Kentucky's next Senate race is in 2026, when Mitch McConnell's temr is up

Grimes's deceptions became a strong secondary factor in her loss, McConnell's campaign manager says

By Tyler Spanyer

University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications

The deceptions of the Alison Lundergan Grimes campaign compounded Sen. Mitch McConnell’s attacks on President Barack Obama, and those were the two key factors in the U.S. Senate race, McConnell campaign manager Josh Holmes said in an interview.

Holmes said the outcome of the race was determined when Grimes refused to say if she voted for Obama. He said the McConnell campaign encouraged journalists to ask the question, and her response “kind of felt like she wasn’t giving you the whole truth.”

The vote gaffe was in the news for more than a week, and “sealed it” for McConnell, Holmes said.

He said it validated the idea, advanced by the McConnell campaign and journalistic fact-checkers, that Grimes wasn’t being straight with the voters.

The key to this race, according to Holmes, was the inability for Grimes to define herself in the public eye. “We were trying to tell our story, because that’s what a campaign is all about,” said Holmes. “Meanwhile she was just throwing stones, instead of attempting to define herself to the voters.”

 For example, in the first round of Grimes ads that questioned McConnell’s voting record, “The advertisements were well designed,” Holmes said. “They were creative and interesting, but the facts were just wrong. Everything about that was perfect, but the research.”

The first of these ads was highly ridiculed by fact-checkers because it incorrectly said McConnell had voted to increase Medicare beneficiaries’ costs. McConnell just played it cool saying, “That’s the oldest, most cynical attack in the Obama playbook.”

Even though the ad was ridiculed for being false, Grimes released more questionable commercials. Glenn Kessler, “The Fact Checker” of The Washington Post, named one as one of the “biggest Pinocchios of 2014.” Kessler noted that an earlier, similar ad had already hit the top of his falsehood scale.

“The Democratic candidate who unsuccessfully challenged McConnell stood in front of the camera and made statements that she must have known are false,” Kessler wrote after the election. “Her central claim — that McConnell had pocketed $600,000 from anti-coal groups — had already earned four Pinocchios. The statement was based on money earned by McConnell’s wife, much of which came from being on a board of bank that finances coal companies. So the ‘anti-coal’ moniker was bogus.”

Holmes, 35, had been McConnell’s chief of staff for more than three years when McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton was forced to resign in the wake of allegations involving misconduct by Ron Paul’s last presidential campaign in Iowa. This left Holmes with running a “presidential level campaign,” as McConnell had described it, for the home stretch.

“The McConnell chief of staff typically has a very heavy hand in the campaign,” said Holmes. “So I was prepared to take that next step. We wanted to run an aggressive campaign and that’s what we did.”

Holmes said of McConnell, “He said to me the most important word in the English language is focus, you just can’t lose sight in what your ultimate goal is.”

The McConnell campaign was record-breaking. According to Holmes, the campaign knocked on over a million doors, a number “no one has come close to.” Add that into the 70 total TV advertisements that it ran and it was a campaign that could rival even some of the most successful presidential campaigns.

“At one time in September, we ran 17 different advertisements in one week,” said Holmes. “Compare that to the 2012 Obama campaign, which ran 24 advertisements in one week.”

The obvious difference here is that the McConnell campaign was a statewide campaign, while the Obama campaign was nationwide. Holmes said most of the advertisements were regional, “so that when you looked out your car window you saw what the ad was talking about.”

So what’s next for Holmes, the campaign managing superstar? He said he doesn’t know, but what he does know is what his wife would think about him running a presidential campaign: “My wife would kill me.”

Politico writers on C-SPAN discuss McConnell campaign

John Bresnahan and Manu Raju, Politico correspondents who wrote a long story about Sen. Mitch McConnell's re-election victory, discussed his campaign Sunday night on C-SPAN's "Q and A" with Brian Lamb. Some tidbits:

McConnell had a preliminary game plan for the race all the way back in 2010. When faced with the possibility of a primary challenge from millionaire Matt Bevin, his consultants showed Bevin's consultants ads they would run, and did run the day Bevin filed his candidacy.

