What do you think about Andy Barr taking Mitch McConnell’s senate seat and Jamie Comer for governor?
These are the two questions I’ve been asking registered Republican friends, including Trump supporters, here in Anderson County following the August 2 political speeches at Fancy Farm.
Considering this rural, central Kentucky county voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, you might think the answers are obvious. And you would be wrong.
Congressman Barr has been in office for more than a decade, well before Trump threw his name out there as a possible presidential candidate. And yet, in his six minute Fancy Farm speech, Barr squeezed in the word ‘Trump’ 15 times.
Barr has been my congressman since I moved here shortly before Trump was elected president. My earliest memory of the congressman was watching him turn tail and run away from a woman in the hallway at Anderson County Middle School in 2018 when she tried to ask him a question he didn’t like. Anecdote aside, Barr is well-liked here, but in a milquetoast, boy-next-door way, which is to say he is good at saying the right buzz words and smiling for photos but nobody — not even the people who vote for him — can pin down exactly what he stands for these days other than whatever President Trump says he should stand for.
I assumed that Barr would be a lock on the Anderson County vote for senate, but people here are interested in Nate Morris because he’s an outsider (like Trump, see how that works?) and constantly shows he’s a fighter.
And yet these same people, when you drill down on the ‘fighter’ bit, will tell you they are exhausted by the loud, angry talk and wondering what any of these guys — Barr, Morris, Daniel Cameron — would actually DO with a 6 year term as a freshman in the senate.
What many of Trump’s voters love about McConnell is his longevity. He supports Trump enough but is also a man with his own mind who goes about his business in a quiet, controlled, dignified, strategic manner.
With Trump and McConnell, voters feel they’ve gotten the best of two extremes.
As for Cameron, bottom line: a nice guy who can’t win a statewide race. That he lost to a democrat, even though that loss was to a popular and very specific kind of democrat in Andy Beshear, a Cameron vote in the primary feels really risky.
Rural republicans here believe there’s an even bigger risk with Nate Morris, even as much as they like his fighter persona. Nobody really knows who he is except that he’s rich. And what little they do know is that “he just seems mad” one woman told me, and boy oh boy she does not like him “pissing on” McConnell. Even the folks on the fence about McConnell respect his many years of service, and this might be the thing that ends it for Morris.
As for Congressman James Comer and his potential run for governor, there is the general sense that he no longer knows Kentuckians at all.
Comer has been in the “swamp” in DC too long, was the overall sentiment, and also that he’s doing fine and maybe should just stay there.
Comer used almost his entire six minutes at Fancy Farm to harangue the media, including saying that the “liberal media” was peddling a false narrative that Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, is popular with rural Kentuckians.
I have news for Congressman Comer. This is not a false narrative. Republicans in rural Kentucky might despise Joe Biden and agree with Comer on ‘woke’ and immigration and Hunter Biden’s laptop, but a whole lot of them really like the governor — they ALL call him Andy — and a bunch of them even voted for Beshear to make him governor again.
In Comer’s Fancy Farm speech he said, “Ya’ll obviously didn’t grow up in rural Kentucky and you definitely don’t know anyone in rural Kentucky. We folks in rural towns have a thing that many reporters and most Democrats have never heard of, and that’s a thing called ‘common sense’.”
Comer is right. We do have common sense. But again, the rural people I talked to the last couple of weeks think Comer has become just another D.C. swamp attention-monger. They love that he’s spent his time in D.C. sticking it to the Bidens — because yes, not one Republican can stand the Bidens — but now that the Bidens are gone?
With Trump in office sucking up all the media attention, Congressman Comer looks like he’s flailing for the sake of flailing. On FOX News and the Sunday shows, he’s throwing around the same old buzz words like ‘woke’ and ‘DEI’ people have heard for years. And how does that help rural Kentuckians, exactly? Does it get them lower grocery prices? Cheaper prescriptions? An education? Childcare? Jobs, jobs, jobs?
I realize all of this will be taken with a giant grain of salt, if that. I am a known partisan, an outspoken Democrat, that woman who goes to the capitol in Frankfort and writes about what I see in the GOP supermajority legislature. But I also love my neighbors and my community and I talk to everyone. Even people who hate what I write about love a debate with someone who’s up for a good-natured chat about the hard stuff.
Sometimes I wonder if the men/women running for statewide offices remember that there are 120 mostly-small counties in this state, and while we are absolutely divided politically — politicians work day and night to keep us this way — rural people are tight, many of us remain friends, we share food and laughs, we go to church together, our kids and grandkids go to school together, we show up for our neighbors, and in private conversations we tell each other what we really think.
Rural Kentuckians should not be taken for granted.
We don’t fit so neatly in a ballot box, and it’s a long road to 2026 and 2027.
All candidates would do well to remember that when they grab a microphone.
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