested the race was tightening, and private Democratic pollings shows the same thing. An internal survey from Cornell Belcher at brilliant corners Research & Strategies (conducted July 13-19) for Harrison’s campaign showed Graham with a 43 to 41 percent lead in a four-way race (including a Libertarian and a Constitution Party candidate), and also noted that Harrison was leading by 19 points among college-educated women and 7 points among suburban voters. An Anzalone Liszt Grove survey (conducted July 5-20) for the Lindsey Must Go super PAC showed Graham with a 49%-45% edge, underscoring still why it is much easier for a Republican than a Democrat to come close to 50% in the state. However, Democrats hope that with third-party choices on the ballot, that threshold will drop, but Republicans say they aren’t worried about such a scenario.

Presidential polling shows a much closer race than President Trump’s 14 point win over Hillary Clinton four years ago. Those same Senate surveys show Trump’s lead is now between just 5 and 7 points, but if the presidential race nationally tightens that margin could widen for Trump, making things more difficult for Harrison. Still, it was South Carolina that gave Joe Biden a decisive primary victory back in February that put him on a glide path to the nomination, and Biden does well with Black voters and is a plausible alternative for moderates as well. Plus, Democrats hope that Biden’s selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris, the first Black woman ever on a presidential ticket, as his running mate will further excite the African-American base, especially Black women that Harrison very much needs to turn out.

Several sources in the state point to one crucial decision by the Harrison campaign that has made him more competitive than Democrats in South Carolina usually are — going up early on TV with positive, biographical ads that were left unanswered by Graham for almost two months, with Harrison beginning ads in early April while Graham went on air in late May. Now, Graham’s latest TV ads tie Harrison to national Democrat and highlight praise he’s had for Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Harrison’s latest ad contrasts Graham’s travel expenses with the senator saying he would reauthorize COVID unemployment benefits “over our dead bodies,” a remark Democrats highlight as particularly tone-deaf as coronavirus deaths near 170,000 nationwide, including 2,260 in South Carolina as of Sunday.

And even some Republicans in the state are somewhat skeptical that Graham’s efforts to cast Harrison as a far-left candidate will work. One admitted that Harrison is running “a centrist Democratic campaign focused on dinner table issues that has captured a lot of disaffected moderates” and working to capitalize on demographic realignments in the state.

The unsaid difference is that Harrison rising to the station of state party head means he knows how to politic in the Palmetto State. He has run a disciplined, smart campaign, from opening with his biographical ads in the spring to going after Lindsey Graham with his greatest weakness, Previous Footage Of Lindsey Graham Saying The Exact Opposite Of His Current Position.

Compare that to Amy McGrath, who just has the opposite footage of herself problem and has already taken a new campaign manager as of this week.

Amy McGrath, the Democrat challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, is replacing her campaign manager with a little more than 80 days before Election Day.

In a statement, McGrath’s campaign announced that Dan Kanninen will take over for Mark Nickolas as campaign manager. Kanninen, who recently joined the campaign, served as states director on former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign.

Kanninen ran the North Carolina operation for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, and also oversaw some state operations during former President Barack Obama’s White House runs in 2008 and 2012, according to his bio. Kanninen is currently CEO of his own consulting firm.


“There is no more destructive force in Washington than Mitch McConnell—he is the architect of the dysfunction that is hurting Kentuckians,” Kanninen said in a statement. “Amy has served her country for more than 20 years, and she will continue to fight for Kentucky as senator. I’m honored to be a part of that fight.”

Nickolas will stay on with the campaign as a senior adviser overseeing paid media.

At least McGrath realized what she's doing is not working. Harrison on the other hand has a plan and is executing it.

If only the two were switched and Harrison was running here...

I'll take Lindsey getting the L though.

Last Call For Ditching Mitch

Things are not looking good for Amy McGrath here in Kentucky when it comes to beating Mitch McConnell this fall, as a new poll finds her down 17 points.

A new survey by independent polling firm Morning Consult shows Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with a commanding lead in his bid for a seventh term in Kentucky, leading 53% to 36% over his Democratic challenger Amy McGrath. 

About 700 likely voters in Kentucky were surveyed online from July 24 to Aug. 2 by Morning Consult, whose results have a margin of error of +/- 3.5%. 

The race between McConnell and McGrath is expected to be one of the most expensive U.S. Senate races in the country this year, as both campaigns had over $16 million in cash on hand at the end of June. 

McGrath spent over $9 million in June alone to pull out a narrow victory over underdog Charles Booker in the Democratic primary, whose campaign surged in the final month by portraying him as a more authentic and progressive Democrat. 

The poll showed McGrath still has work to do in consolidating support among Booker voters and other Kentucky Democrats, with 79% supporting her, 12% supporting McConnell and 6% indicating they will vote for someone else. 

