Say the Democrats win the Senate and Mitch McConnell is taken down. What then? | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is in a pickle.

The senior Kentucky Republican began the year with a tough Senate electoral map. A wildly unpredictable Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has possibly made that map even harder.

When conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly in February, McConnell made the calculation that waiting for the election of a Republican president to name a successor would be better than letting the incumbent Democrat, Barack Obama, do so.

Just two years ago, McConnell became the first Kentuckian to lead a Senate majority since Democrat Alben W. Barkley in the 1940s. But now, largely due to circumstances beyond his control, McConnell stands to lose a perch he’s coveted his whole career.

Democrat Hillary Clinton is poised to be elected president, and she would get to fill the current Supreme Court vacancy, and perhaps others, with a majority in the Senate to confirm them.

Still, McConnell thinks long term, and he would still wield considerable influence as minority leader, as he did from 2009 to 2014. And it may be possible for him to lead Republicans back into the majority in two years.

“As minority leader, he was quite skilled at figuring out how to regain control of the Senate,” said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University who’s an expert on Congress. “He knows how to exploit the rules of the game to his advantage quite well.”

As Trump’s troubles have tied other Republican leaders, namely House Speaker Paul Ryan, in knots, McConnell has kept a low profile, not rushing to defend his party’s nominee but not engaging in open conflict with him either.

“I’d say he’s done better,” Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky, said of McConnell. “Paul Ryan has made a repeated spectacle of working through handling the Trump thing.”

It’s all part of a patient approach to politics McConnell has built for nearly five decades.

Rep. John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democrat in Congress, has known McConnell since 1968, when both worked on the campaign of Kentucky Sen. Marlow Cook, a moderate Republican. Both later served on Cook’s staff.

McConnell ran for county executive in Jefferson County, the state’s largest and a stronghold for Democrats, and won two terms. With the help of an ambitious media consultant named Roger Ailes, McConnell challenged an incumbent Democrat for the U.S. Senate, and was elected on his first try in 1984.

McConnell relishes his role as a Senate power broker, Yarmuth said.

“He’s not interested in policy. He’s interested in partisan power,” he said. “I don’t think it matters to him the position he holds.”

Democrats need to win five seats to gain a simple majority in the Senate, and they have a shot among nine states in which races could go either way.

According to the nonpartisan Rothenberg and Gonzales Political Report, three seats are pure toss-ups: two held by Republicans, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, and one held by a Democrat, Nevada.

Three others held by Republicans – Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin – are more favorable to Democrats. Three more Republican seats – Missouri, Florida and North Carolina – are more favorable to Republicans.

“A shift of 2 to 4 points in key Senate races, and the majority would be gone,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of the Rothenberg and Gonzales Political Report.

New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, an outspoken liberal, would become majority leader and would get to set the agenda, as McConnell does now.

But as leader of a Republican minority, McConnell would be no shrinking violet.

Almost nothing gets done in the Senate without 60 votes. At best, Democrats could start next year with 53 or 54 votes, including those of two independents.

As minority leader, McConnell could serve as a check on the ambitions of Schumer or a Democrat in the White House.

“You can stop anything you want to stop,” Yarmuth said. “If you assume a Hillary Clinton presidency, you’re in a stronger position to affect policy.”

That could include matters of immigration, health care, taxes, the environment, voting rights – conceivably anything Democrats would like to accomplish.

“The intensity of partisanship in Congress is not going away anytime soon,” Binder said.

With Clinton widening her lead over Trump, it appears increasingly likely that it is she who will appoint at least one, if not more, justices to the Supreme Court.

While a rule change instituted when Democrats controlled the Senate enables the chamber to consider judicial nominees in lower courts with a simple majority, Supreme Court justices still require 60 votes. That’s where McConnell could exert a lot of influence.

Liberal dreams of resurrecting a modern version of the court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren 50 years ago could be premature.

“The Senate is your one place, at least at the Supreme Court level, to fight Democratic appointees, to force them toward the middle,” Voss said.

Then comes 2018, when the Democrats will be the ones facing the challenging map – perhaps even worse than the one Republicans have this year.

This year, Republicans are defending 24 seats to Democrats’ 10. In two years, Democrats will be defending 25 seats to Republicans’ eight.

“The media is going to try to declare the death of the Republican Party on Nov. 8,” Gonzales said. “But Republicans will have a great opportunity to bounce back in the midterms with a Democrat in the White House.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story wrongly attributed Nathan Gonzales’ quote in the last graph to someone else.