Club for Growth: McConnell Did Not Make Election a Referendum on Biden

Club for Growth President David McIntosh said during a press conference on Wednesday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) failed to make the November midterms an indictment of President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats.

One reporter asked McIntosh what McConnell’s standing will be now that it remains unclear if Senate Republicans will take back the Senate majority. He also mentioned that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said he would not support McConnell for Senate majority leader.

McIntosh said he does not believe that McConnell would face a serious leadership challenge; however, he said that McConnell failed to present a case for Senate Republicans as they now try to take over Congress’s upper chamber.

McIntosh, a former congressman who was elected under the 1994 Republican wave, said that many newer Senate Republicans elected in 2018 and 2020 are now getting “restless” after not being in the majority for years.

He said, “They don’t like serving in the minority. And they don’t see the vision of getting back to the majority. And I think they’ll quietly distance themselves from their support from it.”

McIntosh explained, “Mitch failed to make this a referendum on why Republicans were better than the Biden agenda and the Democrats, and he knocked down anybody’s efforts to have a platform to run on.”

McIntosh said that McConnell’s “style of campaigning” is “spend money and go back and use that money to try to get yourself elected. It didn’t work in a lot of these close races.” He added that many Republican candidates often do better when there is a cohesive Republican vision, such as the 1994 Contract with America that got Republicans the House Republican majority.

Ahead of the midterms, McConnell has declined to release a legislative agenda that would give voters a vision of what a Senate Republican majority would look like. Absent McConnell’s leadership, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) chairman, released in February an 11-point broad vision for a Senate Republican majority.

Further, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a McConnell-aligned super PAC, has declined to back Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters and New Hampshire Senate Republican candidate Don Bolduc. 

In the SLF’s absence, outside conservative groups such as the Club for Growth Action, and the Sentinel Action Fund, Heritage Action’s super PAC, filled the gap, which led to their rise in the polls.