McConnell ignores Trump’s attacks and says ‘I have the votes’ in quest to make

CNN
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It’s become a throwaway line at former President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies: GOP senators must boot Mitch McConnell from the leadership position he’s held longer than any Republican in American history.

But McConnell has a message.

“I have the votes,” the Senate GOP leader said bluntly, indicating he’s locked down enough support to claim a new feat: The longest-serving Senate party leader ever, a record held by Democrat Mike Mansfield for more than four decades and which McConnell would surpass in the next Congress.

Yet whether he’s in the minority or majority next year – and if he continues to serve as GOP leader after 2024 – are different questions altogether.

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN, McConnell weighed in on his outlook for the high-stakes battle for control of the Senate and warned President Joe Biden about how his nominees would be handled in a GOP majority. The GOP leader expressed his preference for a new Nebraska senator, defended votes that put him at odds with Republicans in the 50-50 Senate and steered clear of Trump’s brazen personal attacks against him and his wife, Elaine Chao – in an apparent attempt to avoid a distracting fight with the former President before the midterms.

And as Republicans grow nervous about their prospects of retaking the Senate, especially after allegations that Georgia Republican nominee Herschel Walker paid for a woman to have an abortion 13 years ago, the GOP leader indicated his belief that the battle for the majority is a true “cliffhanger” and that it’s too early to know if the 2022 cycle will turn into a GOP debacle like 2010 and 2012 when lackluster general-election candidates cost his party a serious shot at the Senate majority.

“It was clearly a challenge in 2010 and 2012, with Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock,” McConnell said, referring to GOP candidates in Nevada, Delaware, Missouri and Indiana, respectively, who lost general election matchups. “So it was clearly a problem in 2010 and 2012. Whether it’s a challenge, whether it’s fatal or a big problem this year, we’ll find out” next month.

McConnell, who has been devoting enormous time to ensure his high-spending super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, continues to spend staggering sums across the airwaves in the final weeks of the midterm elections, indicated that he plans to stand by the anti-abortion Walker who has denied stunning allegations that one of the mothers of his four children had an abortion at his request.

“I think we’re going to stick with Walker and all the effort we put in through SLF, we’re going take it all the way to the end,” McConnell said when asked if he had concerns about the revelations, arguing instead he believed the election would turn on Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s alliance with Biden.

“I talk to him fairly often,” McConnell said of Walker, the former football star and novice candidate pushed into the race by Trump and backed by the GOP leader in the primary. “I think they’re going to hang in there and scrap to the finish.”

While McConnell and Trump have been at sharp odds since the GOP leader cast him as “practically and morally responsible” for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, despite voting to acquit him at his impeachment trial, the Senate GOP leader has taken pains to avoid mentioning the former President or engage in a tit-for-tat with Trump and his powerful megaphone. In a recent tirade on his social media page, Trump said McConnell has “a death wish,” attacking his votes on unspecified bills and saying the GOP leader is “willing to take the country down with him.”

“I don’t have anything to say about that,” McConnell said about the attack against him, his first response to the episode.

In the same post, Trump issued a racially charged attack against Chao, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Taiwan and also served as Trump’s secretary of transportation, calling her McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow.”

Asked if the racist comment about his wife was acceptable, McConnell did not want to respond to it.

“The only time I’ve responded to the President, I think, since he left office is when he gave me my favorite nickname – Old Crow – which I considered a compliment and after all, it was Henry Clay’s favorite bourbon.” He declined to comment further on the matter.

(The interview was conducted Friday before a member of his conference, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, made racially charged remarks at a Trump rally over the weekend.)

With less than a month to the…