Follow the Money: Who Does Mitch McConnell Represent?
Last week I profiled Republican representative Andy Barr (KY-6), who is running for the US Senate in 2026. The seat he hopes to win is currently held by octogenarian Addison “Mitch” McConnell, who has held that seat for 40 years.
At first blush, Barr and McConnell may not seem especially similar. While campaigning for McConnell’s seat, Barr has done everything he can to ensure that he receives an endorsement from Donald Trump, whereas McConnell has occasionally butted heads with Trump and even subtly undermined Trump. But Barr and McConnell are both career politicians who have few sincerely held beliefs beyond:
the belief that they should personally have power and
the belief that relying on funding from the wealthy will help them achieve power
If McConnell was an ambitious politician running for Senate for the first time, he would probably be doing exactly what Barr is doing now: staunchly supporting Trump in hopes of an endorsement. The difference between Barr and McConnell isn’t a function of their views, but of their career stages: McConnell sometimes finds himself at odds with Trump because Trump’s influence undermines his power within the Republican Party, whereas Barr sees Trump as a path to the personal power he hopes to achieve as senator.
What the data will ultimately show is that Barr and McConnell are the same kind of political animal: a career politician who seeks political power by promising to help the rich.
A Political Animal
Whatever you think of Mitch McConnell as a person, one thing is undeniable: he has been incredibly successful at overcoming his significant shortcomings as a political candidate and achieving political power by soliciting the assistance of powerful people.
McConnell exhibited exceptional political savvy from a young age. As a junior in high school, he ran for student council president at his high school and won despite being nerdy, unathletic, and deeply uncharismatic. If you remember what high school was like, this seems like something that shouldn’t have been possible. How did someone with so little personal charisma or popularity convince the student body to make him president?
A young Mitch McConnell realized that, despite his shortcomings and lack of popularity, he could win if he had the support of the most powerful students in his school. And he understood that the most powerful students in his school were the popular students. So he chose a strategy of trying to gain the support of popular students from the football and cheerleading teams through flattery, and to use their endorsements to win the election.
The strategy of gaining the support of powerful people to help him win an election was ultimately successful, and it became a blueprint for his entire political career.
The Early Years
After graduating high school, Mitch McConnell attended the University of Louisville, where he received his B.A. in political science in 1964. That same year, he also interned for senator John Sherman Cooper (R-KY) before attending law school at the University of Kentucky. After completing his law degree in 1967, he (very) briefly served in the U.S. Army Reserve. His first day of training was on July 9, 1967, and his last day was August 15. Officially, he was honorably discharged due to optic neuritis. Over the years, rumors that optic neuritis was not the real reason for his discharge have occasionally resurfaced, perhaps in part because optic neuritis could be cured in 1967 with steroids..
Regardless of why he left military service so abruptly, McConnell quickly took the opportunity to rejoin the world of politics. He worked in the offices of senator Marlow Cook from 1968-1970 and then worked for Tom Emberton’s campaign for governor of Kentucky in 1971. While working for Emberton’s campaign, McConnell tried to simultaneously run for a seat in the state legislature. However, he was disqualified from running because he did not meet the residency requirements. He spent the next few years working as an attorney while teaching night class on political science at the University of Louisville.
McConnell’s first successful campaign as an actual political candidate who met the state’s residency requirements came in 1977, when he was elected the Jefferson County judge/executive–the top political office in Jefferson County, Kentucky.
The changes in McConnell’s political behavior as he prepared to run for Jefferson County judge/executive provide the first real insight into McConnell’s core political values. And what it reveals is that he has no core political values beyond doing what he thinks is necessary to win elections.
Although McConnell had traveled to Washington in 1963 to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a Dream” speech, one of the first things he did when preparing to run for office in Jefferson County was to send his resignation letter to President Ford, thanking Ford for the chance to serve and also encouraging him to nominate judges who would oppose court-ordered busing to integrate schools. This is quite the dramatic “evolution” for someone who had been a staunch civil rights supporter. In fact, it was such a notable change in McConnell’s attitude towards integration his supervisor at the Department of Justice attached a cover letter indicating that McConnell was returning to Louisville to run for office and suggesting that McConnell’s “evolution” on school integration probably was the reason for this change.