"Think about that," Raju said. "No one had ever heard of Matt Bevin in Kentucky and Mitch McConnell took him seriously enough" to make a six-figure ad buy on the first day of the race.

On the other side, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes and her father, Jerry Lundergan, met with movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg before she became a candidate, seeking wanted assurances of money.

The morning of the day Grimes entered the race, she told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that she wasn't running, then met with supporters and announced. From the start there was a disconnect between her and Guy Cecil, executive director of the DSCC.

Grimes wasn't a good candidate, the reporters said, though not in so many words. "She was never able to really define herself," Raju said. "It was not clear what she stood for, what she actually believed."

McConnell campaign manager Josh Holmes has said that Grimes's refusal to say whether she voted for President Obama sealed her fate. "Who do you think advised her to do that?" Lamb asked.

"Everybody denied it was them giving her that advice," Raju replied. "It was a really curious decision." He said that when he asked Grimes in January if she would vote for Obama again, she replied  "Your facts are mistaken" but wouldn't explain herself.

Bresnahan said, "Democrats up on the hill were just flabbergasted that she would say something like this. . . . "I've talked to some African American lawmakers who were kind of incensed by the whole thing." As for McConnell, "I'm surprised he didn't start laughing in the middle of that debate."

Grimes's repeated jabs that McConnell had grown wealthy in office "got under his skin," Bresnahan said. McConnell's campaign produced an ad showing McConnell shopping at Kroger and driving a modest car but didn't use it because a focus group didn't believe it.

The program also included two segments of an interview Brian Farkas of C-SPAN did with McConnell two years ago but has never aired. (It will soon on C-SPAN3, Lamb said.) In one segment, he talks about Henry Clay, author of major compromises over slavery before the Civil War.

Lamb asked if McConnell will be a compromiser as majority leader. "That's going to be the big question," Raju said: how much he tries to unite his caucus and how much he tries to attract Democratic support.

Student liked the course, but was disillusioned by his interviews with voters on Election Day

By Ben Tompkins

University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications

Tompkins

Recently, students in a special journalism course covering Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race were staged at various precincts to interview voters about who earned their vote and what had shaped their decision. Prior to this course, I had no previous experience with political reporting, nor had I considered political reporting as a career. While our class has received paramount leadership from the co-instructors, Al Cross and Bill Goodman, conducting the interviews at the polls reinforced my stance that political reporting is not for me.

Let’s start from the beginning. The first half of the course was informative and there is no doubt in my mind that the excellent reporting skills that we’ve been taught from our instructors, and the A-list guest speakers they’ve hosted to speak to the class, have expanded upon my versatility as a journalist. Mike Ruehling, Scott Jennings, Sam Youngman and John David Dyche are among a handful of decorated professionals in their respective industries that have come and made our class smarter with each and every assertion made and question answered. The 26-plus years of experience and insight that Al Cross, the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, and Kentucky Educational Television’s Bill Goodman provide to the course is second to none.

Stories on immigration and other situation pieces, follow-up interviews from the Bluegrass Poll, debate stories, and advertisement analyses have pushed my limits and forced me to grow as a reporter. The work that we turned in prior to Election Day was the facet of political reporting that I enjoyed. Professor Cross told the class that it was stories such as our situation pieces that made the difference in educating voters. The story that I wrote on immigration was written to present both sides of the story, covering stances from both sides of the aisle.

Stories like that were aimed at allowing voters to read valuable and informative information so they’d be able to sift through the rhetoric and stretched truths dominated in political advertisements. We were making a difference through our reporting and through the hard work that Professor Cross and a few of the students put into keeping the public informed on our blog. Then came the post-election interviews.

Standing with my blue Papermate pen, yellow legal pad and iPhone 6 outside Meadowthrope Elementary in Lexington, interviewing random voters about whom they had voted for and why, it became clear that a startling number of citizens – startling to me, at least – had no idea why they voted the way they did or what had factored into their decision.

