On January 3, 2023, Mitch McConnell burst into tears at home while eating breakfast. The famously phlegmatic senator was reading an email from Josh Holmes, his political adviser, congratulating him on becoming the longest-serving party leader in Senate history.
Later that morning McConnell wept again in front of his loyal staff. The senator is an ardent anti-smoker, but they marked his milestone by purchasing an ashtray like the ones former Democratic Majority Leader Mike Mansfield used to give away as mementos. They lit cigarettes and crushed them out in the ashtray, symbolizing that McConnell had at last extinguished Mansfield’s record and achieved his lifelong goal of “making history.”
Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, recounts this story in The Price of Power. It is a highly readable account of McConnell’s childhood, early political ambitions, steady rise into Senate leadership, and the ways in which he wielded that hard-won power over three decades. McConnell’s Sphinx-like exterior is one of his great political assets, and his occasional displays of emotion can be as baffling to some as the apparent contradictions in his Senate record. But as Tackett observes, “Many people only see Senator McConnell in monochrome. The real portrait has many hues.”
Indeed, McConnell’s complex legacy as Senate Republican leader has many dimensions. His political acuity, focus, strategic foresight, and tactical skills have leveraged his party’s influence in both the minority and the majority to advance conservative policies for decades. At times he has been willing to test or bend the norms and traditions of the institution he often says he loves. Yet McConnell’s handling of the emerging populist Republican right and its leader, Donald Trump, might wind up being his starkest legacy. As a Reagan Republican committed to an internationalist foreign policy and a bipartisan system of governing, McConnell has repeatedly come into conflict with the rising right wing of his party. In 2014, running for his sixth term, McConnell writes in his autobiography, The Long Game,
I was well aware that efforts from the Left would very well be the least of my problems. The cottage industry of so-called professional conservatives that had sprouted a few years earlier had by this time taken full bloom. Prior to 2010, the energy of the grassroots conservative movement was entirely focused on unseating Democrats, but now certain so-called conservative groups were determined to unseat Republicans they deemed insufficiently conservative.
McConnell struggled to adapt, straining to protect the conservative values and style of Reaganism while continuing to exert influence in the new era. He antagonized the Republican right when he opposed them, and repeatedly infuriated Democrats. Ultimately, his instincts failed him. He could have voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial for the president’s behavior on January 6, 2021. He could have urged other Republican senators to join him. It might well have worked, but he didn’t even try. Instead he wavered, then at the last minute chose to vote with his party. Acquittal meant that Trump, a man McConnell loathes, could become president again.
Tackett had exceptional access in researching this book. He conducted more than 50 hours of interviews with McConnell from March 2021 to June 2024, a crucial period as the Republican Party fractured around the Senate leader. Tackett also listened to hours of tapes from the senator’s oral history, interviewed staff members and advisers, and read volumes of archives, including family letters dating back to the courtship of McConnell’s parents. Additional research included more than 100 interviews with historians, Senate experts, Democratic and Republican politicians, including President Joe Biden, and others who have known McConnell over the years, such as Bill Gates, with whom he worked on eradicating polio. (Curiously, he seems not to have interviewed Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer or former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.)
The result is a staunchly evenhanded narrative from the perspective of a perceptive and knowledgeable outsider. Readers who want more critical assessments of McConnell’s career can find them in Ira Shapiro’s 2022 book, The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, or Alec MacGinnis’s The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch Mc-Connell, published in 2014.
Tackett reveals new material, particularly in the first third of the book, which focuses on McConnell’s years as an only child, the two years of intense therapy at Warm Springs and at home that saved him from being crippled by polio, and the germination of his passion for politics. He was born in rural Alabama and had a close relationship with both of his parents, especially his mother, who dedicated herself to his recovery while his father was fighting in World War II. When McConnell was 13, the family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, for his father’s job at DuPont. There he schemed for two years to be elected senior class president. By his early 20s, after interning on Capitol Hill, he was obsessed with becoming a U.S. senator. “Honestly, the odds of me making it [to majority leader] were pretty daunting, and even though this was my goal for a long time, I didn’t have any realistic thoughts that I would actually get there,” McConnell told Tackett. “I wasn’t sure I was good enough.”
Tackett captures McConnell’s exceptional self-discipline and unflagging drive to harness power in service of his political agenda. “Do I want to have power? Absolutely,” McConnell said. “What’s the point of being here if you are not trying to have an outcome?” In the Senate, he pointed out, you can make policy in the mold of your political view when your party is in the majority. McConnell’s “long game” is also thus an “inside game,” and he has played it brilliantly by mastering the rules and serving the needs of his fellow Republicans. “If you measure [his success] by someone’s ability to direct the caucus, he’ll go down as one of the best, not only in terms of longevity, but just in terms of batting average,” Virginia Democratic Senator Tim Kaine told Tackett.
Many senators aspire to be president, but McConnell understood early on that he was not well suited to a national popularity contest. He gambled that sheer hard work and his talent for strategic and tactical politics would elevate him inside the smaller arenas of Kentucky politics and the U.S. Senate. Control of the Senate, he understood, meant winning elections. And winning would require money for political campaigns, canny application of Senate rules, and a more conservative judiciary.
He trained himself to be a phenomenal fund-raiser, first for his own campaigns and later for his caucus. He made loosening restrictions on money in politics a constitutional issue, adopting the argument that money is speech. He took his challenges to the Supreme Court, which eventually overturned a number of campaign finance restrictions, culminating in the 2010 ruling in Citizens United, which opened the door to unlimited spending by corporations and the creation of super PACs. When Democrats then tried to pass legislation requiring full public disclosure of the sources of this money, McConnell’s Republicans blocked it with filibusters.
