By Gregory Wallace
(CNN) — It would have been one of the most interesting races of the 2014 midterm cycle: Actress Ashley Judd challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky for the seat he has held for nearly three decades.
But Judd decided not to launch a campaign for the Democratic nomination, and her top adviser explained why on Monday: sabotage.
“Really the establishment on both sides turned against Judd,” Jonathan Miller said on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront, clearing the way for another Democratic candidate.
“Some of them wanted another candidate, (Kentucky) Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, some for good reasons … they thought she’d be a stronger candidate, but others sought to either profit from her, working on her campaigns, or would love to have a friend in the U.S. Senate,” Miller claimed.
Also working against Judd were “people who weren’t friends of Secretary Grimes, who wanted to push her into the Senate race so she wouldn’t be running for governor or lieutenant governor back home because she might be a rival of one of their preferred candidates,” he continued.
Miller wrote an op-ed for The Daily Beast Monday that also claimed that Democrats circulated lies about statements Judd had made or former President Bill Clinton’s involvement in the race.
Although Judd cited her family, Miller suggested that if not for the sabotage, Judd could have been a viable candidate.
“Now, I don’t pretend that Ashley Judd was a perfect candidate, or that there weren’t a significant number of Democratic insiders who opposed her candidacy,” he wrote in op-ed. “But in her early calls, she was winning over many skeptics, including the incumbent governor and the House speaker, the latter being the most prominent politician from Appalachia, the region purportedly most hostile to the actress because of her public opposition toward a controversial coal-mining technique.”
Members of Judd’s own party “duped” reporters into believing falsehoods about his candidate, he said.
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