Mitch McConnell has emerged as the most potent villain for Democrats running for Congress in 2020. In a survey conducted in 12 presidential battleground states, McConnell runs away with the title.
End Citizens United, a Democratic campaign finance reform group, surveyed 1,200 voters in the survey, finding that Democrats have a 3% advantage in the 2020 generic congressional ballot overall in those 12 states. But after being exposed to a message about McConnell, that advantage leaps to 12%. That's twice as effective in turning voters to the Democrats as the Trump message, which gave Democrats a 6% advantage. Congressional Republicans has a group are also unpopular, but McConnell is the flashpoint, with the messaging on them giving Democrats a 9 point edge.
McConnell's approval rating in these states is just 26%, a dismal 18% with independents. In those former Obama states that went for Trump, he's at 25% approval with a 53% negative rating. That's 78% of voters who know enough about him to have an opinion. That makes McConnell's embrace of the "Grim Reaper" role for killing everything good from the Democratic House perhaps a bit problematic for him. He thinks he needs to reinforce that image to keep his own seat in Kentucky, but in doing so he's creating headaches for the likes of Susan Collins and Cory Gardner and Joni Ernst and even John Cornyn, all also up this cycle. As HuffPo's Kevin Robillard points out, Democratic challengers are already capitalizing on this, with Iowa's Theresa Greenfield, Texas' M.J. Hegar and Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon all focusing on McConnell—and their opponents' enabling of him—in their campaign launch videos.
McConnell's team says they love this. His former chief of staff, Josh Holmes, says "the left has turned him into a deity on the right. The more they highlight what he's doing in the Senate, the more popular he becomes. […] Every time Donald Trump attacks Nancy Pelosi, it makes her stronger. When Democrats attack Mitch McConnell, it makes him stronger." It might make him stronger in Kentucky, that and the help he’s getting from Putin's oligarch buddies. But it's probably not doing him many favors in his own conference.
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