Analysis: Mitch McConnell keeps shifting right

WASHINGTON – For nearly three decades, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell was a proud promoter of congressional earmarks, sending billions of dollars to his home state of Kentucky for medical research at universities, transportation projects and economic improvement programs for cities and towns.

But in November 2010, with conservatives ridiculing earmarks as a symbol of Washington excess, McConnell stood on the Senate floor and agreed to give one of his most prized political tools: his power to direct federal dollars to Kentucky.

"Make no mistake. I know the good that has come from the projects I have helped support throughout my state," the Senate Republicanleader said. "I don't apologize for them. But there is simply no doubt that the abuse of this practice has caused Americans to view it as a symbol of the waste and the out-of-control spending."

Embracing what became an outright ban on earmarks was one of the most visible breaks McConnell has made in recent years with his more politically moderate past — but it's not the only one.

As part of an evolutionary process that has recast both the senator and his party into a more conservative mold, McConnell steadily has drifted more to the political right every session since he first came to the Senate in 1984, according to a statistical analysis of his votes as part of on-going research project by political scientists at several universities.

"He's tracking to the right because the whole Republican Party has moved to the right," said University of George political scientist Keith Poole, co-creator of the complex vote-tracking system called DW NOMINATE that found that Congress is more polarized than at any time since the 1870s.

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That's what elected representatives do, said University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss.

"With both his party moving right and his state moving toward the Republicans, it would be astonishing if McConnell had not drifted to the right somewhat over the long term," he said.

Asked if he acknowledged such a shift, McConnell wouldn't agree to an interview, but his campaign spokeswoman Allison Moore responded that "Mitch McConnell doesn't base his decisions on a scorecard, he makes decisions based upon what's right for Kentucky."

"He's always been a strong conservative," she said.

Kyle Simmons, who served as an aide to McConnell for 15 years, including two as chief of staff, said his former boss "has been consistently conservative over the years, which is in keeping with the widely held views of his constituents."

The senator certainly touts his conservative credentials in campaign ads and to audiences, such as the nation's largest gathering of conservatives outside Washington in March.

"If I'm given the opportunity to lead the U.S. Senate next year, I won't let you down," McConnell told the Conservative Political Action Conference. "We will fight tooth and nail for conservative reforms."

And the latest vote analysis by National Journal, a publication which covers Washington, showed McConnell's positions on economic, social and foreign policy issues in 2013 ranked him more conservative than three-quarters of the Senate, placing him as the 100-member body's 25th most conservative lawmaker.

Still, as McConnell wages a bid for a sixth term, starting with the May 20 Kentucky primary, he has had to prove himself to be conservative enough.

His primary opponent, Louisville businessman Matt Bevin, is a tea party favorite who has denounced McConnell as an enabler of President Barack Obama's so-called liberal agenda.

Earlier this month, Bevin — backed by conservative groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Madison Project — accused McConnell of advocating "big-government Washington policies."

The irony, analysts say, is that for all of McConnell's conservative history, he has been unable to appease the Republican Party's farther right wing.

"He hasn't moved far enough or fast enough for the tea party," said Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University. "While McConnell was, is, and probably always will be a conservative, he's not a big influence on the GOP's rightward shift in recent years. He's just responding to the environment in which he finds himself — like any smart politician would."

For its part, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is not intending to make a prime issue out of McConnell's conservative shift, presuming he advances in the May 20 primary.

"I don't think the Kentucky race is about who is too conservative or who is too liberal," DSCC spokesman Justin Barasky said, instead choosing to characterize him as "the walking, talking embodiment of everything wrong with Washington's partisan political makeup."

Shift aids survival

No matter the reason for McConnell's shift further right, observers say it has helped him to survive and move into a top leadership role — and probably is enough to retain even the most conservative voters in a potential general election against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.

"Far more than anything else, Mitch McConnell is a ruthless pragmatist. He's not some knee-jerk ideologue," said Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. "Mitch is a savvy politician who understands where the wind is blowing in his own party and also understands that, as a leader in the Senate, it's probably going to be easier for him to keep his troops united if he reflects what more of the majority of his colleagues believe."

McConnell in March told The New York Times that, in regard to conservative outside groups challenging him and other GOP incumbents, "I think we are going to crush them everywhere."

At first blush, that may seem inconsistent: a senator who has become more conservative attacking other conservative groups.

But it comes down to the flavor of conservatism McConnell represents: while he is shifted farther right ideologically, he has not gone as far as, for example, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a tea party star.