McConnell had the support of 84% of Republicans surveyed, while independents favored the senator 45% to 33% over McGrath. 

Over 6% of the likely voters surveyed indicated they would vote for someone besides McConnell and McGrath, with nearly 6% still undecided. 

While a survey two weeks ago from the internal pollster of McGrath's campaign showed McConnell leading by only 4 percentage points, two other polls since June found McConnell up by at least 20 percentage points. 

A survey conducted in mid-June by Oakland, California-based pollster Civiqs and commissioned by progressive think tank Data for Progress found McConnell leading McGrath 53% to 33%.

This is going to be as bad or worse than 2014 and Alison Lundergan Grimes's loss.  Kentucky Democrats have always had a problem with registered Dems voting straight up for Republicans, but McGrath can't even get 80% of the party.  It's very clear that voters here still see Mitch as Senate Santa, delivering the money and the power to the state.  It worked for Hal Rogers in the House for decades, and it's worked for Mitch for some time now and will continue to.

Mitch is pretty much going to win this comfortably because voters here believe Mitch when he lies like this:

Senate Republicans proposed a major rescue package: A trillion dollars for kids, jobs, and healthcare. But Democrats are blocking it all. The American people need a bipartisan outcome, not Democrats’ stonewalling behind closed doors.

— Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) August 4, 2020

This is a lie.  It's Mitch and the Senate GOP who have refused to vote on the House Democrats' HEROES Act which passed May 15. But people here believe Mitch because he delivers. He's Senate leader.  He wouldn't lie to us, right?  Not to his constituents, right?

Oh, and Charles Booker?

He would be losing by 20 points or more. Just sayin'.

Texas As Primarily Kentucky

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

A long-shot Republican US Senate seat in a traditionally red state possibly in play this November, the Democratic primary front-runner, a white military veteran woman pilot who has a big out-of-state cash lead and growing national attention to her campaign suddenly finds herself facing a real fight on her hands from a Black state lawmaker from the state's largest city as he is peaking at the right time thanks to Black Lives Matter protests and his career as a criminal justice reformer, but the pilot may have banked enough of a mail-in ballot lead to win as the runoff primary was delayed due to COVID-19.

While Charles Booker came up short against Amy McGrath in Kentucky last month, the story also applies to Texas this month, where last night Air Force veteran helicopter pilot MJ Hegar faced off against state Sen. Royce West for the right to take on Republican US Senator John Cornyn.  As with McGrath, Hegar counted her chickens before they hatched and ran almost exclusively against Cornyn, while West ran on the protests of the last six weeks.

But the results were the same as Hegar survived with a 52%-48% win.

Air Force veteran Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar will officially face Sen. John Cornyn in November after winning out against state Sen. Royce West in Texas’s Democratic primary runoff on Tuesday. 

Hegar secured the endorsement not just from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee but also from major national groups including EMILY’s List, Everytown for Gun Safety, and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. She has long been the anointed candidate to take on Cornyn, and she was the top vote-getter in Texas’s Super Tuesday primary in March. 

On Tuesday, she again defeated West, a progressive fixture of Democratic politics in Texas. In the lead-up to the runoff, Hegar and her allies spent heavily to make sure they put the race away: According to the Texas Tribune, she, along with the DSCC and EMILY’s List, poured at least $2 million into ads in the Houston area over the last week of the race, outspending West 85 to 1.

That kind of spending might well have been necessary. According to Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University, West had been gaining traction in the race, though Tuesday’s result shows it didn’t happen quite fast enough to get him over the line.
In particular, Jones said, the national movement following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis gave West a lift. “African American officeholders and political elites in the state,” he said, began to “really rally behind West in a way that they hadn’t in the original primary in March.” 

Hegar was always the favorite, however, and now she heads into the general election against Cornyn with about $1.6 million in the bank and a steep climb ahead of her. The Cook Political Report rates the Texas Senate race as “Likely R,” and Jones said he believes that’s “still pretty safe.” 

Texas is becoming less of a sure thing for Republicans: FiveThirtyEight’s polling average shows President Donald Trump in a dead-heat tie with Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the state, and one-time presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke came within a few points of unseating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. 

But Cornyn looks to be somewhat more popular in the state than his colleague in the Senate, never mind the president, and he’s running anywhere from 8 to 13 points ahead of Hegar in recent polling, so she’ll have her work cut out for her.

All of this sounds terribly familiar to me, and both Hegar and McGrath will probably end up losing by double digits.

Or maybe not.  Maybe not this year.  Even Mitch McConnell is spooked.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been crisscrossing Kentucky and delivering a sober analysis of the country's struggle with the coronavirus pandemic, imploring Americans to wear masks and warning in blunt terms that it's unclear how long the virus will continue to wreak havoc on the country. 

