While I generally have a bone of contention with Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd's reporting on the politics of Kentucky and the Grimes-McConnell Senate Race, I believe I saw a faint glimmer of rationality creep into the Beltway analysis. Previous to the primary results, the Beltway wisdom about McConnell and any Democrat's chance against him this fall is the following: McConnell is heavily favored to win because Kentucky is a Red state that hates Obama. Period. End of story. However, Matthews did not seem to stick to that Beltway narrative, and an analysis of the money spent and votes obtained in the primary demonstrate that McConnell is not a shoe in for reelection.
Matthews could not contain his disdain for McConnell the previous night during MSNBC's coverage of the Kentucky primary results, and while it wasn't stated out loud on MSNBC, I think that Matthews internalized the message sent by Kentucky Republicans. Mitch is not popular among Republicans.
While I can't get the final numbers yet on the primary results - the State Board of Elections site is down, David M.F. Shankula of Barefoot and Progressive blog has some numbers up about the money spent during the primary and the votes. My favorites are that McConnell and his allies have spent a total of $16 million dollars on his campaign so far, and McConnell could only manage 60% of the Republican vote. At least 100,000 Republican voters voted for someone else rather than cast a vote for McConnell.
McConnell has been in office for nearly 30 years, and he spent more money than he ever had to on a primary. But he still had 40% of Republican voters say, "Nah!" These are people who are supposed to be politically aligned with and sympathetic to McConnell.
And no one put a gun to their collective heads and told them to go and vote. Overall voter turnout was lower than in 2010. Yes. In 2010, you could argue that both primaries did not have a front runner for an open Senate seat, so interest in the 2010 campaign would be higher than this year's race with an incumbent running. However, over a 100,000 Republican voters decided to show up and vote against McConnell.
As I have repeatedly argued, a Republican cannot win statewide office in Kentucky without drawing on DINOS and so called independents. There are not enough registered Republicans in Kentucky to put a Republican over the finish line. Yet, here we have the sitting Republican Senator with 30 years experience and Republicans are less than enthused.
No, those Republicans will never vote for Grimes, and some of those 100,000 will end up voting for McConnell while holding their noses. But some of those same Bevin supporters will not vote for McConnell either. They will vote for some third party candidate or stay home, and McConnell cannot afford for Republican voters to stay at home this year.
So next time you here some Beltway pundit blather on about McConnell's political strength in Kentucky, feel free to wander over to barefootandprogressive.com, or the LEO Weekly, or even the Courier-Journal. The Kentucky journalists and bloggers have been pointing out that McConnell is not invincible for a while now. It would be nice if more of the experts would figure out what Kentuckians actually think and feel about McConnell.