Meet Alison Grimes, McConnell's nightmare.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

The luckiest break Democrats have had in the 2014 election cycle--a political twist so significant that it could allow the party to maintain control of the United States Senate--resulted from a strikingly stupid political scheme.

For several months in early 2013, Democrats in Washington entertained the notion of running movie star Ashley Judd against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the dark prince of American politics who promises that if Republicans win control of the Senate this fall he will end debates about increasing the minimum wage, regulating banks, protecting the environment, and addressing the corrupting influence of corporate cash on American elections and governance. Judd's a fine actress, with an impressive resume of humanitarian and political activism, along with childhood roots in the Bluegrass State. But McConnell and his pals were positively gleeful at the notion of running against a jet-setting celebrity who had spent much of her adult life in the general environs of Hollywood and Nashville.

A funny thing happened, though, on the way to electoral oblivion. Judd decided she didn't want to take the hits that the haters were preparing on McConnell's behalf. That left national Democrats with no choice but to get serious about beating the man who has for a quarter century curried the favor of Wall Street as part of a long-term plan to become Senate Majority Leader.

What they realized, grudgingly, was that the smart strategy for beating McConnell was never going to run through the Hollywood hills. It runs through Stanton, the city of 2,733 that serves as the seat of overwhelmingly rural Powell County in east-central Kentucky, and through hundreds of small cities and towns across a state where rural voters are, when properly motivated, entirely capable of finding the Democratic line on the ballot. So, Democrats went local, convincing Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes--who actually "gets" that Powell County and rural Kentucky matter, a lot, for Democrats--to be their candidate.

Grimes knows how to speak to Stanton, and communities like it--not by veering right on social issues, and not merely by making respectful references to farming and rural development, but by going populist on economics and promising to do battle with "the people on the top in both parties."

That understanding is what distinguishes Grimes and her candidacy.

She knows that she can win the big city of Louisville, which already elects one of the...