Super PAC: Progressive/Tea Party Alliance Aiming To Topple Mitch McConnell?

Photo Credit: APRepublican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is becoming increasingly concerned about his 2014 re-election chances in Kentucky, according to a progressive Super PAC that says it is partnering with unnamed Tea Party groups to paint McConnell as a corrupt insider and knock him out of his longtime Senate seat in a Republican primary.

A recent McConnell campaign fundraising email accused liberals of “attempting to infiltrate conservative” groups in Kentucky. Another McConnell campaign email accused the liberal organization MoveOn.org of supporting a “phony tea party” in an attempt to beat the senior senator. Though MoveOn disputed the McConnell campaign’s charges, the progressive super PAC Progress Kentucky is openly waging the kind of attack that McConnell seems worried about.

“Mitch McConnell has recently contributed through [his wife] Elaine Chao’s family $80,000 to the Kentucky GOP,” Shawn Reilly, executive director of the progressive super PAC Progress Kentucky, told The Daily Caller. “It looks to me like he’s trying to buy the Kentucky Republican Party in order to try to avoid a primary.”

“He also set up his campaign office a year earlier than he ever has, and he placed it in the same office where his 1984 campaign — his first successful Senate race — was housed,” Reilly added. “I hear from people that he’s pretty superstitious.”

Progress Kentucky, which filed as a Kentucky-based super PAC on Dec. 13, says it is making a concerted push to align itself with tea party groups in order to field and support a viable Republican primary challenger for McConnell. Reilly said that his group is already in productive communication with tea party leaders across the state.

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