Mitch McConnell wins re-election in Kentucky, but Senate majority still in question

Majority leader’s challenger, Amy McGrath raised more than $90m over the course of the cycle, the second-highest mark among any Senate candidate

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has won re-election for a seventh term in Kentucky, although it was unclear as of 8:15pm on Tuesday whether his party had retained a majority for the next Congress or would be relegated to the minority.

The longtime Kentucky Republican tapped into his prodigious fundraising network in the Bluegrass State to beat back a Democratic challenge from retired US Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath.

Mr McConnell led Ms McGrath 55-41 per cent with 62 per cent of the vote reported when The Associated Press called the race.

While Mr McConnell cruised to an easy victory on Election Night, the outcome wasn’t always a foregone conclusion.

In 2019, Democrat Andy Beshear defeated GOP incumbent Matt Bevin for the governor’s mansion.

Ms McGrath raised more than $90m over the course of the cycle, per her Federal Election Commission reports, the second-most of any Senate candidate.

But Mr McConnell’s donors stepped up to the plate, pouring nearly $60m into his campaign account to help counter Ms McGrath’s message on the TV airwaves and in digital advertising.

Throughout the final months of the campaign, Ms McGrath hammered the majority leader for refusing to even show up to the negotiating table with the White House and House Democrats on a desperately needed coronavirus stimulus package this fall.

McConnell’s Supreme Court pitch

But there was one issue where Mr McConnell’s record was unassailable in traditionally conservative Kentucky: the Supreme Court.

The six-term senator has spent decades laying the groundwork to transform the judicial branch into a conservative force field against big-government Democratic legislation. Together with Donald Trump over the last four years, Mr McConnell and the Senate Republican majority remade the federal judiciary in the Kentucky Republican’s conservative image.

Last Monday, Mr McConnell and Senate Republicans confirmed their third Supreme Court Justice in four years, Amy Coney Barrett, on a party-line 52-48 vote, cementing a 6-3 conservative majority on the court that could remain that way for years to come.

US Supreme Court justices serve lifetime appointments.

Since the beginning of 2017, Mr McConnell has confirmed 53 appeals court judges, 162 federal district court judges, and three of the nine Supreme Court justices.

More than one out of every four federal judges in the US have been chosen by Mr Trump and confirmed in Mr McConnell’s Senate.

The appointment of those conservative legal minds to the court — men and women who were hand-picked by the president with the express purpose of, in the GOP’s own words, rolling back Obamacare, women’s access to abortion, gun control measures, and same-sex marriage — is “the most significant, long-lasting accomplishment of the last four years,” Mr McConnell has been fond of saying throughout his 2020 re-election campaign.

McConnell’s in the minority?

Several Senate races that will decide whether the chamber remains in Republican hands or flips to the Democrats in 2021 were too close to call by the time the AP announced Mr McConnell’s certain victory.

If Mr Biden wins the presidency and Democrats reclaim a Senate majority, which they haven’t savoured since 2015, norm-shattering changes could be on the horizon.

Both Mr Biden and the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, have signaled they could be open to eliminating the decades-old “filibuster” rule that effectively requires 60 votes to pass legislation in the chamber.

Such a move would allow Democrats in Washington — with control of the White House and both chambers of Congress — to enact an unprecedented slate of legislation, on everything from health care and the federal tax code to climate change and campaign finance laws.

“It’s going to depend on how obstreperous [Senate Republicans] become” if he is president and they are in the minority, Mr Biden told the New York Times in July, when asked whether he would order Senate Democrats to ax the filibuster.

In a speech on the Senate floor shortly before Ms Barrett’s confirmation vote last week, Mr Schumer warned Senate Republicans they would “never, never get your credibility back” after rushing through her nomination just days before the 2020 election after blocking Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination in 2016 for coming too close to a presidential election.

When Democrats reclaim a Senate majority, “you will have forfeited the right to tell us how to run that majority,” Mr Schumer told Republicans, which many DC veterans interpreted as foreshadowing Democrats’ openness to scuttling the filibuster if a GOP minority puts up roadblocks to a Democratic administration led by Joe Biden.

Former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has publicly advised Mr Biden and Senate Democrats to test the waters of bipartisanship for just three weeks in January and February before hitting the “nuclear” button and eliminating the filibuster for all legislation and federal court nominations.

Mr McConnell has indicated he will keep the filibuster in place for legislation — but not for judicial nominees, including Supreme Court justices — if Republicans hang onto the Senate.

"On legislation... the Senate’s treasured tradition is not efficiency but deliberation," the Kentucky Republican wrote in an op-ed for the Times last summer.

"One of the body’s central purposes is making new laws earn broader support than what is required for a bare majority in the House," Mr McConnell wrote, arguing that while the legislative filibuster does not appear in the Constitution's text, it is "central to the order the Constitution sets forth" and is in line with what America's founding fathers would have wanted.

"It echoes James Madison’s explanation in [Federalist Paper 62] that the Senate is designed not to rubber-stamp House bills but to act as an 'additional impediment' and 'complicated check' on 'improper acts of legislation.' It embodies Thomas Jefferson’s principle that 'great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities,'" Mr McConnell wrote.