The dream had been deferred for years, but when it was finally realized, how splendid it was. On November 4, 2014, McConnell trounced Alison Lundergan Grimes, winning by more than 15 percentage points, the second largest of all his reelection margins. He won just about the entire state outside of Louisville and Lexington—in Martin County, where the effects of the 2000 coal slurry spill live on, he won 74 percent of the vote. Barely had he received word of his own victory than news of the broader triumph arrived: Republicans were winning across the country, giving the party more than enough seats in the Senate to finally claim the majority with McConnell at the helm. “Tomorrow, the papers will say I won this race, but the truth is, tonight we begin another race . . . that’s the race to turn the country around,” he said in his victory speech at a hotel in the suburbs of Louisville—in Jefferson County, where he had celebrated his first victory thirty-seven years earlier.
The midterm election of 2014 had been, in a sense, the perfect Mitch McConnell election. It had been dominated, more than any cycle before it, by the dark money made possible by the court rulings championed by McConnell and by his blockage of legislation to require disclosure of the spending. Groups that did not disclose where their money came from spent more than $215 million, up by more than a third from the 2010 midterm election. More than two-thirds of this undisclosed spending was on behalf of Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
McConnell himself benefited hugely from this dark money in his race against Grimes. He received $23 million from outside groups, more than double what Grimes did. Some of the spending was from known entities like the National Rifle Association, but the single biggest outside spender was a mysterious group called the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, which spent more than $7.5 million on ads attacking Grimes. Because the organization classified itself as a group engaged in “social welfare,” not just elections, it did not need to disclose its donors. But its purpose was plain: the only name associated with the group was a veteran of McConnell’s prior two campaigns.
The election also suited McConnell in being even more devoid of substantive policy debates than is the norm for modern campaigns, freeing him from having to state what he believed on important issues of the day. McConnell struggled mightily on the few occasions when the subject turned to the success of the Affordable Care Act in Kentucky, where the gains in health coverage had been among the three largest in the country. In the campaign’s sole debate, he suggested that the state’s version of the law could continue in some form even if the federal law was repealed. The moderator declined to follow up, Grimes failed to challenge the claim nearly as aggressively as she could have, and in the days following it received far less attention than her refusal to say whether she had voted for Obama for president. As John Yarmuth, the Democratic congressman from Louisville who has known McConnell for years, put it in an interview with The Atlantic just before the election: “Margaret Mead once said that the only thing worth doing is to add to the sum of accurate information in the world, and Mitch doesn’t do a lot of that, especially when it comes to the Affordable Care Act.”
If the election had a theme, it was sourness—the sourness that Americans felt about an economy that was improving by many metrics but not enough for them to feel it themselves, and the sourness they felt about a government in Washington that seemed disconnected from their anxieties and was getting nothing done. Just as McConnell had calculated it would, this sourness rebounded against the party holding the White House, never mind who had engineered the standstill. And that fallout would now elevate him to the post he had aspired to for most of his life.
Given the nature of McConnell’s strategy, it was jarring to hear him declare in his victory speech at the suburban Louisville Marriott that he hoped that, with him in charge of the Senate, Democrats and Republicans could start working together once again. “Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict,” he said.
As brazen as this pivot toward comity might have seemed, it was not out of the realm of possibility that McConnell actually hoped to reach consensus on a few issues. As always, everything was about the next election, but the calculus around the next election might have changed now that his party was in the majority: where before it had helped his side to stymie the president, since the blame would accrue mainly to him, now the electoral consequences of dysfunction might also fall on a Congress under Republican control. Cooperation might now be in his self-interest.
There was, of course, another possible motivation for trying to accomplish some things in Washington, as Yarmuth noted in his Atlantic interview. Just moments earlier, Yarmuth had been telling a pro-Grimes rally that McConnell “doesn’t have any core values. He just wants to be something. He doesn’t want to do anything.” But now he noted that McConnell might just want to do something for the sake of his place in the annals of the institution he revered. “If he were to become majority leader, I think he actually will try to make things better,” Yarmuth said. “He will begin to think about his legacy, and he will not want the history books to write how he has been for the last thirty years.”
If so, it would be a long time in coming. But it would, in all likelihood, be too late.