In the US elections are entirely up to the state, regardless of any other factor: a state legislature can constitutionally address any unusual circumstances, like a natural disaster, according to its needs.
As a separate issue, in most states the governor simply selects replacements for vacant offices, like US Senator, and would also be able to do so in the event of any extreme circumstances.
But Mitch McConnell himself worked to change this in Kentucky in 2024, as soon as he realized he wasn’t going to run again and his health might give out on him: he wanted to ensure Gov. Beshear, a Democrat, could not select his replacement.
The law in Kentucky that he helped to push through, requiring a special election for his replacement, IS automatically triggered and only bars a special election from three months prior to a regular election. If that deadline is passed, in this case August 3, then the good people of Kentucky only have one senator instead of two until January.
But to have a vacancy, someone has reveal the truth that there actually is a vacancy to be filled. So the suspicion now is that the Republicans are going to try to hide McConnell’s condition until the first Tuesday in August – the last day a Kentucky special election can be called – so that Thomas Massie, a Republican who just got primaried out of his own Congressional seat, can’t make a run for McConnell’s now obviously vacant Senate seat.
This is an interesting debate – X link / (xcancel link) – around the minutiae of it; apparently no matter what happens now a legal challenge awaits in Kentucky. That’s what happens when someone like McConnell pushes through a badly written, ill-thought piece of legislation that isn’t clear enough: whoever doesn’t like it has grounds to sue.
Which is to say that he didn’t just fuck it up for his own vacant seat, he fucked it up for Kentucky as a whole, or at least until that law gets changed, by tying the governor’s hands when ANY state or state-related federal office becomes vacant.
If this is too long I apologize; I started off answering your own comment and then it expanded to the current situation. I hope you find it useful.
In the US elections are entirely up to the state, regardless of any other factor: a state legislature can constitutionally address any unusual circumstances, like a natural disaster, according to its needs.
As a separate issue, in most states the governor simply selects replacements for vacant offices, like US Senator, and would also be able to do so in the event of any extreme circumstances.
But Mitch McConnell himself worked to change this in Kentucky in 2024, as soon as he realized he wasn’t going to run again and his health might give out on him: he wanted to ensure Gov. Beshear, a Democrat, could not select his replacement.
The law in Kentucky that he helped to push through, requiring a special election for his replacement, IS automatically triggered and only bars a special election from three months prior to a regular election. If that deadline is passed, in this case August 3, then the good people of Kentucky only have one senator instead of two until January.
But to have a vacancy, someone has reveal the truth that there actually is a vacancy to be filled. So the suspicion now is that the Republicans are going to try to hide McConnell’s condition until the first Tuesday in August – the last day a Kentucky special election can be called – so that Thomas Massie, a Republican who just got primaried out of his own Congressional seat, can’t make a run for McConnell’s now obviously vacant Senate seat.
This is an interesting debate – X link / (xcancel link) – around the minutiae of it; apparently no matter what happens now a legal challenge awaits in Kentucky. That’s what happens when someone like McConnell pushes through a badly written, ill-thought piece of legislation that isn’t clear enough: whoever doesn’t like it has grounds to sue.
Which is to say that he didn’t just fuck it up for his own vacant seat, he fucked it up for Kentucky as a whole, or at least until that law gets changed, by tying the governor’s hands when ANY state or state-related federal office becomes vacant.
If this is too long I apologize; I started off answering your own comment and then it expanded to the current situation. I hope you find it useful.