A progressive super PAC in Kentucky is looking at getting in bed with the tea party in order to oust the six-term incumbent Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
Hearing last week’s news that a coalition of tea party groups calling themselves the United Tea Party of Kentucky are targeting McConnell and interested in taking input from other outside groups, Progress Kentucky got in touch.
“What we’re finding — at least in this stage of the race — we’re finding that our interests align [with the tea party],” Progress Kentucky organizer Keith Rouda told Politico. “It’s unusual.”
Private democratic donors are getting in on the candidate-hunt too, Politico noted, offering to put money behind anyone who could credibly challenge the Senate’s top Republican. And all that cash can’t sound so bad to the United Tea Party folks.
“If he was interested in what we do and what we believe, he would be promoting legislation and putting forward small government ideas, but we haven’t seen that from him, so 30 years of media spin and political machine spin has run it’s course,” United Tea Party spokesperson John Kemper III told WSFA-TV.
The liberal argument for this de facto alliance would be that it’s worked before. The report tells us that the strategy could “lead to a candidate in the general who’s much more conservative, similar to failed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who was heavily favored in the primary by people supporting Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO).” The primary race would be hotly contested, which means both Republican candidates would blow a lot of money on the primary, perhaps leaving them underfunded in the general.
The problem, of course, is that Kentucky’s a hard state for Democrats to win and the — very, very real — danger is that we could wind up with a Senator much farther to the right than McConnell. However, we would also wind up with a senator much less powerful than McConnell, so maybe there’s some advantage there. Keep in mind, Todd Akin hung himself with his idiotic rape theorizing — you can’t count on every Tea Party Republican to be as self-destructive.
On the other hand, McConnell’s approvals are in the crapper, so he’s not exactly a shoe-in.
Maybe it’s worth a shot or maybe it’s a waste of time. Personally, I think it’s worth it, if only to force the GOP to rejigger their senate structure. They’d probably come out of that a little less organized. And who knows, a Democrat might actually win.
