Mitch McConnell recalls childhood battle with polio in acceptance speech saying US will overcome Covid

Senate majority leader sails to victory over well-funded Democratic challenger

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell projected optimism that the US will overcome Covid-19 during his acceptance speech on Tuesday, telling his supporters the story about his harrowing experience with polio as a child.

Mr McConnell has won election to a seventh term, the Associated Press projected, with the senator up over his Democratic challenger, Amy McGrath, 58-38 per cent with more than 90 per cent of the expected vote total reported.

“When I was a child, our nation was battling a different virus — polio,” the Kentucky Republican said.

“As a very young child, that fight became my own. While my father was off fighting World War II in Europe, I was fighting a different battle. Thank God I had a guardian angel … my mother.”

Mr McConnell credited his mother with walking him through exercises prescribed by his doctor so he wouldn’t lose function of his legs.

And he expressed optimism that the US would overcome the coronavirus pandemic just as it has overcome polio.

“Our country is going to get back on our feet. Our nation has real challenges and real adversaries. But our fellow citizens are not our enemies. There is no challenge that we cannot overcome together,” Mr McConnell said.

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.

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.