Jeremy Stilz, a 30-year-old Democrat, said he had voted for Alison Lundergan Grimes not because he agreed with what she stood for, but because she wasn’t Mitch McConnell.

“Not necessarily who, but who I was voting against. I more voted for her [Grimes] as a way to get him out – the lesser of two evils kind of thing. It’s time for a change, he’s [McConnell] he’s had far too many terms and I feel like if you’ve had that much time in office you have a lot of knowledge about how to – not necessarily corrupt but change things for yourself instead of the actual agenda that you should be there for.”

When I asked Stilz what issues he felt like McConnell had failed to deliver on, he was unable to give me an answer usable for the purposes of a quote or story. He began to blame the gridlock on McConnell but was unable to put in words what he was trying to express; he didn’t know what the gridlock was or what it meant whatsoever. I had to finish his sentence for him and clearly that’s not what a reporter should do – lead someone to making a decision or statement.

Another man, Frank Monroe, a 62-year-old engineer, went on a tangent about candidates and Washington as the machine. When asked why he voted for Grimes, Monroe replied, “The incumbency of Mitch McConnell. They sit on a stump and tell you ‘I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that,’ until they get up there and become a part of the part of the machine. And you’re either a part of the machine or you throw a monkey wrench in the gears, but if you do that, you’re not going to last. That’s just how it is, everybody knows it.”

The cynical, poor taste that voter interviews post-election left in my mouth made me re-evaluate my enthusiasm for political reporting. I love presenting those around me with information that makes them think, grow and evolve – it’s why I’m working to become a journalist. However, hearing voters like Frank and Jeremy speak on what issues had shaped their decision (or the lack thereof), made me feel as if the work that I had completed in the previous months wasn’t as significant as I had thought.

I interviewed 10 voters on Election Day, certainly not a large enough number for a representative sample. It is not my contention that most people simply get in their car and drive to the polls without the slightest indication of who they like, but the people I interviewed had a difficult time explaining why.

Phyllis Ackerman, a 72-year-old Republican and retired administrative assistant, said she had voted for McConnell on every ballot but his first campaign. But when I asked what it was about McConnell that she liked, the only answer she could muster was his experience. She said that to her, McConnell was simply the best choice, but when pressed to explain, she was unable to express in words what exactly that meant.

While I realize that this experience isn’t representative of all voters, nor should this read as an indictment of them, the fact remains that a surprising number of citizens drive to the ballot box widely uneducated and complain months later when they are unhappy with the elected leadership. If there is one thing that I have no patience for, it is ignorance, and my experience with post-election voter interviews was exactly that – decisions made with no logical explanation of a how or a why.

The man who made himself the third major player in the race wouldn't mind if candidates had more control

By Cheyene Miller
University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications

Scott Jennings, a man who has benefited greatly from the new era of campaign finance, says he wouldn’t mind going back to the old system, when candidates had the power.

Scott Jennings (Courier-Journal photo)

The former political director for Sen. Mitch McConnell ran two organizations that aired one of every seven television commercials in McConnell’s recent race with Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, delivering a one-two combination that made him the third major player.

But he told a University of Kentucky journalism class the covered the race that he would prefer a system where candidates had more control over paid messages than they do now.

“The system, as it has evolved since I first started in politics, now offers outside groups the opportunity to speak as much or more than candidates in some cases because of the contribution limits placed on campaigns,” Jennings elaborated in an email after speaking to the class.

“The current system almost guarantees that a significant amount of money will be spent in major elections on behalf of candidates who cannot legally control the message generated by that spending. I think democracy is more vibrant when people are free to speak in elections; I just think it's kind of silly that candidates themselves – the people brave enough to put their names on the ballot – can’t influence some of the messages that will ultimately be delivered to their benefit.”

Jennings’s two groups, the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition and Kentuckians for Strong Leadership, spent at least $20 million in the Senate race, more than Grimes reported raising. 