Another indication that McConnell has no core policy values other than doing what is necessary to win elections is evolution on the issue of abortion. Jefferson County is the most liberal county in Kentucky and because McConnell needed the support of Jefferson County liberals to win elections, he quietly positioned himself as a strong pro-choice ally, opposed efforts at the state level to undermine Roe v. Wade. This is, of course, completely at odds with his anti-abortion stance in the US Senate: he’s gone so far as to call Roe v. Wade a “terrible legal and moral error” and compared the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the overturning of the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Why was McConnell a staunch supporter of abortion rights when he represented the most liberal county in the state but a staunch opponent once he was elected to a statewide office?
It may be tempting for the optimists among us to say this is a cynical perspective on McConnell’s political evolution. People grow and change, and their political views change too. And that’s a fair point. But it’s awfully convenient that McConnell’s views have only changed in ways that make it easier for him to win elections.
Mr. McConnell Goes to Washington
Mitch McConnell decided to run for the US senate in 1984, challenging incumbent Democrat Walter Dee Huddleston. It looked like an impossible goal, as Huddleston was leading by as much as 40% in polls two months before the election. However, McConnell’s campaign was saved by his decision to hire Roger Ailes, who would go on to help with McConnell’s 1990 campaign before becoming the CEO of Fox News in 1996. Ailes convinced McConnell to air ads featuring bloodhounds searching for Huddleston because of votes he’d missed in the Senate. Despite the attack ads featuring essentially no policy discussion whatsoever, they were incredibly successful and shifted the entire race, which McConnell ended up winning by 0.4%.
Who Does Mitch McConnell Represent?
For this article–and other future articles in this series about politicians who have been in Washington for decades–I have to start the analysis with a disclaimer. While Open Secrets is an invaluable resource for assessing who politicians represent, the data they include on their website only goes back to 1998. While the data prior to 1998 is not compiled by Open Secrets, it is still available with the FEC. So I have decided to do some analysis of McConnell’s first Senate election (1984), provide very brief overviews for his campaign funding data from the elections of 1990 and 1996, and then focus the rest of this article on McConnell’s elections for which Open Secrets has already provided fairly good summary data.
The Election of 1984
In his first election to the US Senate, McConnell’s decision to hire Roger Ailes paid massive dividends, ultimately propelling him to victory. It would be easy to attribute his victory to the competence of his marketing team, but McConnell himself demonstrated a keen ability to solicit campaign contributions from rich people during that first election. Overall, 254 candidates ran for 33 seats in the US Senate in 1984 and raised a total of $145.8 million–or about $574,000 each, on average.
Despite his status as a challenger, rather than an incumbent, McConnell raised $1,591,303.00. While Open Secrets does not cover this campaign, McConnell’s FEC filings for 1979-1984 are available online. While these records don’t tell us what percentage of individual contributions were under $200 (the threshold for “small donations” that we will generally use here), they do provide information about donations over $500. Of the roughly $1.59 million received by his campaign, $745,336 (or about 46.8%) came from individuals who donated at least $500. In other words, McConnell received more money from people who donated $500 or more than most candidates received overall. The $745,336 in donations of $500 or more are listed as coming through 962 individual contributions, but some individuals donated $500 or more on multiple occasions. When two donations came from individuals with the exact same name and zip code, I counted the second copy of the name as a duplicate. There were some cases in which two names were listed in nearly but not quite identical ways (for instance, the same first name and last name, but one name included a middle name and the other did not). I only counted these as duplicates when the names shared the same zip code and the professions listed for the individual gave me good reason to think the two contributions came from the same person.
