Last Call For The Booker Of History

Kentucky state Sen. Charles Booker is the Democratic candidate running against GOP Sen. Rand Paul here in Kentucky this November, and Booker's new campaign ad is a hard strike against Paul.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker stands with a noose around his neck in a new campaign ad criticizing his opponent, Republican incumbent Rand Paul, for holding up legislation in 2020 that would have made lynching a federal hate crime in America.

The certain-to-be-controversial ad, which Booker's campaign released Wednesday morning, includes a content warning for "strong imagery."

It does not mention that Paul went on to co-sponsor a new (and bipartisan) version of that legislation. The Senate unanimously voted this March to pass the updated Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which is now law.

"The pain of our past persists to this day," Booker says in a voiceover as his ad begins, showing a historic lynching photo and a noose hanging from the limb of a tree. "In Kentucky, like many states throughout the South, lynching was a tool of terror. It was used to kill hopes for freedom.

"It was used to kill my ancestors," Booker says as he appears onscreen, standing next to a tree with a noose looped around his neck.

"Now, in a historic victory for our commonwealth, I have become the first Black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate."

"My opponent?" he says as an image of Paul appears. "The very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The person who singlehandedly blocked an antilynching act from being federal law."

"The choice couldn't be clearer," Booker continues over the resounding creak of a rope, shown in close-up, before he appears onscreen with his hands gripping the noose. "Do we move forward together? Or do we let politicians like Rand Paul forever hold us back and drive us apart?

 

Now, having lived in this state for 16 years, I can tell you two things: One, that Booker is right about Rand Paul's history as Senator, and two, that doesn't change the fact that Kentucky is 88% white. The backlash on this ad is going to be incredible and nationalized. FOX is going to have a field day with this here for weeks, if not months.

This is going to be framed as the Worst Thing Black Democrats Have Ever Done™. Expect Black Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott and Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears dragged out to denounce Booker and demand he drop out of the race.

Oh, and part of me feels like Booker just put a target on the backs of every Black person here in the Commonwealth.  He's still right about the state's history of lynching. He just threw it in the face of Rand Paul and white Kentucky. Booker needed to get national attention to change the trajectory of an assured double-digit loss.

But I don't know if this is going to help here. I really don't.

We'll see.

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.

Another Hat In The Ring Against Mitch

Amy McGrath isn't the only name running against Mitch McConnell.  Louisville state Representative Charles Booker is considering entering the race and says he'll make a decision by the end of the month.

Booker, 35, a first-term state legislator, told The Courier Journal he filed the paperwork for his committee Monday and plans to launch a statewide listening tour by the end of November before he makes a final decision on whether to run.

"It's clear that Kentuckians are ready for a change and they're ready for a movement," Booker said. "My goal with this process is to make sure that we can build the infrastructure needed to catalyze that."

He said he's tired of McConnell using Kentucky as a "poker chip" to gain power while the Bluegrass State suffers.

"The fact of the matter is: (McConnell) knows how to do something about it. He has the power to and chooses not to," said Booker, who was born a few weeks before McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984. "And that's the part that pisses me off, because while he jokes about calling himself the Grim Reaper, we're literally dying."

Booker, who has Type 1 diabetes, said he's had to ration insulin before and "nearly died myself" doing so. McConnell is blocking a bill that House Democrats say would lower drug prices.

"(McConnell) has the tools, he has the ability to help Kentucky. He chooses not to and mocks us while he doesn't," Booker added.

Booker's decision to form an exploratory committee marks a significant step toward potentially running for U.S. Senate. But the state representative previously said that he had an eye on Washington, D.C.

Here's Booker's announcement ad, and it's a good one.



Booker has a real future. We'll see if it goes through McConnell's seat.