I’m not going to dig up all the links right now, but trust me when I say that the subject of Mitch McConnell’s low approval numbers in his home state is something I’ve written about before, including six years ago and twelve years ago when he also had to face the voters and seek reelection. He is persistently one of the least popular politicians in the country among the people who he directly represents. Right now, Kentuckians give an eighteen percent approval rating.

That is simply awful but he hasn’t been all that much better off in the past, and he’s still managed to win when people cast their votes.

As a general rule, any incumbent whose approval numbers are strongly negative should start looking for another job. If they’re intent on saving their career, they should start doing some things differently to change the poor impression they’ve made on their constituents.

But McConnell seems to operate with a different set of rules where political gravity does not apply. As far as I can tell, he never changes a thing or shows the least concern about his approval ratings. For some, this might be an admirable quality, but it’s still requires some kind of explanation.

Consider his reelect numbers:

A Public Policy Polling survey found just 18 percent of respondents approve of the job McConnell is doing, compared with 74 percent who disapprove.

If McConnell were up for reelection today, 37 percent of respondents said they would vote for the Kentucky Republican. Another 44 percent would instead choose a Democratic opponent, according to the survey.

An additional 19 percent said they were unsure.

We can see an obvious gap there. Fewer than one in five Kentucky voters like the job McConnell is doing but nearly 4 in 10 still plan to vote for him. There’s another one-in-five voters who are at least considering voting for him. There are clearly a lot of people who are prepared to swallow their personal distaste for the Senate Majority Leader and still give him their support. We can chalk that up to the conservative lean of the Bluegrass State where the national Democratic Party does a poor job of connecting with people.

This is why McConnell isn’t panicking. He still has a road to fifty percent. But it’s a precarious road.

Unless Trump is impeached and removed from office or somehow doesn’t become the GOP’s 2020 presidential nominee, McConnell will be sharing the ticket with him. According to Morning Consult, Trump had 56 percent approval at the beginning of September. That’s not bad, even if it’s down 19 points from Inauguration Day in 2017. Among Kentucky Republican primary voters, Trump stood at a very robust 86 percent approval.

We’ll have to wait to see the next survey to get a sense of how the kick off of the impeachment process has affected Trump’s numbers in Kentucky, but the same PPP poll that found McConnell currently at 18 percent found Trump still at sixty.

So, it seems that McConnell is going to be relying on a lot of pro-Trump voters to punch their ballot for him if he wants to get reelected. A simple back of the envelope calculation suggests that he’ll need to hold the 37 percent he currently has and win 13 out of the 19 percent undecided voters just to get to dead even.  I don’t think he has much chance to win votes from people who already plan to vote for his eventual opponent, although he could theoretically pursue some of their support.

That will be hard to do, however, when he needs Trump supporters. The numbers currently suggest that a majority of the undecided voters are likely to choose Trump over the Democratic nominee, and that boxes McConnell in.

Going a little deeper, it seems inevitable that Trump will win more overall votes in Kentucky next year than McConnell will. That just follows from one having an approval number of around sixty percent and the other having an approval number in the high teens. So, the lower Trump goes, the worse things will be for McConnell.

The wildcard here is the possibility that Trump won’t survive to be the 2020 nominee. If that were to happen, it might seem like McConnell would take the blame as the leader of the Senate that forced the relatively popular Trump out.  But there is no guarantee that Kentuckians won’t come to agree that Trump needed to go, or to at least become more evenly divided on the issue than they are at present. Trump will not be nearly as popular (anywhere) as a former president as he is now. McConnell could actually wind up repairing his reputation with a lot of voters, including some who don’t currently plan on voting for him.

There is no obvious way for McConnell to game this out. He’s vulnerable and will grow more vulnerable if Trump’s approval numbers weaken. That argues for trying to protect Trump and boost his approval numbers, which might be what Kentucky voters expect from him. But he’s going to need Trump to win by a huge margin in Kentucky and that might not happen.

If, on the other hand, McConnell helps push Trump out, he’s going to need the people of state to approve his decision, at least in retrospect. This, I believe, is far likelier to happen than many people expect. Other than a couple of holdouts like Pat Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy, no one defended Nixon once he was gone. I don’t think things we’ll be much different with Trump.

Kentucky is such a Republican state, that it would probably be a safer bet for McConnell to share a ticket with a presidential nominee not named Trump. Almost any Republican would win the state in a conventional Republican/Democratic matchup, and McConnell could use their coattails.

On the other hand, the GOP had a very bad election in 1974 even after Nixon left office. But this argues more against anyone pardoning Trump between his departure and Election Day 2020 than that the GOP is doomed if Trump goes down.

Whatever McConnell ultimately decides will be informed not only by his own personal predicament but the wishes of other Republican senators in the caucus he leads. Personally, I think McConnell would be a fool to bank on Trump coming out the other end of impeachment with enough juice left to help him win reelection. Even in Kentucky, that seems like a reckless assumption.

Yet, if you look at McConnell’s demeanor and disposition, you’d think he didn’t have a care in the world. For some reason, he’s never suffered the fate his approval numbers suggested he would, and maybe he’s right in assuming things will be the same for him in November 2020.