That clearly is reflected in the statistical analysis of roll call votes by DW-NOMINATE. Using a scale on which the most liberal lawmaker is scored as "-1," an absolute centrist is a "0," and the most conservative member of Congress is "+1," McConnell's track in the Senate reveals distinct ideological footprints to the right.

In the 99th Congress, his first, McConnell was scored at .306 — less than a third of the way to the highest possible conservative rating, DW-NOMINATE shows. In every succeeding Congress, McConnell's conservative rating crept up, to .357 by the 102nd Congress, to .408 in the 105th, all the way to .526 in the 112th Congress, the last full two-year session before this one.

"That would be a significant shift," Poole said.

By contrast, Paul scored a 1.0 in the 112th Congress. Another tea party Republican, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, scored a .99.

McConnell "is about in the middle of the Republicans," Poole said, but the party as a whole, has "moved right."

That has occurred amidst an increasingly divided Congress, according to research by Poole and some fellow political scientists. In fact, after the last Congress ended in January 2013, Poole and his colleagues wrote: "It is now safe to say that polarization in Congress has reached an all-time high, exceeding even levels seen during the late nineteenth century."

The issues

No single issue is more heavily weighted than others in Poole's analysis. But observers say McConnell's shift on earmarks is just one example of his changed position.

On immigration reform, for example, McConnell was among the "yes" votes in the Senate for a bipartisan 1986 bill that overhauled the nation's immigration system and provided a legalization program for undocumented immigrants. Its sponsors included then-Rep. Romano Mazzoli, D-Ky.

But a push for new immigration reforms in 2014 did not get McConnell's support because, he said in a Senate floor speech, "it just doesn't say to me, at least, that we've learned the lessons of 1986, and that we won't find ourselves right back in the same situation we found ourselves in after that reform."

"If you can't be reasonably certain that the border is secure as a condition of legalization, there's just no way to be sure that millions more won't follow the illegal immigrants who are already here," McConnell said.

The senator took that stand against a backdrop of opposition to immigration reform from conservative activists and many conservatives in the House and Senate.

In 2009, McConnell appeared to endorse a bipartisan plan to create a commission to assess the financial health of the federal government and make recommendations on balancing the budget in the long term. But when that plan came up in the Senate in January 2010, McConnell voted against it, as did other Republicans who had supported it.

Obama had come out in favor of the commission as well, but conservative groups were attacking the idea as a potential roadmap to higher taxes.

Politifact.com, a fact-checking site run by The Tampa Bay Times, rated McConnell's switch as a "full flop."

Nevertheless, perceptions that McConnell is more closely aligned with hard-line conservatives has to be put in perspective, observers said. The senator remains essentially in the middle of a GOP whose "ideological 50-yard line has shifted to the right," said Jennifer Duffy, senior analyst with the non-partisan Cook Political Report.

John Weaver, a political consultant who was the top adviser to Sen. John McCain in the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns and chief strategist in the 2012 White House bid of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, said Senate Republicans have become more conservative over time, just as Democratic senators have become more liberal.

"Both in voting record and in temperament, Sen. McConnell kind of represents that schism we have in Washington," Weaver said.

Balancing act

On other issues, McConnell has staked out familiar positions in conservative territory. He has been a constant critic of the Affordable Care Act, has opposed increasing the minimum wage and fought extending long-term unemployment insurance.

In a state where Democrats can and do get elected statewide, Ornstein said such views could prove troublesome in a general election battle, and create a delicate balancing act for McConnell.

"If he makes any kind of moves to the center after this primary" to be more palatable to independents and some Democrats, "he has to fear that sizable numbers of (tea party conservatives) will sit on their hands. … (But) if he doesn't move, he's leaving himself open to the charge that he is too far to right for the state as a whole."

But Voss said he expects any tea party defections to Bevin will be temporary. Animosity to the senator is rooted in a handful of votes he cast in favor of government intervention during the financial crisis of 2008-09, he sid.

"A lot of Republicans and conservatives who are grumpy with McConnell not being conservative enough are likely, when they get a read on (Grimes), to snap back to their Republican inclinations," Voss said.

Baranowski agreed. "There's a big enough conservative coalition in the state to put him over the top," he said. "This is, after all, a state that made Rand Paul McConnell's junior colleague."

Reporter James R. Carroll can be reached at (703) 854-8945. Follow him on Twitter @JRCarrollCJ.