Overall, the $745,336 McConnell collected in the form of donations of at least $500 appears to come from at most 886 individuals–or 884 individuals excluding McConnell and his mother Julia, who each contributed $1,800 to his campaign. Among those 884, at least 77 appear to be spouses of other McConnell donors, meaning that, excluding the contributions made by the McConnells themselves, $741,736 was given by a maximum of 807 families that donated an average of $919 each. Despite being a challenger rather than an incumbent, the large number of large donations of over $500 helped McConnell raise more money than almost half of the incumbents (13 of 29) who were running for re-election in 1984, including senators Ted Stevens and Strom Thurmond.
The Elections of 1990 and 1996
In his first two re-election campaigns, McConnell demonstrated an impressive ability to convince rich people to support his campaign. While he’d raised a total of about $1.59 million for the 1984 election, for the 1990 he raised about $2.03 million in large donations and $5.64 million overall. His campaign finance advantage was overwhelming, as he raised about 87% more money than did Democratic challenger Harvey Sloane ($3.01 million). The race was reasonably close despite McConnell’s fundraising advantage, but McConnell ultimately won the election by 4.4 percentage points.
While McConnell raised slightly less money in 1996 ($5.03 million), his funding advantage over his challenger, Democrat Steve Beshear, was even more overwhelming. While Beshear raised about $1.77 million overall, McConnell raised more than that ($1.95 million) through large individual donations alone. Overall, McConnell raised about 184% more than Beshear did, ultimately winning his re-election by 12.7 percentage points.
2002 and Beyond
While the readily available data makes it clear that McConnell’s success early in his career was driven largely by his ability to convince rich people to donate to his campaigns, more clarity emerges beginning with his 2002 election–the first election in which data from Open Secrets is available. Drawing from this data, I’ve compiled summary statistics on the sources of McConnell’s funding over the next three elections prior to his ascension to Senate Majority Leader. That data is presented below.
The column entitled “Small Donor %” indicates the percentage of McConnell’s campaign contributions that came in the form of individual donations under $200. This is, essentially, an indicator of how much financial support McConnell received from average Americans. In the three re-election campaigns prior to his ascension to Senate Majority Leader, McConnell never received even 10% of his funding in the form of small individual contributions from average Americans. Moreover, small individual contributions accounted for a smaller share of his funding over these three elections, decreasing from 6.74% in 2002 to 6.52% in 2008 before reaching a new low of 3.94% in 2014. This means that McConnell’s financial support between 2002 and 2014 did not come primarily from average Americans. Who, then did it come from?
The next three columns answer that question. As indicated in the column “Large Donor %,” over each of those three elections at least 54% of his funding came from large individual contributions of $200 or more. Meanwhile, the column “PAC %” indicates that, in each of those three elections at least 20% of his contributions came from PACs, which are also predominantly funded by the rich. Overall, in each of those three elections, large individual contributions and PAC contributions combine to account for at least 78.42% of his funding. Overwhelming, he was funded by rich Americans.
It is worth noting that in 2008 and 2014, his campaigns were partially self-financed. Realistically, this too should be categorized as funding from rich individuals, as McConnell’s net worth was estimated by Open Secrets to be roughly $16.98 million in 2008 (making him the 14th-richest senator) and $22.16 million in 2014 (making him the 10th-richest senator). If McConnell’s self-financing is treated as funding from the rich, then his funding from the rich constitute 83.98% of his funding in 2002, 86.24% in 2008, and 84.01% in 2014.
While the data clearly illustrates that McConnell represents the wealthy instead of average Americans, the column “In-State %” reveals a secondary pattern: while most of his funding (54.58%) came from in-state in 2002, that number declined to 41.15% in 2008 and 21.89% in 2014. What this means is that between 2002 and 2014, McConnell shifted from representing rich people in Kentucky to representing rich people across the United States.
While McConnell had clearly welcomed and relied on contributions from the wealthy to fund his campaigns up to this point, his ascension to the position of Senate Majority Leader in 2015 meant that his personal power was not just dependent upon winning re-elections but also dependent upon Republicans maintaining a majority in the US Senate. This created a new incentive for him to deploy his fundraising acumen to help other Republicans win their elections.
To this end, McConnell’s allies created the Senate Leadership Fund.
