McConnell More Focused on Winning Midterms Than Party's Image

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he's more focused on making sure Republicans win in this year's midterms elections than he is about what direction the GOP is headed towards.

Asked about whether he wants the GOP to be more in line with former President Donald Trump or more traditional establishment Republicans like Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, the senator from Kentucky told CNN: "I don't have a litmus test. I'm for people that get the Republican nomination, and for winning, because if we win we get to decide what the agenda is, and they don't."

This year's GOP primaries had largely been seen as a test of Trump's influence over Republican voters. While some in the party had wanted the base to move away from the former president and his allies, a series of proxy battles and a stellar endorsement record suggested that Trump remains a leading Republican voice more than a year after leaving office.

The biggest of his primary endorsement wins, however, was the ouster of Cheney—who is arguably Trump's fiercest critic in the GOP—from her House seat. In August, Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman beat out Cheney for the Republican nomination in Wyoming.

Newsweek reached out to Cheney for comment.

Although McConnell had signaled he would side with establishment Republicans in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot, calling Trump "practically and morally responsible" for the attack, his latest comments demonstrate the Republican leader appears less preoccupied with steering the GOP away from Trump these days.

McConnell's focus on winning elections this fall comes after his party's outlook for the midterms took a nosedive after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. Before the ruling, Republicans had a 6-in-10 chance of flipping the Senate, but FiveThirtyEight's latest projections show that Democrats are now the ones with the advantage, holding odds even higher than the GOP's back in the spring.

Over the summer, McConnell said that part of the reason his party's chances of taking back the Senate had decreased was because of "candidate quality"—a subtle dig at Trump, whose endorsed candidates in several battleground states had lagged in the polls despite winning their primaries. McConnell's statements were widely seen as snubbing Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker and Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz.

Although Oz has picked up in the polls, Walker became embroiled in a controversy last week after a story broke claiming that the anti-abortion candidate allegedly paid for a former girlfriend to undergo the procedure in 2009.

Nonetheless, McConnell said he'd "stick with Walker" and all the effort his super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, has put into Walker's campaign. "We're going take it all the way to the end," the Kentucky Republican said.

"I think they're going to hang in there and scrap to the finish," he added.