Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, will not seek reelection next year, the Kentucky Republican announced on the chamber floor Thursday.
“I figured my birthday would be as good a day as any to share with our colleagues a decision I made last year,” McConnell said on the day he turned 83. “Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time.”
McConnell, who was first elected to the Senate in 1984, announced his plans to step down from Republican leadership nearly a year ago in the aftermath of health struggles.
Throughout his decades in the chamber, McConnell played a key role in steering the Supreme Court to its current conservative tilt and has maintained a traditional Republican view of foreign relations as others in the party shifted toward a more populist view in the Donald Trump era.
On Thursday, he hinted that he would continue to advocate that view over the next two years.
“Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s determination, the work of strengthening American hard power was well underway when I arrived in the Senate. But since then, we’ve allowed that power to atrophy. And today, a dangerous world threatens to outpace the work of rebuilding it,” McConnell said in his floor speech. “Lest any of our colleagues still doubt my intentions for the remainder of my term: I have some unfinished business to attend to.”
In a defining moment of his time as party leader, McConnell, in 2016, refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. He kept the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s post vacant during a contentious presidential campaign, arguing that, during an election year, the next president should fill the spot. Following his victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump successfully nominated Neil Gorsuch as Scalia’s replacement, with McConnell invoking the so-called nuclear option for Supreme Court nominees to eliminate the 60-vote threshold required for confirmation.
But in 2020, ahead of another presidential election, McConnell pushed for a speedy process to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the bench only weeks before Trump lost reelection to Joe Biden.
In total, McConnell’s alliance with Trump resulted in three of the president’s Supreme Court nominees being confirmed to the bench in his first term. But the pair have had a tense relationship since the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. McConnell blamed Trump for the day’s events, though he voted against convicting him at his second impeachment trial. In recent weeks, the former majority leader voted against some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees. He was the sole Republican to oppose Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
A decadeslong career
McConnell earned several nicknames over his time in the Senate, including “Darth Vader” earlier in his career as he stymied campaign finance overhauls and the “Grim Reaper,” when he blocked Democratic legislation in the early years of the Biden administration.
Still, there were times when he showed a pragmatic streak, helping to craft the “fiscal cliff” deal enacted in January 2013 and a 2021 deal to raise the debt ceiling after initially saying Republicans wouldn’t help.
Before ascending to party leader in 2007, McConnell led the Republican Senate campaign arm for the 1998 and 2000 cycles, when the party saw its roster decline from 55 to 50 senators.
He also held stints as the top Republican on the Ethics and Rules committees. Upon leaving leadership this year, he became the chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
McConnell has publicly battled health issues in recent years, including a fall outside the Senate chamber earlier this month, which a spokesperson attributed to the “lingering effects of polio,” which he overcame as a child living in Alabama.
He showed an early taste for politics, becoming student body president in high school and college, as well as president of his law school class. He got his start on Capitol Hill as an aide to Kentucky Republican Sen. Marlow W. Cook and was later a deputy assistant attorney general in the Ford administration.
In 1984, he ousted Democratic Sen. Walter D. Huddleston in a close race, in which McConnell ran an ad featuring bloodhounds searching for the incumbent, who the ad said was missing votes but making paid speeches.
While some of his early races in Kentucky were close, McConnell has easily won his more recent reelection efforts in a state that has grown reliably Republican on the federal level since he first sought office. He won a seventh term in 2020, defeating Democrat Amy McGrath by 20 points in a closely watched contest.
Robert Benvenuti, the chair of the Kentucky Republican Party, praised McConnell for helping to shape the party’s dominance in the state.
“Without his vision and tireless efforts, we would not be the majority party in Kentucky, with strong voter registration, supermajorities in our legislature, and seven of Kentucky’s eight seats in Washington,” Benvenuti said Thursday.
Succeeding a leader
Republican jockeying to succeed McConnell had already begun in Kentucky in the anticipation that he would not run for an eighth term.
Daniel Cameron, the former state attorney general and a onetime McConnell aide, quickly posted on social media that he was preparing a run.
GOP Rep. Andy Barr also said he was considering running and would make a decision “soon.”
“Kentucky deserves a Senator who will fight for President Trump and the America First Agenda. I’ve done that every day in the House and would do so in the Senate,” he said in a statement.
Businessman Nate Morris hinted at a potential bid for McConnell’s seat during a Thursday panel at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington.
“A lot of people have encouraged me to look at the seat, and I just want to speak as an entrepreneur. I’m an outsider, I’m a businessman, and I think we need more people coming from the outside to help President Trump with his America First agenda,” he said on the CPAC stage.
Morris, who drew raucous cheers from attendees when he said McConnell was retiring, accused the longtime senator of trying to “purposefully sabotage President Trump over and over and over again” as he repeatedly railed against McConnell over the course of the panel.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee expressed confidence Thursday of Kentucky remaining red in 2026, when the GOP is set to defend seats in 22 states. Democrats have not won a Senate election in Kentucky since 1992.
“Kentucky is a red state, so the NRSC is confident that our eventual nominee will be a principled, America First conservative who will join our Majority’s fight for our nation’s Golden Era,” NRSC chair Tim Scott of South Carolina said in a statement.
Still, David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said McConnell’s retirement “created an additional defensive headache for” Republicans.
This report was corrected to reflect that Daniel Cameron is a former Kentucky attorney general.
Jacob Fulton contributed to this report.
The post Mitch McConnell says he won’t seek an eighth term in 2026 appeared first on Roll Call.