"Well regretfully, my friends, it's not over," McConnell said Monday at a hospital in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky. "We're seeing a surge in Florida and Texas and Arizona and yes, here in Kentucky." 

It's a far different message than what's being espoused by President Donald Trump, who boasts about the country's response, demands the economy reopen, rarely urges Americans to wear a mask and dismisses the virus' surge across the Sun Belt and the rise in cases in 37 states.

"It's going to take a while to get a vaccine," McConnell said back home this week, less than a week after Trump promised a vaccine "very, very soon" and in "record time."

McConnell, on the other hand, urges caution. 

"Remember once we get one or more vaccines we're going to need a massive number of doses, not just for our country, but for the whole world," he said, standing outside a hospital this week, holding his disposal facemask in his left hand. "For the whole world. A massive number of doses." 

On Tuesday, McConnell added in Henderson, Kentucky: "The earliest I've heard anybody suggest one could be available would be later this year, and that would be extremely optimistic."

Mitch is running from Trump on COVID-19.  He wants a Senate package and while his top priority is lawsuit immunity from COVID-19 lawsuits, he's moving forward on something I didn't think he would. Of course, he has thousands of Kentuckians and millions of Americans facing the end of COVID-19 unemployment benefits as convenient hostages for his demands, so who knows what will happen next week.

Maybe this is where Mitch and John Cornyn both lose to Democratic military veteran women pilots in November.

Last Call For McGrath Meets McConnell

Amy McGrath survived her primary against Charles Booker...barely...but she ended up winning by 2.8% in a race where she was ahead by 20% at one point.

Former Marine Corps pilot Amy McGrath held off a surging Rep. Charles Booker Tuesday to win the Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate in Kentucky a week after ballots were cast, setting up a big money showdown with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November.

Booker, who won 42.6 percent of the vote, won Kentucky’s three largest cities — Louisville, Lexington and Bowling Green — but the more liberal voters in those cities weren’t enough. McGrath surrounded Booker, winning victories throughout rural Kentucky to win 45.4 percent of the vote.

“While each of our experiences are unique, as a woman in the military, I had to repeatedly fight the establishment during my 20-year career,” McGrath wrote Tuesday in a statement declaring victory. ”...A year after showing the country that Kentucky won’t hesitate to replace an incompetent and unpopular incumbent Republican like Matt Bevin, let’s do it one more time.”

Booker conceded the race in an emailed statement shortly after 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, noting that he had only narrowly lost after being a relative unknown when he entered the race. He said that meant Kentucky was ready for “big, bold solutions.”

“From this moment on, let’s take the frustration we feel and commit to fighting for change like never before,” Booker wrote. “Let’s dedicate to the work of beating Mitch, so that we can get him out of the way. Yes, I would love to be your nominee, but know I’m still by your side. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.”

It was an unusual primary. Delayed by a month over concerns about the spread of COVID-19, then conducted largely via absentee ballot, Kentuckians were left waiting a full week after Election Day for results.

McConnell’s campaign greeted the news by saying it was “great to have” McGrath in the general election.

“Extreme Amy McGrath is lucky to have gotten out of the primary with a victory, but her reputation sustained significant damage all across Kentucky,” said Kate Cooksey, McConnell’s spokeswoman. “McGrath is just another tool of the Washington Democratic establishment who has no idea what matters most to Kentuckians.”

I fully expect Mitch to run another lazy campaign tying McGrath to Pelosi, Biden, the Clintons and Obama, complete with "Will Washington liberal Joe Biden dare show his face in Kentucky?" and count on McGrath's unforced errors to win.

Sadly, he'll most likely win as a result.  What I fear is that McGrath is going to make the same mistakes Alison Lundergan Grimes did in 2014, as Joe Sonka's postmortem from six years ago details.

There isn’t a Kentucky political reporter whose opinion I respect more than CNHI’s Ronnie Ellis, who says one of the biggest errors of Grimes’ campaign was not putting ads on the air during McConnell’s primary fight with Matt Bevin so she could fully introduce herself to voters. The only problem with that theory is it assumes she ever fully introduced herself to voters at any point in the campaign. To a large extent, she never did.

Grimes’ reluctance to give in-depth interviews has been written about extensively, as well as her robotic talking-point answers that too often failed to provide detail on her positions. (I only received eight minutes to interview her in the entire campaign, and she didn’t directly answer a single question.) This was surprising to many who covered her 2011 race for secretary of state, where she came across as intelligent, candid and warm.

There were only about six things people knew about Alison Lundergan Grimes from this campaign, and she repeated them – and little else – over and over again. She is for increasing the minimum wage. She is for gender pay equity legislation and the Violence Against Women Act. She is for union rights. She is for creating jobs in Kentucky. She is not Mitch McConnell, who is against all of these things. She is for coal and gun rights, and she is not Barack Obama.