Tackett describes in fresh detail how these court decisions turbocharged McConnell’s power through the creation of the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC that quickly outstripped American Crossroads, the outside group that had been funneling money to Republican Senate races. In 2016, its first full year in operation, the Senate Leadership Fund spent more than $164 million on Republican Senate candidates chosen by McConnell, cementing their loyalty to him. A companion group run by a McConnell aide, One Nation, does not have to disclose its donors and has given more than $205 million to the Senate Leadership Fund since 2016. (Democratic leaders in the House and Senate also use fund-raising entities of this kind.) “The conservatives on the Supreme Court, in their Citizens United decision,” writes Tackett, “had created a financial pipeline that McConnell built into a vast political ecosystem.”
McConnell’s success in remaking the federal judiciary was, he told Tackett, “the single most consequential thing I’ve been involved in in my public life.” Federal court nominees had usually been confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate. McConnell changed that tradition when he weaponized the filibuster, a tactic Democrats had also used in the past, but sparingly. From 1955 to 1964, the filibuster was used nine times to stop a measure in the Senate; from 2009 to 2014, with Mc-Connell as minority leader, the filibuster was used 643 times.
After the 2008 election, Republicans were on their heels. Democrats held the White House and commanding majorities in Congress. McConnell used the filibuster and other stalling tactics to amplify the minority’s power beyond their numbers. Democrats became so frustrated that in 2013 they detonated the so-called nuclear option for nominations other than the Supreme Court, using a parliamentary maneuver to reduce the number of senators it takes to end a filibuster from 60 to 51. It was a bold and potentially dangerous move, one McConnell opposed, and he warned the Democrats that they would regret it. Indeed, after Republicans regained the majority and the White House in 2016, they lowered the threshold for Supreme Court nominations as well, enabling Donald Trump to appoint three justices and ensure a conservative Court for decades to come.
McConnell’s tactics weren’t limited to high-profile judgeships; he also blocked President Barack Obama’s appointees to relatively obscure posts at the National Labor Relations Board, the Election Assistance Commission, and the Government Printing Office, hampering these agencies’ ability to function. Republicans even refused to allow the Senate to organize in January 2009 unless Republican committee staff funding remained the same, breaking with the prior practice of reduced funding for the minority.
Tackett acutely portrays McConnell as a wily leader who finds—or even invents—process rationales for political decisions: for example, denying Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland even a hearing, allegedly because it was in the year before an election, then pushing Amy Coney Barrett’s Court nomination through in the final months of Trump’s first term.
At the same time, notably in the sphere of foreign policy, McConnell shaped major bipartisan legislation, risking the wrath of the growing Trump faction. He has supported a robust internationalist foreign policy—for example, assembling a bi-partisan coalition to appropriate money for Ukraine in its fight against Russia. His long-standing concern about foreign policy is less known than it should be: As a freshman senator, he joined the Foreign Relations Committee, though it had nothing to do with Kentucky, and later served on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, which doles out foreign aid, another unlikely choice.
Within the Republican Party, McConnell has become increasingly unpopular with rank-and-file voters who support Donald Trump. He was even booed at the 2024 Republican National Convention. McConnell was shocked that Trump won in 2016. He told Tackett, “The big problem is … [he] has every characteristic you would not want a president to have. Not very smart, irascible, nasty.” On January 6, according to Tackett’s riveting account, McConnell’s aides feared for their lives as they blockaded themselves in their Capitol offices. McConnell said later on the Senate floor, “January 6 was a disgrace … There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.” Why then did he vote to acquit Trump in the impeachment trial after the storming of the Capitol? Undecided until the last minute, McConnell ultimately found process reasons to justify it, as he so often had before. He claimed, not very convincingly, that he could not have persuaded enough Republicans to reach the 67 votes needed for conviction. He asserted that Trump could be subject to criminal prosecution and civil action, adding that the Constitution does not allow conviction after a president has left office.
McConnell’s real goal was to preserve a Senate majority. Tackett writes, “He wanted the energy of Trump’s voters in Senate races, without the baggage of Trump.” McConnell’s encyclopedic knowledge of history may have misled him into believing that Trump, like Andrew Johnson, the first impeached president, who escaped conviction in 1868 by one vote, would become a pariah in his own party. “He gambled on his belief that Trump would fade from the political stage in the wake of the insurrection,” writes Tackett. “Instead, Trump reemerged every bit as strong among core supporters. It was likely the worst political miscalculation of McConnell’s career.”
Indeed, the failure to bar Trump from holding federal office again might be the unfortunate coda to a career that will surely be remembered as one of the most consequential in modern Senate history. With his current term ending in 2026, McConnell might retire while Trump is still president and the Republican Party is further transformed into one he barely recognizes.
There is often an element of tragedy in an arc of political power, as one period in history gives way to another. For McConnell, the Reagan Republican, decades of deluging politics with money, bending Senate rules and norms, and shaping the judiciary to his will are giving way to the new Trump era, which not even he can control. But the influence of the longest-serving party leader in Senate history has not yet faded away. When Senate Republicans voted for McConnell’s successor as leader, it did not choose Rick Scott, the candidate backed by Trump Republicans. It selected a senator who has been part of McConnell’s leadership team since 2009, John Thune. Further, in the next Congress McConnell will chair the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, where he will control an enormous portion of the federal budget, including funding for Ukraine. He will also chair the Committee on Rules and Administration, where he says he will continue to “defend the Senate as an institution and protect the right to political speech in our elections.” Mitch McConnell’s career is winding down, but it’s still a little too soon to write his political epitaph.
