“President Trump has spoken,” said a booming announcer in a TV ad about his endorsement of Rep. Andy Barr in Tuesday’s Republican primary, as if his is the last word about the race for U.S. senator. So much for government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as the first Republican president called it. The hubris of the Trump-connected PAC that bought the ad illustrates the grip that Trump has on much if not most of the Republican base. The primary will roughly measure Trump’s standing in Kentucky, both positive and negative.
The big test is in the Fourth Congressional District, represented by Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican who has been a fly in the party’s ointment since he was elected in 2012. He has crossed Trump repeatedly, but his cardinal sin was helping Democrats force release of the Justice Department files on deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Trump is going to unusual lengths to help challenger Ed Gallrein, in his latest attempt to quash dissent in his adopted party.
The election won’t be a clear-cut verdict on Trump, because Massie has given Republicans in the district plenty of reasons to want him out: votes against Israel, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” and federal funding for the district, subpar constituent service, and a shortage of contact with local officials.
Until his Epstein-files law, Massie was one of those representatives more interested in making a point than getting an outcome. He would say that he’s standing on principle, but he’s also been so much about performing on social media and elsewhere that he opened himself up to a challenge – and is giving traditional Republicans who don’t like Trump OR Massie an opportunity to rejoin the party mainstream, redefined.
That, and Gallrein himself, are examples of how Trump has bent to his will the party he hijacked in 2016. Gallrein clearly didn’t consider himself to be a MAGA Republican then, because he changed his voter registration to independent when Trump clinched his first presidential nomination, and changed it back to Republican only when Trump left office. But after a narrow loss in a state Senate primary, he found Trump much more to his liking – even though Trump 2.0 is a more radical version.
This Trump is an autocratic megalomaniac engaging in unprecedented self-aggrandizement and stoking his personality cult by putting his signature on the currency and his photo on government buildings, adopting government policies that enrich his family, and treating the Justice Department like his private law firm. He started the bipartisan race to the bottom with mid-term redistricting that is warping the political fabric of several states.
In Indiana, after some Republican state senators blocked a Trump-ordered redistricting there, he got almost all of them defeated in this month’s primaries, and by double-digit margins. Virginia’s Supreme Court narrowly threw out a radical Democratic gerrymander on procedural grounds. In Tennessee, where Republicans had already destroyed the longstanding Democratic district in Nashville and have now done the same with the state’s only majority-Black district in Memphis, look for lame-duck Gov. Bill Lee to get an ambassadorship from Trump in return for calling the special legislative session.
Time has passed for Kentucky to redistrict for this year’s elections, but a few years ago the legislature further gerrymandered the First Congressional District to run from Bluegrass horse farms to the Mississippi River. That made for a redder Sixth District, where both parties are having primaries for Barr’s seat and Trump has endorsed front-running Ralph Alvarado.
The Democratic primary in the Sixth could be a test of Democrats’ ability to run against Trump. Former federal prosecutor Zach Dembo stresses that he quit the Justice Department when Trump started using it to go after his enemies. Dembo’s message is the most compelling of the six candidates, and he has the Lexington Herald-Leader endorsement, but he’s a political newcomer and former state Rep. Cherlynn Stevenson has experience and a network. Progressive Erin Petrey says “We don’t need another corporate Democrat” but doesn’t name names.
A Dembo nomination would show that a strong anti-Trump message can get the district’s Democrats out to vote in a primary, and presumably in the November general election. The Sixth could move from Democrats’ wish list to active participation by the national party, but the Senate race is an obstacle. Amy McGrath, running second to Charles Booker, is finally on TV with good ads and has the Herald-Leader endorsement, but it’s late. Maybe she hopes Democrats who’ve written her off as a two-time loser are a small slice of the electorate and she can dominate the final conversation because Booker isn’t on TV. But much of her potential is in counties where there are no significant local primaries, given the party’s decline in rural areas. It’s still Booker’s to lose.
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Cross-posted from the NKY Tribune.
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