Knock down, drag out

McConnell bracing for 'knock down, drag out' 2018 midterms

By LOUIS NELSON

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Washington Examiner Thursday that he anticipates a “knock down, drag out” 2018 midterm election for Republicans, who will look to maintain their majorities in both houses of Congress with a historically unpopular president in the White House.

“The environment today is not great, the generic ballot’s not good, and I’d love to see the president’s approval rating higher. So I think we should anticipate a real knock down, drag out — even on the Senate side,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said in an interview Thursday.

While the party in control of the White House often struggles in the first midterms after a presidential election, the Senate races scheduled for 2018 would ordinarily bode well for the GOP, with Democrats defending several seats in states won by President Donald Trump last year while Republicans are protecting only a small handful of vulnerable seats.

But with most polls showing Trump with historically low approval ratings for a president one year into his first term, Republicans have struggled at the ballot box in 2017, most notably in deep-red Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones won a special Senate election to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Even in the five House special elections won by Republicans, Democrats outperformed expectations, mounting competitive races in traditional GOP strongholds like suburban Atlanta, Kansas and Montana.

Republicans running in 2018 will also have to defend the massive tax reform bill passed this week by Congress, a top priority of the president’s and of GOP leadership that has thus far proven unpopular with voters. McConnell said Thursday that Democrats “want to have a debate over the tax bill, we’re ready for it,” imagining campaign ads against Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), both of whom voted against the tax bill and are up for reelection next year.

“But that won’t be the only issue. There are a lot of different things that affect the attitude of people, some of which we won’t be able to control,” the majority leader continued.

McConnell also said he is prepared to wade into GOP primaries to “make every effort to make sure we have a nominee on the November ballot who can appeal to a general election audience.”

He attacked former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has said he plans to back insurgent GOP candidates and upset the Washington establishment, over his support for controversial Republican firebrand Roy Moore, who lost to Jones in the Alabama Senate race and was accused during the campaign of molesting girls as young as 14 when he was in his 30s.

“Those political geniuses managed to elect a Democrat in the reddest state in America. I rest my case,” McConnell said.

Moore won the GOP primary in Alabama’s Senate race in part by campaigning hard against McConnell’s leadership, a successful message among Alabamian Republican voters who rejected Luther Strange, the incumbent who was backed by the majority leader. But McConnell said his support, as well as support from his Senate Leadership Fund super PAC, won’t be an issue in 2018.

“I’m not going to be an issue in a single race in America,” he said. “I can assure you the support of the Senate Leadership Fund is not a negative. You can ask a lot of incumbents around here whether they believe it was important to their success, and it was. And, it will be there again in 2018.”