And as the surprise McConnell news broke open, with his stepping out of leadership at year’s end, the more junior Republicans began floating other contenders who are more reflexively accommodating to Trump’s wishes.
“There’s no doubt it’s time to turn the page. I mean, we’ve got to turn the page here as a party. We’ve got to get back to supporting working people over corporate interests. We’ve got to get rid of the corporate money that has gushed into our politics,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a frequent McConnell critic, told reporters.
In many ways, the Senate Republican Conference has served as the last bulwark of traditional conservatism as it’s been represented by McConnell, who won his first Senate race on the coattails of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide reelection.
Even in recent years, a clear majority of Senate Republicans preferred lower taxes for the wealthy and far less government regulations, combined with a strong national defense that would reassure allies and intimidate our rivals.
But that orthodoxy has received its stiffest challenge over the last year, as Hawley and about a dozen other Republicans have vocally opposed McConnell and tried to exert pressure on his potential successors.
In a quick aside during his bombshell speech Wednesday, McConnell noted the GOP’s dramatic shift on global security after his bruising battle with his Trumpian wing to pass legislation that would provide more than $60 billion to Ukraine’s defenses.
“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time. I have many faults — misunderstanding politics is not one of them,” he said.
Having turned 82 last week, McConnell has seen the entire party shift over the last 17 years, the longest service for any Republican or Democratic leader.
His allies were quick to defend McConnell as not getting pushed out by Trump, with whom he has had a political cold war since late 2020, or his enemies within the GOP conference. “No, I do not think he was forced out in any way. This was his decision,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said.
Since McConnell took a nasty fall last March that kept him out of the Senate for six weeks, many Republicans had been wondering how long he would stay on the job. Allies to potential successors engaged in whisper campaigns to try to explain who should get the job.
Now that campaign can be held out in the open, even as the aspirants paused on Wednesday. “Just hold that thought,” Thune said after reporters asked his intentions.
“That election is nine months away, and there’s a much more important election between now and then,” Barrasso said, suggesting the November general election should preoccupy senators’ minds.
Only Cornyn gave a slight admission of his plans. “I think today is about Mitch McConnell, but I’ve made no secret of my intention,” he said.
Some suggested that, behind the scenes, the potential successors have fully launched their bids. “I’ve had a lot of calls today,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters late Wednesday.
Every Senate leadership election is the most personal of transactions — sometimes a vote comes down to some political act done a decade or two ago, sometimes it comes from a key legislative favor offered years ago — but this race is shaping up to test those traditions more than ever.
And the decisive cluster of Republican votes is likely to come from those loudest anti-McConnell voices.
Thune starts out with a slight edge over Cornyn, in part because Thune’s current role as No. 2 in leadership, the whip, makes him a natural successor, according to multiple senior GOP aides.
A third of today’s 49 Senate Republicans took office after Cornyn, who served six years as whip and four years as head of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, left the ranks of elected leadership at the end of 2018.
But most Republicans believe Thune is short of a clear majority of the 49 currently serving in the GOP, with Cornyn maybe up to a handful or so votes behind.
That would leave about a dozen to 15 Republicans up in the air, almost all of whom come from the wing that voted against extending McConnell’s leadership run after the 2022 elections. If this group worked together, they could back Barrasso on a first ballot and possibly leave both Thune and Cornyn short of the majority, while trying to extract concessions from either of the top two to tip the balance on a second ballot.
“There are lots of conversations that are ongoing between all sorts of different collections of senators,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) told reporters.
For Democrats, McConnell’s departure marks a strange twist. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who won election in 2010, spent his first couple years marveling at how strong McConnell’s leadership team remained despite renegades such as Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in his ranks.
Paul had defeated a top McConnell acolyte in 2010, and Cruz knocked off a close Cornyn ally when he chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“He managed to hold his caucus together. He managed to deliver on some of their core goals, in particular, capturing the Supreme Court and moving it far to the right,” Coons said, noting three conservative justices appointed under McConnell’s watch.
But Coons noted how much the GOP changed with each election, pointing to Tennessee’s swaps of two establishment Republicans, who were very close to McConnell, for two firebrands.
“There’s been a steady movement toward younger members of the Republican caucus who do not value and support compromise and bipartisanship and respect for leadership,” he said.
Rather than the bitter enemy they spoke of with anger and fury last decade, Democrats have recently appreciated McConnell’s help averting calamities such as government funding shutdowns or defaults on the national debt.
Just Tuesday, after a White House meeting with President Biden and congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) repeatedly praised McConnell for his strong words in support of Ukraine.
It’s the sort of thing that far-right Republicans despise. One antagonist, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), used his increasingly conspiratorial-driven social media accounts to talk about “The Firm” when criticizing McConnell and Schumer.
The ultimate wild card would be if Trump wins the presidency and wants to try to force GOP senators to elect someone he is most comfortable with.
That would benefit Barrasso, or some other wild-card contender, because Trump used to frequently criticize Thune for his lack of forceful support. Cornyn’s political sins, to the most conservative senators, came by working with Democrats on modest gun-violence legislation in 2022 and a bill to expand U.S. manufacturing of electronic chips.
While senators have traditionally guarded these leadership posts against such outside interference, one notable exception came after the 2002 midterm elections. George W. Bush’s presidential advisers helped push Trent Lott (R-Miss.) out of his expected ascension to majority leader after he made comments in support of Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), an avowed segregationist, at his 100th birthday party.
Instead, Republicans elected Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), just eight years as a senator to that point, as majority leader. Frist’s four-year tenure as leader came with lots of discussion about his own ambition to run for president in 2008, a rocky path in which the relative newcomer struggled. He eventually retired from politics altogether.
Veteran Republicans believe those aspirants to McConnell’s job, above all else, need to swear off any ambition beyond the Senate.
“They better be doing it for the right reasons, not for their own political advancement,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said. “McConnell never did any of this for his political advancement.”