A Winding Trail for Mitch McConnell to Lead the Senate

HYDEN, Ky. — Mitch McConnell, flanked by animal feed and a stuffed coyote, urged the small Republican crowd in Begley’s General Store here to beat the Democrats “like a drum” and “run up the score.”

When an older woman seated in a front row lawn chair screamed that his opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, would “lie like Obama” if elected, he chuckled and said, “I’m going to take you on the road.” But after posing for pictures with a long line of people, Mr. McConnell cupped his mouth and whispered in the store owner’s ear.

“We’ll get ’em out. We’ll get ’em out,” Tate Begley assured him, explaining later that Mr. McConnell had confided he was “worried about a small county like this, and voter turnout.”

If Republicans take back the Senate, Mr. McConnell stands to achieve his dream of becoming majority leader. But first he must defeat a Democratic upstart half his age. With support for Ms. Grimes strongest in big cities like Louisville, Mr. McConnell’s path to victory runs through the hilly coal fields in the east, the buzzing sheet metal factories along the state’s southern tier and in the barns leaking with pouring rain in the flat and cow-spotted western farmland.

On Monday and Tuesday, Mr. McConnell rode in his navy blue campaign bus to more than a dozen such spots, past Elk Mountain and over the “Land between the Lakes,” by an obelisk honoring Jefferson Davis and a sign for the birthplace of the writer Robert Penn Warren. At the end of his 14 campaign rallies and hundreds of miles lined with falling orange and ocher autumn leaves, Mr. McConnell seemed to have reached a better, less anxious, place.

“You know, it’s been a big race,” he said after the final rally at a western Kentucky farm in Murray, where “Team Mitch” had dramatically lighted a backdrop of grain silos. “We are in a very good position to win. And I think we will.”

Mr. McConnell, a shrewd yet often plodding politician whose nickname on Capitol Hill is “the Turtle,” is famously difficult to read. One of his closest friends in politics, former Senator Robert F. Bennett of Utah, has said that a loss just as Republicans take over the Senate would be “devastating for Mr. McConnell. But throughout the campaign swing this week, the senator’s face remained frozen. He insisted that he did not even allow himself a moment to look out the bus window to savor what could be his last campaign.

“I don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, where he expressed fascination with a sinkhole that had swallowed up some of the cars. “Reminiscing is for people to do when they are thinking about the past. I’m thinking about the future. The election’s about the next six years, not what I’ve done in the past.”

But an aura of the past, both Mr. McConnell’s and Kentucky’s, hung in the air like the acrid smell in the hills around the endangered coal mines. He called it a “treat” to meet a woman in Liberty who asked him to sign a picture of a much-younger Mr. McConnell hoisting her in the air in 1984 when she was 5 and he was a first-time candidate for the Senate. In Hopkinsville, he said “Hi, kiddo” to Marilyn Hays, 85, a local Republican matriarch who carried an oxygen tank and a sign reading “Switch to Mitch! 1984, Stick with Mitch 2014! 30 Years together!”

 “There’s always a sense of nostalgia,” said Billy Piper, a veteran of many McConnell races, who added that as the bus approached a Casey County Pork Producers hall in Liberty, Mr. McConnell recalled a woman who would always greet him there with RC Colas and Moon Pies.

But the old memories did not mean the atmosphere was bleak. In fact, Mr. Piper and others on the bus called the mood “celebratory,” especially when contrasted with the 2008 election, when Mr. McConnell had to scratch out a victory amid a national Democratic wave.

Aboard the bus, Team Mitch ate cupcakes for the 72nd birthday of the country singer Lee Greenwood, the campaign’s musical attraction, and Mr. McConnell, who is also 72, checked on poll numbers in Alaska and Kansas, in the hope he would have a majority to lead. There was talk of five- to seven-point leads, rumors of Kentucky Democrats already speculating about whom Ms. Grimes would challenge after she loses on Tuesday. Volunteers, mostly young and female, wore Team Mitch sweatshirts and ginned up an atmosphere of momentum by cheering atop tractor tires.

Through it all, Mr. McConnell went to work. He started early Monday morning on the loading dock of the Kentucky Power Company in Hazard, the heart of coal country, where he wore pleated khakis, a green polo shirt and a Team Mitch golf jacket. For 15 minutes he offered up red meat about Obama’s “war on coal,” with a healthy serving of talk about his own impending power. In speech after speech, he noted that reporters from Norway, Sweden and Al Jazeera (cue the gasps) had come to see him because the fate of America hung in the balance.

“I’ve been elected four times to leadership without opposition,” he said with pride, and pointed out, “My leadership has nothing to do with seniority.” At an event in London, Ky., Representative Harold Rogers, who had joined Mr. McConnell on the trail, spoke in almost magical terms of Mr. McConnell’s potential ascension to majority leader. “How many of you,” he asked, “have ever touched one?”