Mitch McConnell to step down as Senate Republican leader after record run in the job

The 82-year-old has maintained his power for almost two decades. Credit: AP

Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in history, will step down in November.

The 82-year-old has maintained his power in the face of dramatic convulsions in the Republican Party for almost two decades.

McConnell was set to announce his decision on Wednesday in the well of the Senate, a place where he looked in awe from its back benches in 1985 when he arrived and where he grew increasingly comfortable in the front row seat afforded the party leaders.

“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” he said in prepared remarks.

“So I stand before you today... to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”

His decision punctuates a powerful ideological transition underway in the Republican Party, as the isolationist populism of former President Donald Trump increases still.

McConnell said he plans to serve out his Senate term, which ends in January 2027, “albeit from a different seat in the chamber.”

Aides said McConnell’s announcement about the leadership post was unrelated to his health.

The Kentucky senator had a concussion from a fall last year and two public episodes where his face briefly froze while he was speaking.

“As I have been thinking about when I would deliver some news to the Senate, I always imagined a moment when I had total clarity and peace about the sunset of my work,” McConnell said in his prepared remarks.

McConnell addresses reporters on Wednesday. Credit: AP

“A moment when I am certain I have helped preserve the ideals I so strongly believe. It arrived today.”

The senator had been under increasing pressure from the restive, and at times hostile wing of his party that has aligned firmly with Trump.

The two have been estranged since December 2020, when McConnell refused to abide Trump’s lie that the election of Democrat Joe Biden as president was the product of fraud.

But while McConnell's critics within the GOP conference had grown louder, their numbers had not grown appreciably larger, a marker of McConnell’s strategic and tactical skill and his ability to understand the needs of his fellow Republican senators.

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