The Unholy Writ of Mitch McConnell — Surviving Reelection Through Any Means Necessary
As the election season comes to its ultimate finality, a question was posed throughout the blogosphere — How is it that Mitch McConnell keeps getting reelected? Though I have some understanding over the totality and methodology of which, it was within my general research that certain names and themes kept popping up. Although I cannot speak to the others with some semblance of empirical evidence (Lindsay Graham and Susan Collins) other than to tie all three candidates together through an odd(?!) twist of fate through such cursory research done linking Election Systems & Software, an Omaha, Nebraska based company, to all three states through their voting machines, and, you guessed it, Dominion who purportedly bought up the proprietary rights to ES&S, along with campaign contributions averaging out to a thousand dollars per person by at least four ES&S employees to McConnell’s senate campaign, which intrinsically led to the anomalous voting patterns of historically Democratic counties within Kentucky to starkly Republican votes with great irregularity. But I will speak upon McConnell with firsthand knowledge and his opponents leaving the conspiracy theories to a separate article.
I say this having worked the past four campaigns as a staffer to the middle two (Bruce Lunsford and Allison Lundergan Grimes), and a volunteer for the first (Steve Beshear) and the latter (Amy McGrath) due to other employment at the time, and then the pandemic quelling any chances for the latter preventing me from even attempting to seek the employ of Beshear’s and McGrath’s campaigns respectively.
The following list of why ‘Dirty Mitch’ always wins will be enumerated by importance and adroitness —
1. Dolla, Dolla Bills, Y’all!: Mitch could raise more money than God, and three times that amount if he were actually running against that hippie, Socialist, snowflake Jesus. Whether he were beating the ‘Red Scare’ drum at home in Kentucky over universal healthcare, safety net programs, free tuition, baby-killing, environmental issues, opening the borders, coming for your guns, and so on, money would pour in through droves locally and nationally which significantly plays into a succeeding point (The Assumed Power of ‘Dirty Mitch). McConnell has never met a fear tactic that he didn’t like, or wouldn’t use to line his war chest where the rule of thumb typically remains — If you can outspend them, you win; Trump being the exception to the rule but through a variety of reasons that I won’t go into within this post, the primary reason that said adage didn’t apply to his run for office is the fact that he received so much free press nationally that he hardly had to invest in either name or policy awareness in that whatever he said or typed was covered 24/7 by the majority of the major press.
2. The assumed power of Dirty Mitch: No matter what Mitch did or didn’t do for the state, it was readily assumed that his perceived power in Washington was far too great to risk another candidate. A fact that Mitch and his staff played up as a major selling point. Not even corruption scandals against his second and current wife Elaine Chao — former Secretary of Labor under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and Secretary of Transportation under Trump — McConnell’s years of obstructionism, nor his ties to both China banks and Russian oligarchs could dissuade voters in the Bluegrass state… or did it (Succeeding point: Conspiracy Theories, Covid, And Corruption, Oh My)? But in fairness to Mitch, he has been able to bring in enough pork spending, primarily in areas where it mattered most (Playing the odds, let it ride! — a succeeding point) to sway enough voters within the third, fourth, and fifth districts in order to further solidify his dominance as a five-time reelected senator dating back to his initial foray into politics back in 1984, and the longest active senator in state history.
“The biggest issue in this race is whether or not our small state will continue to have a person of significant clout in Washington or whether we’re going to trade that person in for a rookie,” McConnell frequently said within the highly contested race in 2008, yet echoed the same sentiment within succeeding races.
3. Gettin Dirty!: One of the hallmarks of Mitch’s years of campaigning brought him beyond his innate ability to obfuscate his record, was his adeptness at going ‘dirty,’ hence the moniker ‘Dirty Mitch.’ Where this is typical behavior of most politicians, it remained an egregious error on the part of Lunsford and Grimes for not going blow for blow as Mitch and staff were not only readily available to do so but highly skilled at slinging mud pies whenever the chance availed itself. With every following campaign, the more skilled they would become until it was as if they were on autopilot with their insults — such ad hominem attacks that against both Grimes and McGrath being exceptionally scathing.
Point of fact, even with his numbers hovering the drain in his race against McGrath at 38% going into election day, and where voters were already wary of his tried and true methods of winning, it is somewhat hypocritical that his numbers skyrocketed to just above 50% just shy of the first votes being tabulateed.
As an aside, while campaign volunteers attempted to get a picture with Lunsford at an event while holding aloft a rather scathing looking poster of McConnell with the header being your typical “Ditch Mitch” slogan, Bruce immediately chided them “No! I am not going to go negative” as he quickly tried to physically distance himself from the poster in not wanting such a precarious photo op. Far too late within the campaign did Bruce dab his toe into the dirty waters, but only insomuch as to suggest that Mitch was a ‘liar,’ yet the damage had already been done to Lunsford’s reputation having donated previously to McConnell and other Kentucky Republicans, his being a big businessman without the thoughts or concerns of Kentuckians at heart, and so on.
4. Playing The Numbers, Let it ride!: Mitch, outside of his initial foray into state or national politics during his first term where he struggled on various occasions initially being pro-union, ambivalent toward abortion, and generally feeling out the role that he would ultimately play in Washington, has been astute and calculating upon who to give pork spending to, when, and why. In 2020, a highly contested race hearkening back to that of Bruce Lunsford’s bid in 2008, knowing that McConnell could not win Lexington (Go Big Blue!), Louisville, and squeezed out Bowling Green, he focused his efforts upon the 4th and 5th largest cities in the state — Owensboro, taking 57% of the vote in Daviess County, population 60,323 (28,087 votes), Bowling Green in Warren County with 53.6% of the vote (29,719 votes), and the 5th largest city, Covington in Kenton County with 54.4% (44,700 votes) while amassing the expected votes out the rest of the state for the win(?) which are, and have been predominately Republican counties. But more on the raw data and eschewed vote totals and/or voting patterns later on.