There were some other policies she mentioned and some details here or there, but they were never effectively presented. How many Kentuckians read her jobs plan, or knew how she was going to pay for any of its proposals?

Nor were voters given any real glimpse into who Grimes is as an individual. The fabulous writer Anne Marshall attempted to answer that last question in her profile of Grimes for Louisville Magazine, but was repeatedly stymied at the gates of the Grimes bubble. When Marshall asked Grimes campaign manager Jonathan Hurst to provide an interesting nugget about Grimes that few people know, he replied, “She loves Swedish Fish.” Eventually Marshall got her very quick interview with Grimes and talked about some personal details, but those were limited to subscribers to the magazine, and buried within a story that quite correctly portrayed her as a talking point machine that remains a mystery to many voters.

McGrath is in the same bubble now that Grimes was then.

She has to break out of it, and that means embracing Charles Booker and several of his policies.  If she runs a defensive campaign, she will lose and lose badly.

It's time to go after Mitch, and go after him hard.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Tuesday's primary here in Kentucky is going to be a disaster than makes Georgia's mess look competent: Louisville and Lexington will have one polling station open each for hundreds of thousands of voters and voting-by-mail may take weeks before the results are known, with possibly tens or even hundreds of thousands who requested ballots being disenfranchised and never getting them by Tuesday's deadline.

And all of that falls on the shoulders of our Republican Secretary of State, Michael Adams.

Fewer than 200 polling places will be open for voters in Kentucky’s primary Tuesday, down from 3,700 in a typical election year. Amid a huge influx in requests for mail-in ballots, some voters still had not received theirs days before they must be turned in. And turnout is expected to be higher than in past primaries because of a suddenly competitive fight for the Democratic Senate nomination.

The scenario has voting rights advocates and some local elections officials worried that the state is careening toward a messy day marked by long lines and frustrated voters — similar to the scenes that have played out repeatedly this spring as the novel coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the 2020 primaries.

Because of a shortage of workers willing to staff voting sites during the health crisis, each of the commonwealth’s 120 counties is opening a very limited number of polling locations. The two largest counties will have just one in-person location each.

On Thursday evening, a federal judge rejected an effort to add polling places in the state’s largest counties, citing a legal standard discouraging last-minute court intervention in election procedures.

That means Jefferson County — the state’s largest, home to 767,000 residents and the city of Louisville — will have as its sole polling location a convention and expo center where voting booths have been set up about eight feet apart in a cavernous hall. About 1 in 5 residents in the county is African American, the largest black population in the state.

In Fayette County, the state’s second-largest county and home to Lexington, voters who want to cast ballots in person will have to head to the football field at the University of Kentucky, where voters will find hand-sanitizing stations and booths where they can fill out paper ballots and scan them through machines.

One precinct for what, four hundred thousand voters?  Another for 150,000 in Fayette County?

This is absolute vote suppression and Adams is throwing up his hands.

Michael G. Adams, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, said his office has been aggressively trying to reach voters through the news media and social media, encouraging them to vote by mail and seeking to reassure those worried that the expansion of mail voting will lead to fraud.

Adams launched an educational campaign around mail-in ballots with the slogan, “Easy to vote, hard to cheat.” The goal is to explain to voters that “absentee voting is a great concept and there are laws in place about how it works,” he said.

“I’m much more concerned about voter confusion than I am about people trying to steal an election,” Adams said.

Like many states, Kentucky relaxed the rules of who can vote absentee by applying the “medical emergency” excuse to fear of the coronavirus.

More than 937,000 voters requested early ballots as of Wednesday, or 27 percent of all registered voters in the state, Adams said.

And tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, won't get their ballot in time.

It's going to be an absolute disaster.  Adams has had months to prepare for this and he's dropped the ball. Regardless of who wins between Charles Booker and Amy McGrath for the right to take on Mitch McConnell in November, there's no reason to believe the primary results will be accurate.

It should mean Adams's resignation.

It won't, of course.

And where is Gov. Beshear in all this? Andy better get off his ass if he wants to not face a primary from either McGrath or Booker in 2023.

Come on, guys.

Last Call For That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

The Kentucky Democratic Senate primary just got heart-attack serious, if a new Charles Booker/Amy McGrath poll is to be believed.

Kentucky state Rep. Charles Booker is pulling ahead of former Marine combat pilot Amy McGrath in the state’s Democratic Senate primary, according to a new poll released Thursday by the progressive think tank Data for Progress.

The survey, conducted from June 13-15 by the online polling company Civiqs, found Booker leading McGrath 44 percent to 36 percent. It’s the latest sign that Booker is heading into the June 23 primary with significant momentum despite McGrath’s outsize fundraising advantage and longtime lead in the polls.
The Data for Progress/Civiqs poll also found McGrath’s favorability rating under water. Of the 898 registered Kentucky voters surveyed, only 24 percent said they have a favorable view of the former fighter pilot, who launched her Senate campaign last year with the support of Democratic Senate leaders in Washington. Fifty-nine percent reported having an unfavorable opinion of McGrath, while 18 percent said they were unsure.

