Mitch McConnell secures his Kentucky seat for 7th term, here's what Republican Senate majority leader's win means
Incumbent Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has secured six more years in the US Senate after defeating his Democratic challenger Amy McGrath in the 2020 election.
McConnell was a favorite in the race despite McGrath's impressive fundraising numbers. This is McConnell's seventh term win in Kentucky, which is a ruby red conservative state that President Donald J Trump won by nearly 30 points in 2016. McConnell consistently outperformed McGrath in polling, sometimes even by double digits. Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast the Senate Majority leader a 95 percent chance to win the state, Vox reported.
That said, McConnell can lose in another way if Democrats are able to somehow win other Senate races across the country as predicted on the FiveThirtyEight forecast. If that happens, it would immediately demote McConnell from majority leader to minority leader, albeit he is not unfamiliar with the role considering he was a minority leader from 2007 to 2015.
McConnell was highly effective in the Senate even with the power of the minority, successfully blocking much of President Barack Obama's and the Democrats' agenda by leveraging the filibuster, which requires a supermajority of 60 out of 100 senators to pass any major legislation. However, Democrats have talked about repealing the filibuster if they take the Senate, and if they follow through with the same it would greatly diminish any power McConnell and his allies would have as the Senate minority.
On the other hand, McConnell's most notable accomplishment as a majority leader was confirming several Republican nominees to the Supreme Court. He helped secure Republican control of the court by blocking Obama's 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland and getting Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the bench. Following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg earlier this year, McConnell confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett — giving conservatives a 6-3 majority in the nation's highest court.
Aside from the Supreme Court victories, McConnell worked hand-in-hand with the Trump administration to fill up hundreds of lower court seats too. This was further accentuated after McConnell's earlier refusal to confirm Obama's nominees to judicial vacancies, per Vox. In October, Fox News star Sean Hannity told McConnell that he was “shocked” Obama had failed to fill so many court openings. “I’ll tell you why: I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration," the Senate Majority leader said.
Furthermore, McConnell has also assisted several key elements of the Trumpian agenda — most notably the tax bill, which hugely benefited middle and working-class families. McConnell helped pass that bill using a legislative maneuver known as “reconciliation” to bypass the filibuster. According to Vox, he had tried to employ the same strategy to repeal Obamacare (or the Affordable Care Act) but failed to garner enough Republican votes.
But considering Democrats are now discussing fundamental changes and reforms to the Constitution that would have never been brought into the conversation a decade ago, it could easily backfire on Republicans. What's more? Democrats are also considering unprecedented steps that could effectively erase McConnell's achievements in the Senate and bolster their own majority, including making Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico states and packing the Supreme Court with additional seats.