Amy McGrath's Plan to Crash and Burn Another $100 Million

If you’re someone looking to fall upward, you can find no better place than the Democratic party.

A place where you can come 16th place in your Democratic primary, not even making it to Iowa, and somehow walk away with a free nomination for the 2024 presidential. A place where you’re rewarded by handing the keys to power back to a fascist with a best-selling book complaining how badly you lost. A place where, despite repeated failures, you can somehow be considered as a viable candidate for the 2028 presidential election.

Politics is often compared to sports. The whimsical idea of two teams, pitted against one another. One wins, the other loses, we all shake hands and agree to do it again in a few years. What this cute comparison so quickly forgets is that elections have real, painful consequences. A team’s supporters aren’t illegally detained, tortured, deported, or even murdered, if their team misses a vital goal.

The absolute bare minimum to expect from candidates who manage to throw elections against fascists is an apology and a pledge to never run for office again and to dedicate their lives to fighting the evil they failed to stop. However, as we’ve learned today, this is something Amy McGrath has no intention of doing.

If you need a reminder, Amy McGrath was the Democratic candidate for the 2020 Senate election in Kentucky. A self-identified fiscal conservative, she barely defeated her progressive challenger Charles Booker (45% to 43%) and went on to face Mitch McConnell, at the time the second most unpopular Senator in the country.

The race should have been a blowout. McGrath managed to raise $90 million against McConnell’s $57 million, and polls suggested the race was a competitive one, with one poll suggesting McGrath was going to win.

And, sure enough, the race was indeed for blowout. For McConnell. A 78 year-old monster, universally despised for the cruelty and malice he afflicted upon the country, managed to cinch the race by 20 points. $100 million to hand McConnell, the man who stole a Supreme Court seat, his largest victory since 2002.

And McGrath wants to rerun it all over again.

McConnell is retiring, so it remains to be seen who will become the Republican nominee for Kentucky. But whoever it is, if McGrath gets another shot at the general election, she’ll lose all over again.

Her loss to McConnell wasn’t even her first electoral loss. She attempted a shot at the House in 2018, defeating the more progressive candidate Jim Gray in the primaries, before (surprise surprise) losing in the general to the despicable Andy Barr.

At a time where the Democratic leadership is despised, the old ideas of bipartisanship with Republicans and running conservative Democrats in red states need to be tossed out. We don’t need candidates who boast about Trump’s “good ideas”. We don’t need candidates who want to keep Americans trapped in medical and student debt. We don’t need candidates who won’t abolish ICE, a government-sponsored terrorist organization that’s actively murdering Americans.

The former fighter pilot has twice managed to crash her campaign. Democrats shouldn’t let her do it a third time.