Fewer voters, meanwhile, said they have an opinion of Booker, with 38 percent unsure of how to view him. Still, 33 percent said they have a positive opinion of him compared to 29 percent who reported an unfavorable opinion.

McGrath has long been seen as the favorite to win the Democratic nomination to take on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in November. But Booker has emerged as an unexpected threat in the final weeks before the June 23 primary, especially amid ongoing protests over racial injustice and police brutality.

Louisville, Booker’s hometown, became a hotbed for those protests after 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman, was shot and killed by police in March while officers executed a no-knock search warrant at her apartment.

Booker, a freshman state lawmaker, has appeared frequently at the protests in Louisville, and has knocked McGrath for not being more present at the demonstrations. An advertisement launched this week by Booker’s campaign features a clip of McGrath from a June 1 Democratic debate explaining that she had been absent from the protests because she was spending time with her family.

McGrath’s campaign has noted that she has attended several events and met with community leaders in recent weeks about the issues of racial inequality and police practices.

Despite Booker’s lead in the latest Data for Progress/Civiqs poll, the primary is expected to be highly competitive. McGrath has a massive financial advantage over Booker – her most recent federal filings show her with more than $19 million in cash on hand. And other recent polls show her leading in the race.

A recent internal poll released by Booker’s campaign showed him trailing McGrath by 10 points. Still, that suggests that his standing in the race has improved drastically. A similar internal poll fielded in April showed him down more than 50 points.

I hate to say it, but this brings to mind the 2015 Bluegrass/Survey USA poll showing Jack Conway had an 5-point lead over Matt Bevin heading into the gubernatorial election, a race that Bevin ended up winning by 9 points.  Bluegrass was fired as a pollster and went under, their reputation in the state ruined.

On the other hand, Bevin's commanding win in 2015 because, among other things, Bluegrass's model fatally undercounted white GOP non-college men, was the canary in Coal Country that presaged the rise of Trump a year later.

It's possible that the Civiqs poll is predicting the new model correctly and that the effect of Breonna Taylor's death at the hands of LMPD will rewrite the race, not only next week, but in June as well. It's possible that it's a national trend that will wipe out the GOP, including Trump and McConnell, in November.

Or not. Booker could win and then lose to McConnell by 20 points as opposed to the somewhat closer race McGrath has been running.

We'll see what happens next week.

Last Call For Who Ditches Mitch?

The Kentucky Democratic Senate primary to go up against Mitch McConnell was all about former fighter pilot Amy McGrath, who made a solid run at knocking off Andy Barr in Lexington in a 51-48% loss in 2018 and has spent the last 18 months girding up for taking on the Turtle. McGrath has acted all along like she had already won the primary and has a considerable war chest to prove it.

I say was because the primary, just ten days away now, is about to get competitive here in the home stretch.

Amy McGrath is a national Democratic icon for her bid to take out Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader and reviled figure on the left, raising tens of millions of dollars to fuel her campaign.

But McConnell isn't the opponent McGrath, a former fight pilot, is sweating most right now. Instead, it's her rival in the June 23 Democratic primary: Charles Booker, a state lawmaker who was virtually ignored for months but now has all the momentum in the closing days of the election.
Booker has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Kentucky’s two largest newspapers. And the recent protests over racial injustice and police misconduct in Louisville, Booker's hometown, has shined a spotlight on a candidate who otherwise might have been left in the wake of McGrath's television ad blitz.

McGrath is the favorite of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm and many sitting senators, and it’s hard to imagine she could lose a primary in which she’s outspent her opponents combined by a nearly 30-1 margin through early June. But there are signs it's turning into a real race: Booker is panning McGrath as a bland national Democrat who is predictably tacking to the center, while McGrath is biting back at Booker, accusing him of talking a big game on health care and voting rights but not backing it up.

"I don't really know what position Amy McGrath takes because she goes back and forth on everything depending on what consultants seem to say,” Booker said in an interview. “I know that Kentuckians can smell BS from miles away.”

“I’m not, as Mr. Booker claims, 'a pro-Trump Democrat.' I’m pro-Kentucky and pro-America,” McGrath said, refuting her top opponent in a POLITICO interview after months of keeping her fire trained on McConnell.

McGrath's position as McConnell's leading challenger and the then-viral advertising for her failed 2018 House bid have made her a darling of Democratic small donors. As of early June, she had a staggering $19 million in cash on hand, more than McConnell's 2014 opponent, then-Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, spent for the entire election — and that's after already running more than $8 million in TV ads.