The Senate Leadership Fund
The Senate Leadership Fund is a super PAC that was Steven Law, a former McConnell chief of staff, until McConnell was succeeded as Senate Majority Leader by John Thune. In the period between his time as McConnell’s chief of staff and his time with the Senate Leadership Fund, Steven Law served as the chief counsel for the Chamber of Commerce. Thus, through Steven Law, the Senate Leadership Fund has been inextricably linked to both Mitch McConnell and big business interests.
Because it is a super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund cannot give directly to political candidates’ campaigns. It can, however, spend unlimited sums on ads meant to support or oppose certain candidates as long as it does not officially coordinate its activities with any campaigns. I use the word “officially” advisedly because, remember–the Senate Leadership Fund is run by McConnell’s former chief of staff, who also has strong ties to business elites. His activities may not be taking marching orders from McConnell’s campaign but, at the very least, the Senate Leadership Fund serves as a conduit for powerful corporations to channel money into influencing elections on behalf of corporate interests, and doing so in a way that aligns with the interests of McConnell’s interest in retaining Republican control of the Senate.
In the period of 2019-2020, the Senate Leadership Fund spent over $476 million, including about $287 million on ads that either supported Republicans or attacked Democrats. According to some estimates, roughly two-thirds of the money spent on these independent expenditures typically go to attack ads or ads that draw contrasts between two candidates. But, perhaps reflecting McConnell’s reverence for the effective but policy-free ads with the bloodhounds from his first Senate run, the Senate Leadership Fund takes this tendency towards attack ads to the extreme: of the $287 million they spent either supporting Republicans or opposing Democrats, the overwhelming majority was spent on attacking Democrats (97%) rather than supporting Republicans (3%).
In other words, while his entire career before becoming Senate Majority Leader in 2015 reflected that of a politician who always relied on the rich to support his candidacy because the public would never support him without unnatural aid, he strengthened the link between his political ambitions and those of the corporate elite through the creation of the Senate Leadership Fund, which uses essentially unlimited corporate funding to deploy attack ads against Democrats in federal elections across the United States with the purpose of persuading voters to pick more corporate-friendly Republicans.
At the same time, his position as the Senate Majority Leader in 2020 or the influence of the Senate Leadership Fund (or both) transformed his campaign contributions for the 2015-2020 period in a way that makes his most recent election cycle appear much more oriented towards the interests of average Americans than he ever was in the past. It might be the case that more average Americans started donating to him after 2015 because they knew he had become the Senate Majority Leader. It could also be the case that ads funded by the Senate Leadership Fund encouraged more average Americans to donate to McConnell’s campaign than ever before. In either case, the percentage of contributions coming in the form of small individual contributions increased from 3.94% in 2009-2014 to 39.36% in 2015-2020.
But make no mistake: the dramatic increase in small donations that McConnell received from 2015-2020 does not reflect an ideological change or some kind of “come to Jesus” moment where he read the Gospels for the first time and suddenly realized, “Hey, prosperity theology is bullshit and this Jesus guy really doesn’t think very highly of the rich.” If that were the case, he wouldn’t have voted for Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which will give major tax cuts to the rich and partially offset those tax cuts by kicking at least 10 million Americans of of their health insurance by 2034 (including at least 140,000 and as many as 240,000 in Kentucky alone).
Lucky for Kentucky, McConnell plans to retire on January 3, 2027, at the (very) ripe age of 84. Unlucky for Kentucky, the two people most likely to replace him are Andy Barr–a puppet cut from the same cloth as McConnell–and McConnell’s own protege, Daniel Cameron. Neither of these candidates will prioritize average Kentuckians over elites, so Kentuckians shouldn’t put their support behind either of these empty vessels for rich donors.
If you live in Kentucky (or anywhere else in the US, really), the easiest way to tell if a candidate might realistically have the average American’s interests in mind is to determine whether they have made campaign finance reform a central part of their platform. Any candidate who hasn’t is either sold out to rich donors or unaware that rich donors distort our political system for the benefit of elites and at the expense of average Americans.