It’s been 30 years or more since Kentucky was a bellwether state in national politics, but it might be this year. Part of it, at least.
That part is the section of Kentucky that the nation may know best, the Bluegrass Region around Lexington. Most of it’s in the 6th Congressional District, the closest thing the state has to a “purple” district. It has turned redder with the elections of Republican Rep. Andy Barr, Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP, and the legislature’s removal of Democratic Franklin County from the district. But now Barr is running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Mitch McConnell, and the seat he has held for 14 years is very much up for grabs.
Trump carried the district in 2024 by 15 points, but has become an albatross for Republicans in the 6th District for the same big reason he’s at his record low nationally: a war of choice that has been a disaster, resulting in high fuel prices on top of persistent inflation.
Some polls say Trump’s net approval has dropped more here in Kentucky in any other state, to minus 12 points, so he is surely farther underwater in the 6th District, where party registration is virtually even and one in eight voters don’t belong to a major party.
Presidential approval is the biggest factor in midterm elections, and voting locations in the district will be among the first in the nation to close, so it is likely to be an early indicator of how large the blue wave in the Nov. 3 midterms will be.
At this point, I give Democratic nominee Zach Dembo a small edge over Republican Ralph Alvarado. Nonpartisan rating outfits based in Washington say the race leans Republican, but those ratings have been moving Dembo’s way, perhaps correcting an early bias that depended too much on recent performances in the district by Trump and by Barr, who’s had weak opponents.
Now Trump’s brand is bad, which the Alvarado campaign clearly illustrated weeks ago by removing from its website all mention of the president except one photo in a 15-picture gallery. Dembo avoids naming the president, perhaps to avoid stirring up Trump voters, but he cites “the corruption in Washington D.C. and this Administration’s abuse of the criminal justice system,” his stated reason for resigning as a federal prosecutor.
Alvarado, a physician, is the race’s bad-luck candidate. In 2019, he ran for lieutenant governor with Matt Bevin, who lost his bid for re-election and then issued several controversial pardons, and recently was jailed for contempt of court for failure to file financial data in his Louisville divorce case. Democrats are hanging Bevin around Alvarado’s neck; in one of their ads Dembo points at a cutout photo of Bevin and says “This is my opponent. OK, you got me. But Ralph Alvarado is basically the same guy.”
That’s unfair to Alvarado, who had no previous ties to Bevin, other than being a state senator, and who “kept silent” about the pardons, as the ad says. But Bevin’s more toxic than Trump, and the spot ends with the Bevin cutout being carried by Gov. Andy Beshear, likely the state’s most popular politician – and Dembo’s most recent employer. (Dembo’s wife is a prosecutor for Republican Russell Coleman, the state attorney general.)
Republicans are running a flood of spots claiming Dembo would raise taxes and protect illegal immigrants, but he has not responded in ads, indicating that he believes voters driven by those issues are unlikely to vote for him. He has name recognition and support from his victory in a busy primary over more liberal candidates, and Democrats in tight races in other states say similar influxes of Republican ad money have had little effect.
Amid the ad barrage on Lexington TV, the most telling ad may be one for Barr in the Senate race, in which a “loyal Democrat” says she’s for him. Turnout is crucial in midterms, and national polls and early-voting data in some states show Democrats are much more motivated to vote than Republicans. Many registered Democrats who don’t pay much attention to politics could turn out and vote for Barr’s opponent, Charles Booker, mainly or solely because he’s the Democratic nominee at a time when the Republican label has gone bad.
Barr’s ad appears aimed at turning out registered Democrats who have become accustomed to voting for Republicans but aren’t inclined to vote in midterms. Those are voters Alvarado needs to get, but it’s hard to tell how he might get them, or much else about him. He declined to debate Dembo on KET Monday night, and his campaign ignored my repeated requests for an interview and access to any campaign event. It looks and acts like a campaign that’s on the back foot.