Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced in a floor speech Thursday that he won't be running for re-election in 2026, capping four decades in the Senate and a record as the longest-serving party leader in that chamber's history.
The Kentucky conservative, who also turned 83 on Thursday, has been facing several health issues, including sudden freeze-ups in public, and been using a wheelchair pushed by aides. Politically, the establishment fixture and once-dominant GOP figure on Capitol Hill has been sidelined by the ascent of President Donald Trump, a one-time ally who McConnell has since criticized as a “despicable human being," a “narcissist" and “stupid as well as being ill-tempered."
Throughout his career, McConnell had stayed close to the GOP's ideological center of gravity, which included a rightward march in the 1980s. As the top Republican in the Senate, he played a key role in blocking former President Barack Obama's legislative agenda and held open several vacant judgeships, including a Supreme Court seat, for Trump to then fill with conservative nominees. He also helped Trump pass a massive tax cut that primarily benefited the country's wealthiest people.
Even after the Jan. 6 insurrection destroyed whatever personal rapport McConnell had with Trump, the GOP leader voted to acquit him in the subsequent impeachment trial, and then endorsed him in the 2024 election.
But McConnell was never truly comfortable with the direction of the GOP under Trump, which has included an orientation towards of blanket tariffs and an eclectic foreign policy that combines threats of unilateral military force with an embrace of traditional foes like Russia. He's recently voted against several of Trump's nominees, and in his retirement announcement, McConnell said that he would continue trying to push the GOP to return to its earlier approach to foreign affairs.
“Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s determination, the work of strengthening America’s 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. “So lest any of our colleagues still doubt my intentions for the remainder of my term, I have some unfinished business to attend to.”
McConnell's retirement sets off a race for his Senate seat in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992 — but in subsequent years elected several Democratic governors, including current Governor Andy Beshear. Shortly after the announcement, former state attorney general Daniel Cameron, a McConnell protégé, said that he would run for his seat. He may face opposition in the primary from Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., who said that he would make a decision about running as an "America First" candidate "soon."
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