He pointed out that this was the first campaign for a federal office in Kentucky since the 2010 Citizens United ruling, which gave corporations and unions the right to make unlimited campaign contributions.

He said the 2014 Senate race was comparable to the 2012 presidential election, in which each candidate had both a campaign committee and an affiliated “super PAC,” an independent political action committee that cannot legally coordinate with the campaign, but can raise and spend unlimited sums of money from both individuals and corporations on behalf of that candidate.

The exact amount Jennings spent is unknown because the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition is a social welfare organization, which under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code cannot spend its money primarily on politics.  

Jennings said most of  the KOC’s money was spent on "issue ads," which don't call for viewers to vote one way or another and thus aren’t considered political.

As a 501(c)(4) organization, KOC does not have to reveal its donors, but Jennings said the vast majority of its money came from out of state. That was also the case with Kentuckians for Strong Leadership, which is registered under Section 527 of the tax code and does reveal its contributors.

The two biggest players for Grimes were the Senate Majority PAC, affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which spent a combined total of $7,830,234, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ compilation (at www.opensecrets.org) of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.  Jennings noted that out-of-state political operatives ran both committees.

"Combined, they got to roughly what Kentuckians for Strong Leadership spent,” Jennings said. According to opensecrets.org, KSL spent $6,409,617 on the race.

Grimes benefited from $1.34 million in labor-union spending, but it was fragmented, which Jennings said is one of the problems with outside spending. "It can become extremely ineffective," he said.

Jennings said that nationally, Democrats were more successful raising super PAC money. However, Jennings successfully played the role of third major player in the Kentucky race, Grimes campaign manager Jonathan Hurst told the journalism class this week.

Hurst said that while McConnell was focusing on defeating Tea Party-backed Matt Bevin in the Republican primary, the Grimes campaign had to deal with attacks from Jennings and his organizations, who were already pounding the idea of Grimes being President Obama’s Kentucky candidate. 

In Jennings, McConnell “had an ally, a third-party ally that could then come in and deal with us as he dealt with Bevin,” Hurst said. “It played a major part in the race.”

Jennings was so influential in the race that the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition became the focus of an Oct. 29 report from the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. It said “No other group has had a larger footprint in Kentucky's U.S. Senate race.”

Jennings said the campaign-finance landscape has changed greatly since his first campaign in 2000, and “I'm sure legislators and courts will wrestle with these questions again in the near future. For political operatives like me, you just play by the rules as they exist in any particular election.”

He added, “I strongly support the right of anyone to donate to political candidates and organizations. And I think it's a good thing when we have a free flowing marketplace of ideas.”

McConnell: 5 to 10 Democratic senators appear ready to vote with GOP on some issues; EPA still top target

By Al Cross
University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications

FRANKFORT, Ky. -- U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell said Saturday that half the senators who have called him since his re-election have been Democrats, giving him hope that he can create bipartisan coalitions as the chamber's new majority leader, especially to block Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

McConnell at meeting

"They're anxious to be under new management, where their work has a chance to be heard, and we're going to do that," McConnell told a meeting of the state Republican Party Executive Committee, adding later, "It's apparent that a number of the Democrats have had it up to here with Barack Obama themselves." He told reporters later, "I think they're getting a little bit tired of doing the president's bidding."

"That's the good news," McConnell told his partisans. "The bad news is, I haven't heard anything from the president since the election that indicates he has an interest in changing anything." He added later, "I keep waiting for Obama to get the message and move to the center."

He said to applause that just as Obama has declared "war on coal," he will "declare war on EPA."

McConnell made clear during his campaign that he would use budget bills to keep the agency from pursuing proposed limits on carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, but he said there are issues other than coal: "There is a widespread anger over the country" about EPA's overreach, he said. He told reporters later, "Coal is the most conspicuous example if it, but it's happening in a lot of other areas."

The other example he cited is EPA's proposal to redefine "waters of the United States," a seminal phrase in the Clean Water Act, in ways that have confused and angered many agricultural interests.

