Inside McConnell's war
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LOUISVILLE, Ky. — As Matt Bevin weighed whether to jump into the Senate GOP primary, Mitch McConnell thought the Kentucky businessman should see what was in store for him if he did.
At a private meeting in Washington in the summer of 2013, McConnell emissary Danny Diaz met with Bevin’s top consultant, Mark Harris, to show him the ammunition the Senate’s top Republican was ready to use. The GOP leader’s team had spent months digging up dirt on Bevin and even prepared a 2½-minute attack ad dubbed “the kitchen sink,” with a female narrator accusing Bevin of getting rich “the Wall Street way,” “lying on his résumé” and “chronically” failing to pay taxes.
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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 in which the tea party candidate never got the traction he needed.
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It was a lesson in running against the most powerful Republican in the Bluegrass State, and just one example of McConnell’s shrewd, presidential-caliber campaign that was years in the making and ended in a stunning 16-point margin over Alison Lundergan Grimes. From opposition research that helped sink his tea party opponent to a strategy that consistently thwarted his 35-year-old opponent’s attempt to distance herself from President Barack Obama, all while embracing cutting-edge technology and campaign techniques, McConnell showed that even a 30-year veteran of the Senate can score a victory for the establishment by running a textbook campaign.
Interviews with officials in the McConnell, Bevin and Grimes campaigns, and the GOP leader himself, show how the incumbent managed to overcome persistently low approval ratings, millions of dollars in attack ads from the left and the right and voter disgust with Congress, to defeat a high-spending tea party candidate in Bevin and then a fresh-faced Democratic foe in Grimes.
He won by a landslide, winning all but 10 of the state’s 120 counties.
That victory propelled McConnell, 72, into his new post as Senate majority leader, completing his own rise to power in a chamber where he first arrived 50 years ago as a college intern and solidifying his reputation as his party’s top political tactician.
In an interview, McConnell described the 2014 race as the most “complex” campaign he’s run in his three-decade Senate career.
“It’s hard to answer the question what was the toughest [campaign], but boy, these were certainly the most complex set of challenges,” McConnell, wearing a turquoise turtleneck and jeans, said in his living room at his home here in Louisville, with pictures of his and his wife’s ancestors covering the wall. “From the primary to the government shutdown, things that were going on internally and externally … Here it was just warfare, constantly. On and on. On and on.”
The campaign, led by McConnell’s senior adviser, 35-year-old Josh Holmes, began four years ago — immediately after the Republican leader realized he needed to recalibrate his tactics following Rand Paul’s stunning 2010 win in the Senate GOP primary over a candidate McConnell had publicly endorsed.
McConnell was undoubtedly helped by Obama’s deep unpopularity in Kentucky — McConnell aides had a running contest of who could get more “Obama” mentions into daily newspaper accounts about the race — and the fact that Bevin and Grimes proved to be shaky opponents under the glare of the campaign spotlight.
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And he was aided by GOP groups dumping huge money into ad buys, including the super PAC Kentuckians for Strong Leadership and its nonprofit affiliate, which poured roughly $20 million into TV and radio ads, most of which lashed Grimes. It allowed McConnell to run an ad campaign in which roughly half of his ads were positive testimonials about his Senate career.
But it was more than just that.
How McConnell pulled off a win illustrates a combination of innovative and old-school tactics. The campaign used new technology for extensive and persistent voter targeting efforts. They went hyper-local with ads, creating a staggering 70 campaign commercials, many aimed at wooing specific pockets of voters in different regions of the state.
The campaign massaged McConnell’s image, spending millions highlighting regular Kentuckians who benefited from his constituent service program, a necessary move now that pet spending projects — a McConnell specialty during two decades on the Appropriations Committee — are banned by Congress.
And, of course, he used brute force to expose his opponents’ vulnerabilities.
“I think good opposition research is smart if you’re going to run a good campaign,” McConnell noted. “Once you become an incumbent, everybody who challenges you thinks that you are going to be the issue. But everybody has got a record.”
Derailing opponents
It was McConnell’s reputation as a hard-nosed campaigner that made it hard for his foes on the left and the right to find a high-profile challenger.
Her campaign, it struck me, was two things: He's been there 30 years, and I'm a woman.
Prospective opponents were quick to pull their names from contention. In a 2012 email from conservative GOP Rep. Thomas Massie to McConnell’s then-campaign manager, Jesse Benton, the northern Kentucky congressman said he wouldn’t run against McConnell. The email’s subject line: “A statement of sanity.”
And after one Kentucky Democrat privately learned McConnell’s team had details of his divorce, he announced publicly he would not try to challenge the GOP leader.
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A McConnell supporter at his victory party on election night. | M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico
On the Republican side, Benton and other senior McConnell aides began in 2012 scouring the state and dropping by virtually every tea party...