Grimes’ campaign comes as the incumbent Republican's numbers are weak. Grimes: 'The goal is to win'

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — Alison Lundergan Grimes was 6 years old when Mitch McConnell started his Senate career, and she’s held elected office for not even two years.

But the fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.


A once-bitterly divided state party is embracing Grimes, who rallied big and energetic crowds this week at her first campaign events following her botched July 1 announcement. The Kentucky secretary of state’s stump speech focused heavily on McConnell — she roused supporters with a stampede of attacks against the GOP leader’s nearly three-decade tenure in Washington.

And Grimes’s campaign comes as McConnell’s poll numbers are weak, he faces a primary challenge from a deep-pocketed businessman and he’s leading a group of Senate Republicans increasingly at war with itself.

( PHOTOS: Mitch McConnell’s career)

According to a new Democratic polling memo obtained by POLITICO, McConnell’s troubles could be real. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman’s survey for Grimes’s campaign shows her leading McConnell by 2 points in a head-to-head matchup, buoyed by self-described moderate voters and disapproval of McConnell’s leadership. It marks the challenger’s biggest lead yet in the race and is the second Democratic survey to show Grimes edging out the GOP leader.

In her first national interview since becoming a candidate last month, Grimes is clearly bullish about her prospects.

“The goal is not just [to keep it] close, the goal is to win,” Grimes told POLITICO.

And Grimes warned that she is “not going to be bullied” by McConnell’s tough campaign tactics, adding that she is prepared to fight the onslaught of GOP attacks attempting to link her to President Barack Obama, who is deeply unpopular in the Bluegrass State.

“I think the voters of Kentucky are tired of that play,” Grimes said, speaking on her campaign bus. “It seems as if Sen. McConnell wants to run against anyone but me, including the president, the Senate majority leader, leader [Nancy] Pelosi. And, unfortunately, I’m the one who filed my paperwork.”

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The Kentucky Senate race will be the country’s most closely watched contest of 2014, something that will be highlighted this Saturday when the candidates share the stage at the state’s annual Fancy Farm Picnic. While they dismiss the Democratic polls, Republicans readily acknowledge the race will be tight through next fall, assuming McConnell defeats businessman Matt Bevin in a primary. But the largely untested Grimes must also survive a formidable political machine McConnell has methodically built for the past three decades.

Grimes knows full well that the key to victory is to make the race a referendum on McConnell. She’s quick to attack McConnell for being the leader in a “dysfunctional” Washington, but she’s reluctant about revealing her own positions on issues such as abortion, taxes or gun control. Whether her own forthcoming policy views can pass muster with conservative Kentucky voters could very well be the biggest challenge of her candidacy.

In a state in which Obama lost 116 out of 120 counties last year, Republicans argue that once Grimes begins to stake out her more liberal-leaning positions, Kentucky’s conservative voters will return to McConnell.

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“This campaign will be about issues, not the platitudes and vague generalities Ms. Grimes prefers,” said Jesse Benton, McConnell’s campaign manager. “Given the issue matrix, she is in a near impossible position as she will have to either explain to Kentucky voters why she is against them on so many issues or mislead them about her true beliefs.”

Indeed, in some ways she’s taken pages straight from the McConnell playbook, sticking closely to her talking points and aggressively staying on message.

In the interview, Grimes hardly strayed from her anti-McConnell rhetoric, calling him the “guardian of gridlock,” the leader of the GOP — or “Gridlock, Obstruction and Partisanship”— and at the center of D.C., or, as she says, the “Dysfunctional Capital.”

Grimes, who would be the first female elected senator from the Bluegrass State, plans to make an aggressive appeal to women voters, repeatedly citing an episode when McConnell allegedly denied a Kentucky woman from a teachers association a meeting with him.

“Simply saying, ‘I’m married to a woman’ doesn’t speak loud enough,” Grimes said of McConnell. “Your actions, what you do in the course of 28 years, indicates where you will and how you will stand up for women.”

Benton replies: “In addition to being married to one of the strongest women in America [former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao], a majority of his staff are women, as is his chief of staff. Recycling tired Obama White House talking points won’t work.”