Republicans will hold at least 53 of the 100 seats in the new Senate, and McConnell said "I'm pretty optimistic" that a 54th seat will go their way after a Dec. 6 runoff in Louisiana. Asked if he thinks he can assemble the 60 votes that he said would continue to be needed to pass significant legislation, he said "I think there's a pool of five to 10 Democrats" who could create a center-right coalition.

McConnell said that number may become clearer after the Senate votes next week on the bill that would order completion of the Keystone XL oil-sands pipeline from Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. "We don't know," he said, because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has prevented votes on such legislation, including coal issues. Here's a video clip from cn|2's "Pure Politics":

Whatever bills the Republican-controlled Senate and House may pass, Obama could veto, and McConnell has said that Republicans will not shut down the government by holding appropriations bills hostage.

Asked if GOP leaders might authorize continued operation of essential government services but exclude EPA from that, he said the question was too hypothetical to answer. Asked if a bill that combined a number of issues could get the 67 Senate votes needed to override a veto, he said "I have no idea."

He told the party committee that he expects to have the "bourbon summit" with Obama that has been discussed since the president said he would like to meet with the senator over Kentucky's most famous beverage, but "Whether it's anything beyond a p.r. gimmick remains to be seen."

He concluded his remarks to the committee by saying, "It's harder to be the offensive coordinator than the defensive coordinator . . . It's a responsibility I welcome, and I'm going to carry it out as best I can."

McConnell then told reporters, "I'm going to be more inclined to judge him by what he does than by what he says. I don't want to minimize this opportunity for the country." He said many items that need attention, such as a long-range transportation plan and regulation of government-sponsored financial enterprises, "are not all that partisan." Here's a cn|2 video:

McConnell reiterated that he will support Sen. Rand Paul if he runs for president, but said Paul would certainly seek re-election in 2016. State law bars someone from being on the same ballot for both offices, and Paul's camp has suggested a way around that would be to replace the Republican presidential primary with a caucus.

McConnell said he had given no thought to that idea.

That issue would be decided by the party committee that McConnell addressed first.

The senator said that since he was speaking to a room full of "political junkies," he wanted to mention a few exit-poll results; the one he highlighted was that he won the votes of women by 3 percentage points even though he had a female challenger, Alison Lundergan Grimes: "I think we successfully made the argument to women that while gender's not unimportant, it's not the only reason to cast a vote in an election."

The crowd appreciated McConnell's digs at Bill and Hillary Clinton, who campaigned repeatedly for Grimes and may think that Kentucky is on the list of states she can carry in the 2016 presidential race. "I don't think she'll ever be competitive in Kentucky," he said. "This is not 1992 or 1996," when her husband won the state with pluralities, the last one with 0.9 percent of the vote.

McConnell elected Senate majority leader

After defeating Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes last week to win his sixth term, Sen. Mitch McConnell was elected by his fellow Republicans to serve as Senate majority leader when the new Congress begins in January.

Republicans were able to obtain a majority after this year's midterm elections, unseating at least eight Democratic senators, with a runoff in Louisiana this December making Sen. Mary Landrieu a likely ninth and giving the new majority party 54 of the 100 seats. Democrats have held on to their majority in the Senate for the last eight years, while Republicans have held control of the House of Representatives since 2011. McConnell has served as minority leader since 2007.

As majority leader, McConnell will set the agenda for the Senate, scheduling when bills are brought to the floor and voters are taken. During his campaign, McConnell often spoke of his presumed position to leader if he were reelected, and his experience and position were often mentioned by voters on Election Day and afterward.

Lexington accountant Patrick Cox, 48, said in an interview after voting that he initially considered voting for Grimes, but ultimately chose McConnell. "His experience, probably, and his experience in the Senate, that's was probably what made me stick with him," Cox said.

McConnell's Democratic counterpart in the Senate and the current majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, was also re-elected  by his party and will serve as minority leader in the next Congress.

