Mitch McConnell Quickly Projected As Winner Despite Dem Challenger Getting Flooded With Cash

 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been projected as the winner of the Kentucky Senate race against Democrat Amy McGrath, a failed 2018 congressional challenger whose Senate bid led many Democratic donors to flood the race with cash. 

Fox News projected McConnell as the winner in the race shortly before 8pm EST. As of 8pm, Fox News showed McConnell with about 61% of the vote and McGrath with about 35% of the vote, with about 35% results in. FiveThirtyEight projected ahead of the election that McGrath only had about a 4% chance of beating McConnell. 

Back in 2018, McGrath lost a race to unseat Congressman Andy Barr (R-KY), and has since drawn in tens of millions of dollars in her bid to unseat McConnell, who is running for his seventh term in office. According to Spectrum News 1, McGrath raised $84 million from the start of her campaign to September 30, 2020. 

McConnell, on the other hand, reportedly raised a little more than $53 million from the start of his campaign to September 30, 2020. 

Kentucky, a reliably red state that hasn’t voted a Democrat for president since 2000, was the first state called for President Donald Trump in the 2020 election by the Associated Press. As of the early summer, FiveThirtyEight never gave the Democrats more than a 3% chance of winning Kentucky’s 8 electoral votes. 

Trump has since been projected by AP as the winner in West Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Alabama. Both CNN and NBC News have since projected Trump as the winner in Indiana.