Love him, hate him, fear him -- Republicans and Democrats alike could not afford to look past him. Mitch McConnell finally stepped down from his Senate leadership role last year after it became clear that the years were catching up to him, and perhaps that his party had shifted in a new direction. 

At the time, it was largely understood that the seven-term Senator from Kentucky had essentially started his valedictory lap in Washington DC. Today, on his birthday, McConnell made it official, announcing his intention to retire at the end of his term next year:

BREAKING: Longtime Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who turns 83 today, has announced he won't seek reelection after his term ends in 2027.

"Seven times my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate ... I will not seek this honor an eighth time." https://t.co/bcK6MyRd23 pic.twitter.com/ufUeQPkdub

— ABC News (@ABC) February 20, 2025

“I figured my birthday would be as good a day as any to share with our colleagues the decision I made last year,” McConnell said on the day he turned 83. “Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time.”

McConnell, who was first elected to the Senate in 1984, announced his plans to step down from Republican leadership nearly a year ago. Throughout his decades in the chamber, McConnell played a key role in steering the Supreme Court to its current conservative tilt and has maintained a traditional Republican view of foreign relations as others in the party shifted toward a more populist view in the Donald Trump era.

McConnell has publicly battled health issues in recent years, including a fall outside the Senate chamber earlier this month, which a spokesperson attributed to the “lingering effects of polio,” which he overcame as a child.

Just a quick note on that point: it's almost certainly true. The few people I have known who recovered from polio in their youth had troubles later in life with the effects. The more concerning medical episodes had to do with the disturbing freezes that took place in front of the press on a couple of occasions. McConnell has demonstrated that he retained the capacity for office, but also that his frailties suggested that he might not be able to keep up for much longer -- as opposed to Chuck Grassley, who's almost a decade older but still robust enough to handle the job.

McConnell may have outlasted his welcome in recent years, too. He appeared ready to work with Donald Trump and the populist faction of the GOP at the start of the first term, but grew increasingly distant from them since. The White House seethed over McConnell's opposition to Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard this year, but that rift has been widening for a few years now. McConnell's institutionalism became too much of a hurdle to Trump's clear intent to reorder the Beltway by any means necessary.

That has understandably angered many people in and out of the GOP, and fair play on that. At the same time, we should appreciate all the battles that McConnell fought and won for the GOP and conservatives during the Obama and Biden administrations. McConnell made Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin pay over and over again for the 2013 "nuclear option" -- which is why RFK, Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth got confirmed at all, and why Kash Patel will now take over the FBI. McConnell fought hard to hold the Supreme Court seat open after Antonin Scalia's untimely death, which gave us Justice Neil Gorsuch rather than Justice Merrick Garland. And McConnell then double-tempoed Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg too, although that was somewhat easier. 

McConnell did all of that, and with a sense of humor, too. When a crank Senate candidate tried to smear McConnell and his wife over a 2014 drug bust by calling him "Cocaine Mitch," McConnell leaned into it rather than vent:

Thanks for playing, @DonBlankenship. #WVSen pic.twitter.com/TV1ETgQdmu

— Team Mitch (Text MITCH to 47137) (@Team_Mitch) May 9, 2018

How can anyone not appreciate that?

Anyway, McConnell gets to leave on his own terms, and Republicans in Kentucky can look to the future. This adds an open seat to the midterms in which the GOP already faced a numerical disadvantage, and Kentucky isn't necessarily a slam-dunk in statewide elections for Republicans. The GOP has a five-point registration advantage as of last month (47/42), and Trump won the state last November by a far wider margin, 65/34. Rand Paul also handily won re-election to the Senate in 2022 by a 62/38 margin, but Democrats keep managing to win the gubernatorial elections there. Andy Beshear won in 2023 by five points over Daniel Cameron, who might be tempted to run for McConnell's open seat next year. 

The good news is that Kentucky Republicans had to be anticipating this, and hopefully have already started working on developing candidates for the 2026 midterms. It will bear watching, though, and no small amount of hard work and investment.