McConnell says he's for Paul, but is mum on plan for 2020; reiterates vow to go after anti-coal regulations

Photo by J. Scott Applewhite, AP

"There were only two things Mitch McConnell didn't want to talk about Thursday — whether he will run for re-election in 2020 and his eventual legacy," Sam Youngman reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader after scoring the first one-to-one interview after the senator's re-election.

The big news from the story is that McConnell said he would support Sen. Rand Paul for president if he decides to run: "We've developed a very tight relationship, and I'm for him. . . . Whatever he decides to do. I don't think he's made a final decision on that. But he'll be able to count on me."

But when it comes to the 2015 Republican primary for governor, McConnell told Youngman he won't take sides, citing his failed endorsement of Trey Grayson against Paul in 2010. "I've learned my lesson there," he said. "That clearly was a mistake. We all make them, and that's one if I had to do over again I would."

McConnell reiterated that his top priority for Kentucky is "to try to do whatever I can to get the EPA reined in" from its proposed limits on carbon-dioxide emissions, which would effectively ban the construction of new coal-fired power plants, a major goal of President Obama. "It will be hard because the only good tool to do that ... is through the spending process, and if he feels strongly enough about it, he can veto the bill," McConnell said.

"As he rattled off the coal-producing counties he won Tuesday for the first time in his career, McConnell said he feels a 'deep responsibility' to stop the Environmental Protection Agency" from regulating CO2 to combat climate change, Youngman reports.

"I'm absolutely convinced from the people I talk to around the country, not just here but around the country, that coal has a future," he said. "The question is whether or not coal is going to have a future here. It's got a future in Europe. It's got a future in China, India, Australia. But not here? . . . It makes me very angry, and I'm going to do everything I can to try to stop them."

For another Youngman story on McConnell's view of dealing with Obama, click here.

Exit poll shows Grimes won women by 5 points, but McConnell won men by 19, and independents by 15

The exit poll in the Senate race showed that women favored Alison Lundergan Grimes by 51 percent to 46 percent, but men supported Sen. Mitch McConnell by an even larger margin, 58-39.

"That was the key to the McConnell victory in a race that quite rankly many people thought would be close," John King said on CNN.

But perhaps just as indicative of the outcome was the poll result among the 19 percent of voters who said in the exit poll that they are independents. Among them, McConnell won 54-39.

McConnell's leadership position and potential also figured into the vote. Asked if party control of the Senate was important to their vote, 86 percent said yes. McConnell carried that group, 55-43.

Grimes carried self-described moderates 52-44, but McConnell carried conservatives 87-10. Grimes carried liberals 81-16, but they were only 19 percent of the electorate.

Grimes ran hard on raising the minimum wage, and she appeared to win among people with annual incomes under $30,000, 53 percent to 41 percent. But McConnell won all other income groups. When grouped above and below $50,000, voters under that figure were evenly divided.

Grimes apparently carried only one age group, those voters 25 to 29, and her 52-43 margin among them was not certain because they only made up 9 percent of the electorate. McConnell's best age group was voters in their 40s, which he won 63-34.

One of the best predictors of a person's vote by party is how often they attend religious services, and the national pattern was reflected Tuesday. McConnell ran away with those who attend at least weekly (they made up 48 percent of the electorate) while Grimes appeared to win among occasional worshippers and the 13 percent who said they never attend services.

Among the approximately half of the electorate who identify as white evangelicals or born-again Christians, McConnell won 68-30. Grimes won the rest 55-43.

Gun-owning households (64 percent of the electorate) went for McConnell 6630, while those without guns went for Grimes 61-37.

McConnell won all the regions identified by the poll except his home Jefferson County, which he lost 57-41. The poll report on CNN did not give the margin of error for such sub-samples or the overall poll.