And Grimes made sure to distance herself from Obama and align herself with the Clintons, longtime friends of her family who remain well-liked in the state. Asked if she regretted voting for Obama in past elections, Grimes argued she backed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary and said she was a delegate at the 2012 Democratic National Convention only because she had no other choice.

“The second convention I went to, I went there as secretary of state,” she said. “And you will recall we had quotas where you got to have certain female and male numbers. Obviously, the only female constitutional officer had to be there.”

In some ways, the 34-year-old Grimes is seeking to contrast her personality and style with McConnell’s. She appears with her 83-year-old grandmother, hugs and high-fives supporters and poses for photos with scores of fans, including at an elaborate campaign rally with more than 1,500 attendees earlier this week.

While the 71-year-old McConnell can certainly throw red meat and rile up a conservative crowd, he’s far more reserved and distant. And as he’s grown in power in Washington and become the face of the Senate GOP, he’s become increasingly unpopular back home.

Senior McConnell officials say they are prepared to make the race about substance — not style — and argue they are ready for a fight over the issues in Washington, something that Grimes has yet to fully discuss.

Benton, who dismissed the Democratic polls, added: “She will have to answer why she has endorsed gun control, taxpayer-funded abortion, amnesty for illegal immigrants, burdensome new EPA regulations, tax hikes, massive new spending and why she thinks it is a ‘waste of time’ to repeal Obamacare.”

Grimes is making an aggressive play for coal country in the eastern and western parts of the state — and has staked out firm ground criticizing the president’s energy policies, flatly declaring he’s “wrong” on those issues.

But she has yet to detail many of her positions, underscoring the tightrope she’ll have to walk between energizing the left and running in a red state in which Democrats bidding for federal office typically flounder.

On gun control, she said she agreed with the Supreme Court that there is an individual right to bear arms, and she said she would support expanding background checks to include Internet sales and gun shows.

“We shouldn’t hold different standards for those going two miles down the road than those who are actually going into the gun stores,” Grimes said.

But she would not say what her position is on banning assault weapons. Similarly, Grimes declined to lay out her views on hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage, nor was she eager to talk about whether she backs higher taxes on high-income earners. While she says she wouldn’t repeal Obamacare, as McConnell has demanded, Grimes has separately made comments that she wants to “fix” the law. But she has been cagey on what exactly she would change.

“These and many more positions, we’re going to have the course of the next 15 months I hope, to talk about,” she said repeatedly in the interview.

And that’s where McConnell senses an opening.

“Senate races are pretty big things that are big discussions on the big issues of the day, and that’s a discussion that she’s going to have a hard time with,” said Billy Piper, McConnell’s former chief of staff and a longtime veteran of the leader’s campaigns. “She’s full of generalities, hoping she can capture a murky middle ground. I think that’s going to be hard to do over time.”

Grimes’s carefully choreographed events this week were aimed partly at rebutting perceptions of her shaky campaign announcement, where she appeared to make her decision to run for the Senate minutes before meeting with the media.

“I told the press, as soon as I knew, they would know,” she said. “So July 1 was just that.”

In the Senate race, the state’s electorate gives both candidates a reason for hope. While Kentucky is a Southern conservative state, Democrats have a registration advantage, with 1.7 million voters compared with about 1.2 million for the GOP, giving Grimes hope she can win by mainly appealing to her own party. But Democrats here are largely conservative and the party for years has struggled to win federal elections — Clinton was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win here.

For McConnell to win, he may need to push back at Grimes’s message that he has “literally gone Washington” and ignored his Kentucky roots.

McConnell advisers say he will recast himself in a more favorable light, pointing out his deep roots to the state and his humble upbringing. While McConnell is eager to champion his clout in Washington, he is certain to contrast that with the Grimes’s lack of political experience.

But Grimes brushes off questions that she’s not ready to serve in a body in which she would be the youngest member, saying the inexperience argument was used against her unsuccessfully in her 2011 race for secretary of state.

“In the year-and-a-half that I’ve been the secretary of state, I’ve been able to do what those in Washington, D.C., have not been able to do,” she claimed.