5. Exit, Stage Right: Before finishing up with the previously suggested conspiracy theory, it is pertinent to note exit polling from the 2020 election where, if they have a level of accuracy to them given the sample size and consistency due largely to the pandemic and/or mail-in voting, Mitch surprisingly scored high in college grad voters, the condition of the nation’s economy being “good,” 51% of Independents, 64% Suburban, 95% due to personal favorables even when his polling numbers the day before were at a consistent 38%, and leadership 85%.
The contrast to this, and as speculation into the validity of the results of the election, McGrath scored high in Financial Situation — “Worse than four years ago” at 82%, and 58% at “About the same;” 51% moderates, only 36% with Veterans but this juxtaposed to Mitch’s negative with vets at 61%, Lastly, Can unite the country at 61% in relation to McConnell’s 34%, 63% in good judgment against McConnell’s 36%, Contain Covid at 75% to Mitch’s 22%, views pertaining solely to each candidate with Amy lagging Mitch where hers were 77% to his 98%
6. Conspiracy Theories, Covid, And Corruption, Oh My!: I remain one that most definitely is not taken by conspiracy theories, but as previously mentioned where there isn’t too much to add here other than contextually, it remains pertinent to point to the financial interaction between ES&S to McConnell’s campaign which potentially led to his blockage of various bills to nix voting machines within a variety of states — predominantly Texas — due to the inability of states in confirming the results of the voting machines software’s accuracy. Ultimately, it was up to the states to decide which machines would be used — that of ES&S or Dominion as each machine(s) may or may not have met the state’s specific needs. But where the machines would instinctively change the voting results by 2.5% or more, they did so, in theory, swaying toward Biden rather than in favor of Trump nationally, yet had their desired effect in state campaigns.
For McConnell, forty percent of the state’s counties carried more voters on their rolls than voting-age citizens. Due to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch in November 2017, a right-wing non-partisan foundation sued Kentucky over its “Dirty Voter Rolls” Out of fifty states, only three, including Kentucky, had active registrations statewide rates greater than 100% of the age-eligible citizen population.
According to Allison Greene “There is the question of why a county like Breathitt has more registered voters than it has people of voting age? 2019 population data shows that Breathitt County had 12,630 people with approximately 23% below the voting age of 18. This means approximately 9,700 people are of voting age, yet there are 11,497 registered voters (https://elect.ky.gov/Resources/Pages/Registration-Statistics.aspx). Having 100% of the voting-age population registered would be astounding enough, but Breathitt County appears to have had almost 120% more registered voters than age-eligible citizens.”
As an unintentional faux pas in a Georgia court on December 4th in challenging the results of the election, Trump’s legal team stated that Dominion voting machines, due to a “machine-controlled algorithm… generally took more than 2.5% of the votes *from *Mr. Biden and flipped them *to* Mr. Trump.” In doing so, they implied that instead of the voting fraud being on the side of the Democrats was, in fact, the opposite of which.
Full disclosure, I share this information both in text and through various pertinent links, where this isn’t a definitive assertion, but rather elements to daisy chain a larger truth together. One point of contention is between the relationship of ES&S to that of Dominion where, as previously stated, purportedly bought the proprietary rights to ES&S’s software. If true, regardless of the various names on the machines, the algorithm, in theory, would be the same. This matters where Kentucky, South Carolina, and Georgia used Dominion voting machines.
Democratic strongholds such as Breathitt County 66.6% (3,738 votes) for McConnell, and in counties that never voted for him, McConnell won in Wolfe County 64.1% (1,912 votes), and 66% (1,958 of the votes) in Elliott County.
As further proof of what the Trump administration knew, and when they knew it, Rudy Giuliani slipped like the aforementioned lawyer within a Georgia court stating within his podcast that the administration knew about the glitch, and was therefore led to appeal to judges within such court cases surrounding only key battleground states where the glitch didn’t work in Trump’s favor rather than a complete recount in the fear that the numbers wouldn’t add up again for Trump.
Add this together to the bribes Mitch took through campaign donations which magnifies his propensity for quashing any bill that came up for a vote regarding removing said voting machines due to the glitch, and it makes for a compelling argument. But again I wish to reiterate that all findings toward a larger conspiracy, whether it be motivated by one side or the other, there remains a larger truth (even if it is to ultimately debunk such a conspiracy theory) that needs to be discovered.
Partial Source — There are other readily available source material offering exposition upon this given topic. In a phrase that has amassed as many negative connotations toward which as possible — Just follow the links. Again, my research was only cursory so what tangible evidence to be found in dealing with this potential ‘conspiracy,’ let alone such a theory, is there to be fleshed out regardless of one’s political bias.
https://nationalfile.com/china-mitch-mcconnell-has-family-ties-to-bank-of-china-top-chinese-shipping-firm/
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/11/Document-5.pdf — court transcript
https://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/mcconnells-chances-hinge-on-his-clout-014764
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mitch-mcconnells-senate-s_n_108642
https://nationalfile.com/flashback-don-blankenship-warned-us-of-mcconnells-ties-to-communist-china-in-2018-campaign-ad/
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/senate/kentucky/52
https://elamerican.com/dominion-the-foreign-software-company-with-a-controversial-background-deciding-american-elections/?lang=en
https://www.courier-journal.com/elections/results/race/2020-11-03-senate-KY-18783/
