KY Politics Insider: Is Cameron leaving US Senate race? Fake news, his camp says
Kentucky Politics Insider offers an analysis of Kentucky politics and the conversations that drive decisions. Email reporter Austin Horn at ahorn@herald-leader.com or ping him on social media sites with tips or comments.
A story in POLITICO shook up Kentucky politics over the weekend.
Its suggestion: Some prominent Republicans are thinking of nudging former attorney Daniel Cameron out of the U.S. Senate race and into the 4th Congressional District GOP primary, where President Donald Trump is seeking to oust Rep. Thomas Massie.
The Cameron campaign, and a key member of Trump’s political team, had two of Trump’s favorite words for the story: Fake news.
James Blair, White House deputy chief of staff, said as much in a post to X.
“There’s a line down the street to challenge (Massie). The president will pick the best one when it’s time,” Blair wrote.
Brandon Moody, Cameron’s general consultant, also denied the possibility of Cameron budging from the race. As of mid-September, he said, Cameron has led the pack in every publicly available poll, pacing ahead of Rep. Andy Barr and Lexington tech entrepreneur Nate Morris, who has never held elected office.
In an interview with the Herald-Leader, Moody called the insinuation “a non-story” and said Cameron was polling ahead in every media market, including Barr’s native Lexington. Cameron won Fayette County in the 2023 gubernatorial primary by 10 points despite running against two Central Kentucky candidates.
“I think this is coming from one of the two candidates who know they can’t win this election without Daniel Cameron getting out of the way,” Moody said. “He’s too strong, he’s too well-liked, and he’s got too much support from regular voters. There’s no amount of money they can spend to drive themselves past Daniel on the ballot, so he has to get out.”
Earlier this month, a pro-Barr PAC released a survey of 600 likely GOP primary voters, which found that 37% said they’d vote for Cameron, 29% backed Barr and 8% supported Morris.
One other item in the POLITICO story that has not received as vociferous a pushback as the Cameron idea was a recent White House meeting between Trump himself and Sen. Aaron Reed, R-Shelbyville.
Reed has for a few months been mentioned as the leading candidate to run against Massie. POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin reported that Trump did not come away “totally convinced” that Reed, a recently elected former Navy SEAL, was the man to beat Massie because he was, per Trump, “too extreme” in his anti-abortion rights stance.
Trump has long advocated for Republican embrace of exceptions to abortion bans in the case of rape or incest, which are not included in Kentucky’s near-total ban on abortion.
GOP congressional hires
It’s go time for candidates running to replace Barr.
With fall festival season well under way, the three GOP candidates and four Democratic candidates are pounding the pavement to get their names out there in what many see as a wide open race in the primary and, potentially, the general election.
The 6th Congressional District is the only one of Kentucky’s U.S. House districts seen as potentially competitive, though it leans Republican.
The three Republicans to have announced for the office all have people working on their campaigns with deep roots in Kentucky politics.That became the case for Ryan Dotson, the state representative from Winchester, recently with the hiring of Nick Nash.
Nash left a job working with House Republicans in Frankfort to head Dotson’s campaign. Previously, he served as political director for the gubernatorial campaign of former commissioner of agriculture Ryan Quarles and in a fundraising role with Kentucky 4-H.
Dotson, a business executive and pastor who has said that no candidate will outflank him on the right, has thus far attracted attention on social media. He hasn’t yet posted significant fundraising beyond contributions from his own pocketbook, though.
Ralph Alvarado, a former state senator from Winchester, also brought on a well-known Frankfort operative to run his campaign. Andy Westberry, the former spokesperson for the Republican Party of Kentucky, left that role to run Alvarado’s campaign.
Consultants for the Alvarado campaign include Chip Englander and Michael Antonopoulos, a duo with ties to Trump and former Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, as well as Austin Chambers, who previously led the Republican State Leadership Committee.
Though Alvarado kept some work and residency in Kentucky, he had served as the commissioner of health in Tennessee before jumping in the 6th Congressional District race. He joined the fray shortly after Sen. Amanda Mays Bledsoe, R-Lexington, announced she wasn’t running.
For Rep. Deanna Gordon, R-Richmond, a big name in Kentucky politics advising her campaign is Brad Shattuck. He is consulting on the effort, not managing in the way that Nash and Westberry are for their respective candidates. Shattuck founded Strategic Impact, a political consulting company with a national presence.
Shattuck has built a reputation in Kentucky: a willingness to go on the offensive, or, as he called it in a 2024 with the Herald-Leader, be “very freakin’ aggressive.”
How that manifests itself in Gordon’s campaign is still too early to tell, with the ads not yet flowing and the candidates not making public appearances next to each other.
Gordon has, however, taken some early shots at Alvarado’s previous role in another state, posting on X that she might make a “welcome to Kentucky” gift basket for him.
Shattuck worked with two statewide candidates in 2023: Kelly Craft in her third-place bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination and Treasurer Mark Metcalf in his winning effort, wherein the campaigns used a novel method of splitting time in a 30-second TV ad slot with another candidate.
Jamestown Associates, a firm with experience in Kentucky via Bevin’s campaigns for the U.S. Senate and successful 2015 bid for governor, is working with the Gordon campaign in a media consultanting capacity.
Horse trainer candidate ready to race?
After a quiet summer in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, with only Minority Floor Leader Pam Stevenson, in the race, things got a lot hotter this week.
First, Logan Forsythe, the attorney and former US Secret Service agent, announced Tuesday.
On Wednesday, it was Joel Willett, an ex-CIA agent and contractor.
But not all the horses may be out of the barn just yet.
Another candidate might be successful horse trainer Dale Romans of Louisville. The longtime Kentucky horse trainer ranks 22nd all time in earnings, with his horses having earned more than $126 million at the track, according to horse racing website Equibase.
Romans went three years in a row with a horse in the top four at the Kentucky Derby from 2010-2012.
When contacted by the Herald-Leader, Romans said he could not “confirm or deny anything right now.” However, for the last week his name has been floated in Kentucky Democratic circles as a potential candidate with the ability to self-fund.
Though Stevenson has run statewide before – in 2023, she lost handily to Attorney General Russell Coleman for the state’s topj law enforcement role – her fundraising has been eclipsed by her Republican counterparts.
She has raised more than $200,000 as of July 1, but at that time her campaign had more debt than it did cash on hand.
