Marine veteran Amy McGrath will challenge Mitch McConnell for his Senate seat in 2020, and she has already broken barriers
With the 2020 elections looming on the horizon, most would-be voters have been focused on the many candidates running for president. But several important Congressional races will also take place in 2020. Today, July 9th, Marine veteran and boundary-breaking woman Amy McGrath announced that she is taking on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for his U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky.
According to CNN, McGrath is the first woman to fly an F-18 fighter jet in combat as a Marine, meaning that she has already broken barriers. McGrath rose to prominence in the political world when she ran for the House of Representatives in 2018, even though she ultimately lost to Republican Andy Barr. If the Democrat defeats McConnell, she will have unseated an incumbent who has been in office since 1984, according to Politico. McConnell has also been the Republican Senate leader since 2007.
McGrath announced her campaign in a three-minute video shared to Twitter. Titled “The Letter,” it opens with her sharing that as a 13-year-old, she wrote McConnell, asking him to change a law that prevented women from becoming fighter pilots. She goes on to say that the senator never responded. The Democrat also takes the opportunity to argue that McConnell is partly to blame for the country’s divisive political atmosphere. She notes that he was “elected a lifetime ago” and has “bit by bit, year by year, turned Washington into something we all despise.”
"I'm running for Senate because it shouldn't be like this," she says.
Her slogan, which appears at the end of the video, declares, “Defeat Mitch. Defend democracy.”
In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, McGrath acknowledged that winning her election would be challenging. But she argued that the senate majority leader had stood in the way of his constituents’ wishes.
"The things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not getting done," she said. "He's not able to get it done because of Senator McConnell."
"The things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done. He's not able to get it done because of Senator McConnell." —@AmyMcGrathKY on why she's running against Mitch McConnell. pic.twitter.com/xumeg5hhBY
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) July 9, 2019
McConnell’s team has already tweeted an attack ad attempting to paint the former Marine as “too liberal for Kentucky.”
Welcome to the race, Amy. #KYSen pic.twitter.com/VdmKfFvTpI
— Team Mitch (Text MITCH to 47137) (@Team_Mitch) July 9, 2019
Only the Kentucky voters have the power to decide if McGrath will usurp McConnell. But we’re already excited to see this groundbreaking woman enter the race.
