The closely contested race in Kentucky between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger, Alison Lundergan Grimes, will come to a head Monday evening as the two face off in a televised debate.
Grimes is currently trailing McConnell by three percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Beating McConnell, one of the highest-profile Republicans on Capitol Hill, would be a considerable win for the Democrats – and more importantly, could help the Democratic Party hold on to control of the Senate, which is up for grabs in November’s midterm elections.
Grimes and McConnell have been running a close race, but McConnell has been consistently in the lead, and the gap between the two has widened in recent weeks.
Grimes’ campaign hasn’t been helped by an interview she gave to the editorial board of the Louisville Courier-Journal during which she refused to confirm whether or not she voted for Barack Obama for president, saying instead that “Kentuckians know I’m a Clinton Democrat through-and-through.” Pundits were unforgiving; Meet the Press presenter Chuck Todd said that he thought she had “disqualified herself.”
But the effect of all this on the polls appears to have been negligible. In fact, Grimes’ poll numbers had already made their biggest drop long before the interview – at the end of August – and have been holding steady since. Recently, it has been McConnell’s numbers which have been plunging.
Still, Republican strategists are sure to try to make Grimes’ evasion a subject of Monday night’s debate, for the same reason that she wanted to avoid answering the question: Obama is very unpopular in Kentucky. Recent polling gave him between a 62-64% disapproval rating in the state.
Despite her party connection with Obama, Grimes is still very much competitive; in fact, between 4 and 8 October, the gap between the two candidates narrowed from 5.2 points to just three, according to the RealClearPolitics tracker; one poll, released on 10 October, even showed Grimes ahead of McConnell, 46 points to 44, though that two-point difference was within the survey’s margin of error.
McConnell has his own vulnerabilities. He has maintained a hard-line stance on repealing the Affordable Care Act, which might generally be a winning issue for Republicans, but is a touchier subject in Kentucky, where the roll-out of Obamacare has been one of the most successful in the country, with 413,410 people now enrolled in new health coverage in a state with a population of just 4.4 million people.
Equal pay is likely to be a central issue in the debate. McConnell was key to the Senate’s blocking the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have built on the 2009 Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help women achieve equal pay in the workplace, while Grimes has made pay equity central to her campaign.
Lilly Ledbetter, the famous pay equity campaigner for whom the 2009 legislation was named, endorsed Grimes’ campaign in 2013, and has described McConnell’s voting record on womens’ issues as “horrendous” in emails written on behalf of Grimes’ campaign.
The other issue that may divide them is immigration. Kentucky may not be a border state, but groups supporting McConnell have aired ads attacking Grimes for her support of the President’s calls for comprehensive immigration reform – calls which McConnell has opposed.
For both candidates, the debate will be an important moment – it might not make all the difference come Election Day, but a stellar performance, or a bad one, could mean an important momentum shift going into the final weeks of the campaign.