She's not just using that spending advantage to pummel voters with advertising. She's also touting her campaign’s high wages, generous health care and efforts to inform people about changes to voting amid the pandemic — contrasting herself with Booker and underdog Mike Broihier.

“It’s really disappointing that I’m the only candidate in the Democratic primary that has the integrity to lead on these issues within their own campaigns," she said.

But beneath her powerhouse fundraising, there are signs of struggles. McGrath had a bumpy rollout last year, saying in one of her first interviews that she would have supported Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, only to reverse herself later that day. More recently, Republican governors and Cindy McCain, the late Sen. John McCain’s widow, condemned ads of hers using their images to attack McConnell.

And McGrath has few substantial in-state endorsements, while Booker has been endorsed by prominent Kentucky media and close to two-dozen elected officials.

“There's not a lot of enthusiasm for Amy among Democrats. Charles’ supporters are very enthusiastic,” said one prominent Kentucky Democrat, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Booker has taken the lead on Black Lives Matter issues in the state after the murder of Breonna Taylor at the hands of the LMPD while McGrath has been concentrating on McConnell, and the ground has absolutely shifted under her feet in the last three weeks.

The real question is who has the best shot at dethroning Mitch McConnell, when both of them are long shots at best?

My brain says McGrath can keep it close, but Booker would be an amazing shift.  I just don't think he can beat Mitch.

We'll see.

Last Call For Bringing Home The Fakin'

Remember folks, Mitch McConnell is up for reelection in November. Former fighter pilot Amy McGrath is the front-runner in the (now June) primary, and McConnell knows his fortunes are irrevocably tied to Donald Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. McGrath knows damn well that McConnell is vulnerable on his treatment of Kentuckians in crisis.

Two weeks ago I received a letter from Angie, a working mom. She wrote to me about her 12-year-old daughter, Addison, who has had Type 1 diabetes since she was 3. Sometimes, Angie and her husband, Steve — who have insurance — pay as much as $1,000 out of pocket per month for the medication and supplies their daughter needs to stay alive. That’s in addition to the $1,250 she and her husband are paying every month for their health insurance premiums.

Angie has been fighting with insurance companies for nine years to get coverage for her daughter’s lifesaving health needs. And she’s not alone. As I talk to Kentuckians across the state, the No. 1 concern I hear about is access to affordable, quality health care.

Kentucky has some of the worst health statistics in the nation. We have the highest mortality rate for cancer and among the worst rates of lung disease, diabetes and heart disease.

Yet as Kentuckians struggle, Sen. Mitch McConnell has fought to make our health care system and its outcomes even worse.
As we are in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic, let’s remember that McConnell has consistently voted to cut funding for medical research and immunization programs, and cut funding to the very agencies (CDC and NIH) that should be prepared for an infectious disease outbreak. Instead of acting immediately to include provisions in an emergency bill to control the costs of vaccines and treatments being developed in response to this outbreak, he held up coronavirus funding in order to make sure Big Pharma would still be able to gouge prices.

Businesses are shuttering, schools are closing, our front-line workers are at risk, and McConnell took off for a long weekend instead of working with his colleagues on the legislation we urgently need to curb this public health crisis. What good is a powerful senator if he treats Kentuckians like this?

But Mitch has drafted a new player in his battle to keep his seat: Gov. Andy Beshear.

As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell negotiated his chamber's $2 trillion coronavirus response package, he was turning to a Democrat in his home state for advice: Gov. Andy Beshear. 

McConnell and Beshear have been in frequent contact in recent weeks, as McConnell shaped the Senate's $2 trillion stimulus deal and Beshear led Kentucky's effort to slow the spread of coronavirus there, sources close to both men said. The conversations started with the state's basic needs -- tests and protective medical equipment -- and eventually encompassed how the federal government could help states, municipalities and hospitals. Top staff members continue to speak daily. 

"It has been really helpful to get ground truth on this while developing a bill of this magnitude," said Phil Maxson, McConnell's chief of staff. 

The link between the nation's most powerful Republican lawmaker and his home state's first-year Democratic executive, who was sworn in just three and a half months ago, underscores the central role governors like Beshear have played in attempting to slow the spread of coronavirus. 

Beshear's daily briefings, alongside Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack and American Sign Language interpreter Virginia Moore, are sober and straightforward -- lacking the gusto of New York's Andrew Cuomo, but similarly accomplishing the dual tasks of providing instructions to his state's residents and outlining its needs and challenges for the federal government. 

"I will do what it takes. I will spend what it takes," Beshear said Thursday.

Beshear is caught in the middle, like many of us here in Kentucky.  On the one hand, he has done an amazing job getting out ahead of the state's COVID-19 cases when they were smaller in number, with social distancing and closures, two weeks ago.  We're still seeing a major spike in cases, going from 250 to 300 today alone, and from 5 reported deaths to 8.  But we're nowhere near in as bad as shape as neighboring Tennessee, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia, Illinois or Indiana are.