McConnell's main theme was to tie Grimes to President Obama. King noted that 62 percent in the poll said they were angry or dissatisfied with the Obama administration, and McConnell won that group, 80-17. Grimes carried those who were satisfied or enthusiastic, 84-14. Forty percent said Here's a video of King's report on the poll's preliminary results, some of which vary from the final numbers:

McConnell scores historic victory; here's how national news media see it (and the Grimes campaign)

Rounding up the national coverage:

McConnell and wife Elaine Chao (Photo: Win McNamee, Getty)

• Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times captures the broad meanings of the result and packs a lot into 51 words: "Mitch McConnell, the taciturn leader of the Senate Republicans who overcame childhood polio and decades of political conflagrations to become the longest-serving senator in Kentucky’s history, cruised to re-election Tuesday. With his party winning control of the Senate on the same night, he fulfilled his decades-long dream of becoming majority leader."
• McConnell worked at helping other Republicans get a majority. In early September, he "called a longtime colleague, Sen. Pat Roberts, from his living room in Louisville, furious about the 78-year-old Republican’s fumbling and lethargic reelection campaign," Phillip Rucker and Robert Costa of The Washington Post report in a long story explaining how the GOP won. "McConnell had in his hands a private polling memo predicting Roberts would lose in Kansas — an alarming possibility that could cost the GOP a Senate majority. McConnell was blunt. A shake-up was needed. Roberts unleashed a flurry of expletives at McConnell. Ultimately, though, the ex-Marine gave in" and fired his campaign manager. He won.
• Rucker and Costa report what close Kentucky observers knew about Alison Lundergan Grimes and her father, Jerry Lundergan: "Although Grimes exhibited strength as a candidate, Democrats in Washington thought her campaign was troublesome. Lundergan, a former state Democratic Party chairman and owner of a catering empire, ran the operation. Grimes prioritized staffers with local knowledge and rejected the national party’s recommendations on hires and advice about messaging. . . . Democrats who had been otherwise impressed with Grimes’s performance were agog at her refusal to say whether she voted for Obama in 2012."
• Manu Raju and John Bresnahan of Politico also reveal some behind-the-scenes stuff: When Matt Bevin was considering a primary challenge to McConnell, an operative for the senator showed Bevin's top consultant what attacks ads on Bevin would look like. "Bevin didn’t listen. And McConnell went to war. The day Bevin announced his primary bid, the McConnell campaign made good on its threat and aired a six-figure ad buy slamming his new opponent as 'Bailout Bevin,' setting the tone for a primary battle where the tea party candidate never got the traction he needed."
• In their very long story, Raju and Bresnahan also reflect the view of many observers in Kentucky, that Grimes failed to "take advantage of the McConnell-Bevin primary fight and try to woo disaffected moderate Republicans." Despite Grimes's shortcomings, her campaign manager, Jonathan Hurst, "insisted the outside money that Republican groups spent late in the campaign was the decisive factor, and that Grimes overperformed in 'the worst terrain' of any Senate Democratic challenger. The story also explores the campaign's massive voter identification-and-persuasion operation and the changes made when "senior adviser" Josh Homes moved form Washington to Louisville and effectively became campaign manager.
• Chris Cillizza of "The Fix" column in the Post explains "Why Mitch McConnell always wins:" He knows his shortcomings, he's always had a good political team; "He's always prepared. . . . He attacks, and doesn't apologize," and "He represents Kentucky," which "has grown more and more conservative."
• Perry Bacon of NBC News said on this morning's "Daily Rundown" on MSNBC that when McConnell speaks to reporters in Louisville at 2 p.m., "the big thing to watch for" is the set of issues on which he wants to make progress: "Entitlement reform? Is it energy? Is it taxes? Bacon noted that in speaking 50 minutes before Obama is scheduled to appear, McConnell is putting the president in the position of responding to him. "McConnell now is more in the driver's seat."
• Sarah Mimms of the National Journal writes "What to Expect from Mitch McConnell's Senate." The first big test of his leadership may be extension of the national-debt limit, early in 2015.
• McConnell is the second Kentuckian to become Senate majority leader, a title that did not exist when Henry Clay dominated the Senate a century and a half ago. Democrat Alben Barkley of Paducah was majority leader from 1937 to 1949, when he became vice president under Harry S Truman.
• For KET videos of the speeches by Grimes, McConnell and others, click here.