Prominent Democrats wooing Alison Lundergan Grimes, not Ashley Judd for KY Senate
March 19, 2013
By MANU RAJU – POLITICO – Democratic heavy hitters — including Bill Clinton — are quietly trying to woo a new candidate to jump into the race to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, even as actress Ashley Judd is taking steps toward launching a star-studded campaign of her own.
With fears growing in some Democratic quarters over Judd’s potential candidacy, some prominent Democrats in the Bluegrass State are beginning to set their sights on 34-year-old Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state. Among Grimes’s attributes: She lacks political baggage since she’s served barely a year in office, and she hails from a well-connected family influential in Kentucky Democratic politics. But it’s not at all certain if she’ll jump into the race.
Grimes does have the Clintons in her corner. Earlier this month, the former president — a longtime friend of Grimes’s father — privately urged the young secretary of state to mount a Senate bid while assuring Grimes that both he and his wife, Hillary, would get behind her should she decide to take on the powerful Senate GOP leader, according to several sources familiar with the matter.
Attending an event for former Kentucky Sen. Wendell Ford in Owensboro earlier this month, Clinton privately met with Grimes for about 35 minutes, where they discussed her political future. Sources said Clinton made the case that the Senate bid would offer a bigger platform than the governor’s mansion or the U.S. House race in the 6th Congressional District, covering Frankfort and Lexington, which the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had hoped she would pursue.
Grimes has also met with officials from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, according to Kentucky Democratic sources. Both the DSCC and Clinton’s office declined to comment.
The behind-the-scenes jockeying underscores the divide in Democratic quarters over taking on McConnell, the party’s biggest target in 2014, when control of the Senate is at stake. There is a palpable fear among some key Kentucky Democrats that if they nominate the wrong candidate — or engage in a messy primary battle — they will squander their best chance to defeat McConnell since his first Senate win in 1984.
Some bluntly worry that Judd — an untested actress-turned-activist — would not be able to take down the McConnell machine while causing headaches for Democrats down the ticket because of her staunchly liberal politics in a conservative state. It’s a fear that McConnell’s allies are only too happy to reinforce.
“It’s my personal, professional judgment that [Judd] places others on the ballot in peril if some of the fears … come to fruition,” said Dale Emmons, a Kentucky Democratic campaign operative of more than two decades and a Grimes ally. “She places these people at risk by a weak performance on the ballot in this midterm election.”