On the other hand, he's absolutely refused to attack Mitch McConnell for his role in weakening the nation's public healthcare system, trying to destroy Obamacare, and trying to take affordable healthcare way from more than 10% of Kentuckians.  Beshear needs to keep McConnell happy, and McConnell needs to keep Beshear happy, and it just so happens that there's enough enlightened self-interest there to keep Kentucky alive, too.

I don't expect McGrath to win, frankly.  McConnell is too canny a politician and will have too many opportunities to point to Kentucky's success in limiting the spread of COVID-19 so far.  When the checks show up in people's mail next month, they'll remember Mitch...and Donald Trump.

Even though Mitch made things infinitely worse.

Mitch McConnell Has To Go

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may be telling reporters that there will be Senate trial if Trump is impeached, but in ads running here to Kentuckians online, he's telling everyone that'll never happen.

In a new campaign video on Facebook, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell pitches himself as the man who can end the House's impeachment inquiry, a sign of how the chief Republican in the chamber might handle an impeachment trial should the House pass articles charging President Donald Trump with crimes. 

"Nancy Pelosi is in the clutches of a left-wing mob," McConnell says directly to a camera. "They've finally convinced her to impeach the President. All of you know your Constitution. The way that impeachment stops is a Senate majority, with me as majority leader." 

"But I need your help," he adds. "Please contribute before the deadline." 

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her support for an impeachment inquiry into Trump, asserting that Trump used his office for personal political gain in July when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, and his son Hunter. 

On September 25, a day after Pelosi's announcement, McConnell said Senate Republicans "support the established proper procedures" for considering a whistleblower's complaint at the center of the House's investigation. McConnell told Politico that the Democrats had "already overplayed their hand" and there was "no quid pro quo" between Trump and Zelensky, according to a White House's summary of the call. Democrats countered that Trump had held up nearly $400 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine not long before asking the Ukrainian leader to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on the probe into the Bidens, even though he did not explicitly mention the aid on the call. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden. 

That same day, the McConnell campaign account unveiled Facebook ads on the topic that consumed Washington, according to Facebook's ad library. "Pelosi is obsessed with impeaching President Trump," said one ad. "And your conservative Senate Majority is the ONLY THING standing in her way." A couple days later, McConnell's video was attached to the ads. 

And yes, those ads are running here in Kentucky.  Kinda awful really.

Also, there's no way McConnell will let a true Senate trial proceed.  You can take that to the bank.

Time for us to elect Amy McGrath.

Mitch Gets The Coal-ed Shoulder From Amy McGrath

This ad is up in Kentucky this week from Democratic US Senate candidate Amy McGrath, and yeah, this one's going to leave a mark.

Devastating ad for McConnell pic.twitter.com/K80B0DaSPm

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) August 23, 2019

Understand coal mining still happens in Kentucky and it will for the foreseeable future. Even if coal mining stopped across the state tomorrow, the issue of miners needing health benefits from a lifetime of work in dangerous conditions would still be important to people here and across coal states. This meeting happened at the end of last month.

About 12,000 former miners nationwide rely on the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund to cover costs and make ends meet, but a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office showed that the fund is $4.3 billion in debt, and a tax on coal which funded the trust fund was cut in half in January. Many advocates for the fund worry it may soon become insolvent.

There is no cure for black lung disease, which is caused by the inhalation of dust particles in mines leading to severe lung damage. Cases of the deadly disease have surged in recent years in Eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia.

The Kentucky Republican, who the miners and their advocates see as key to passing any sort of Congressional assistance, told the group of miners in a brief statement “that they were going to be taken care of,” said Kenny Fleming, a former Pike County miner who suffers from black lung.

“We just have to take him at his word and then we also have to keep him at his word, which I think that’s what we’re after,” Fleming said. “Hopefully he will come through.”

Fleming said McConnell was “kind of vague” and didn’t provide much detail on how the miners would be assisted.

Jimmy Moore, the head of the Letcher County Black Lung Association, said he found McConnell’s conduct “rude.” After the meeting, he said McConnell wouldn’t do anything to reinstate the tax which funded the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.

“He might’ve stayed a minute,” Moore said, referring to McConnell’s quick exit from the meeting. “...It was a worthless trip, that’s the way I feel.”

Robert Steurer, a spokesperson for McConnell, said the senator was “glad to welcome his constituents to the Capitol,” and that members of McConnell’s staff spoke with the miners for about an hour.

Mitch's staff was there for about an hour.  Mitch wasn't. Too busy being the Grim Reaper of the Senate, making sure nothing passes.

For Mitch McConnell to show up for literally all of 60 seconds to "talk" to coal miners with black lung and then vanish is going to hurt him.

And it should.

It's Time To Ditch Mitch, Con't

Amy McGrath is running for Mitch McConnell's Senate seat, but in a state where Donald Trump won by 30 points, she found out in less than 24 hours that threading the "Trump good/Mitch bad" needle is next to impossible in her first major interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal.

CJ: One of the centerpieces for Sen. McConnell's reelection appears to be his work in reshaping the U.S. judiciary. If you had been a senator, would you have voted for Brett Kavanaugh to be on the Supreme Court — why or why not?

McGrath: Well, that's a good question. I didn't listen to all of the hearings. I don't think there was anything, and I'm not a lawyer or a senator on the Judiciary Committee, so I don't know the criteria. But I was very concerned about Judge Kavanaugh, what I felt like were the far-right stances that he had. However, there was nothing in his record that I think would disqualify him in any way. And the fact is when you have the president and the Senate, this is our system and so I don't think there was anything that would have disqualified him in my mind.

CJ: Did the Democrats treat him unfairly with the accusations that were against him waiting until the last minute, as some said, to try and delay the hearings?

McGrath: The Supreme Court nominees are a lifetime appointment, and I think there needs to be a lot scrutiny for lifetime appointments. I don't fault anyone for bringing up things that could give folks pause about the character of someone getting a lifetime appointment.

CJ: Did you think Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's accusation was credible?

McGrath: Yeah, I think it's credible. I think this is — I think many Republicans thought it was credible. And —

CJ: That wasn't disqualifying then?

McGrath: Well, I mean I think again, I think it's credible but given the amount of time that lapsed in between and from a judicial standpoint, I don't think it would really disqualify him.

CJ: So you would have voted for him to be on the Supreme Court?

McGrath: You know, I think that with Judge Kavanaugh, yeah, I probably would have voted for him.

(Around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, McGrath tweeted that upon further reflection, she would not have voted to confirm Kavanaugh.)

Surprise!

Seriously, as a Democrat, Mitch engineering the theft of not one, but two Supreme Court seats should be an ironclad reason as to why McConnell cannot be allowed to continue to represent the state, and if McGrath can't take a solid side on that, then...Trump or no Trump, it's gonna be a terrible time for her.

It's gonna be a long 15 months.

It's Time To Ditch Mitch

Amy McGrath is officially entering the 2020 Senate race to unseat Mitch McConnell.

Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot who rose to national prominence last year in her failed campaign for Congress against Republican Andy Barr, is turning her sights on a new target: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. 

In a three-minute video released Tuesday, McGrath said McConnell has "bit by bit, year by year, turned Washington into something we all despise." 

"I'm running for Senate because it shouldn't be like this," McGrath added. 

McGrath's candidacy marks a significant recruiting coup for Democrats. She emerged as an unlikely fundraising juggernaut in her congressional race, bringing in millions of dollars after her campaign released a biographical video that went viral, and becoming a Democratic celebrity in the process. 

McGrath will have her work cut out for her, however. President Donald Trump won Kentucky by nearly 30 points in 2016, and his presence at the top of the ticket in 2020 will likely help drive Republican voters to the polls 

McGrath failed to win her House race in 2018 against Barr, who won by about 3 points, despite being outspent by McGrath by nearly $3 million. 

In the race against McConnell, McGrath appears poised to run as a moderate seeking to break the partisan gridlock in Washington. In an interview Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," McGrath said she had watched the Democratic presidential debate and was concerned that many candidates were positioning themselves too far to the left on issues like health care. 

Meanwhile, McConnell has shown himself to be a canny and ruthless opponent. In 2014, he beat back a much-hyped rival, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, in a 15-point victory. 

McConnell's team welcomed the challenge from McGrath. 

"Amy McGrath lost her only race in a Democratic wave election because she is an extreme liberal who is far out of touch with Kentuckians," said McConnell campaign manager Kevin Golden. "Comparing President Trump's election to 9/11, endorsing a government takeover of healthcare, and calling the wall 'stupid' is a heckuva platform that we will be delighted to discuss over the next sixteen months." 

On "Morning Joe," McGrath conceded that McConnell "has been formidable" after more than three decades in the Senate. But, she added, "this is a different race." 

"The things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done," McGrath said. "He's not able to get it done because of Mitch McConnell."

Here's McGrath's announcement video, and it's a great one.




I don't know if she can win. I don't know if any Kentucky Democrat can beat Mitch McConnell. But we have to try, and McGrath is the best chance we've had in a while.  She still has to get past the primary, but she's got my vote already for that next May.

But Mitch now has 15 months to call her extreme and socialist and weak and to fill voters' heads with the glory of defending Trumpland from the Evil AOC menace, and in a state where Trump won by nearly 30 points, he can all but say "You're not seriously going to elect this bitch over me, right?" and get away with it.

But you want the plan to get rid of Mitch McConnell?  Her name is Amy McGrath.

Help her win.