How KY Speaker Osborne leads evolving House GOP supermajority in the MAGA era
Hanging on the wall of Kentucky House Speaker David Osborne’s Frankfort office is a picture of a lion tamer. Clutching a whip, his extended arms are corralling the handful of snarling lions encircling him.
Though hyperbolic, the 61-year-old Republican sees himself similarly positioned.
As the highest-ranking member of Kentucky’s largest lawmaking body, Osborne’s role is, in many respects, ringleader and tamer. He’s constantly managing the emotions, opinions and policy goals of the House’s other 99 members. Though lawmakers may steam and snarl, they defer ultimately to their caucus leadership, steered by Osborne, who holds the whip.
“It’s like every day of my life during session,” Osborne joked of the picture, gifted to him by a Democrat.
With the 2026 General Assembly now underway, Osborne is the longest-serving GOP House speaker in Kentucky’s history. It’s a job he says carries a different weight in 2026 than when he observed it as a freshman lawmaker in 2004.
In a series of interviews last spring and summer in his Frankfort office and at his historic home in Oldham County, Osborne described how he approaches one of the most powerful positions in state government.
He was also candid about the challenges of steering a Republican supermajority in the age of President Donald Trump, and how attempting to occupy the political middle, as he does, is increasingly difficult in an ever-polarizing state and country.
“I do hate that everybody is judged before anybody knows anybody anymore. It’s bad for public service, in general,” he said. “It seems like now the people being inspired to serve are being inspired out of anger, hatred and division, and that’s unfortunate. I’m still the Pollyanna that believes it’s noble.
“We need people who are inspired by service and want to do better. I think that gets lost now, and I’m not sure how to turn it around.”
Who has the power in Kentucky?
At a time when ideological differences further divide the country, and where political showmanship and fear-mongering is often valued over passing bipartisan policy, Osborne said, the burden to model true diplomacy and democracy falls on those in leadership positions.
This reality, though he acknowledges it, conflicts with Osborne’s perennial wish to not call attention to himself.
“I try not to think about how I want people to remember me,” he said on spring day in his Frankfort office.
It’s an approach anathema to how Trump comports himself. And it’s a sharp contrast with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s increasingly forward-facing persona, as he seemingly sets his sights on higher office.
Kentucky’s governor is priming voters for what many anticipate to be a presidential run in 2028. In 2025, he started a podcast, began recording weekly selfie videos to address voters directly, and made regular appearances on a range of television media outlets, including Fox News, Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show podcast and Late Night with Seth Meyers.
But as a Democrat in GOP-dominated Frankfort, Beshear has little real power over state policy unless Republican leadership cedes it to him. The GOP’s supermajority status makes the party all-powerful; in the 2025 legislative session, the General Assembly overrode all 29 of Beshear’s vetoes with ease.
These dueling roles — the governor as the face of the state, the House majority leader calling shots from the shadows — are partly the nature of the positions, Osborne said.
“It’s easy to point to the fact that it’s a friction between parties, but I think it’s a friction between offices,” he said.
But it’s also partly the nature of Osborne, people interviewed for this story said.
“That’s just not who David Osborne is,” said Rep. Michael Meredith, an Oakland Republican who has served in the legislature since 2010.
“If he was not directly involved in one of the big decisions that have happened since we took the majority, he has empowered somebody to take on that position and work behind the scenes helping to move those issues along,” Meredith said.
“But he’s never been one to take the credit for anything. He’s happy to give the credit to somebody else because that’s just who he is. It’s more about policy than it is about his personality.”
That was the experience of former House Minority Caucus Chair Joni Jenkins, too, who described Osborne as “very respectful.”
Calling attention to himself is “just not his style at all,” Jenkins, a Democrat, said of Osborne. She made history in 2019 in becoming the first woman to serve as top leader of a Kentucky legislative caucus.
The bulk of her time in leadership was during the COVID-19 pandemic, a friction flashpoint between Democrats and Republicans.
Though many Republicans refused to follow Beshear’s mask mandate, “I felt like he really did go out of his way to try to make sure my caucus felt safe. As I look back, I think that was probably a difficult position for him to be in.”
Jenkins retired in 2022, and since then she’s watched the GOP caucus wade further into fringe issues, she sees Osborne increasingly as a lynch pin that’s preventing the party from sliding into full-tilt MAGA territory.
“I think there are folks like me, in both parties, that wonder: if Osborne should retire or lose his leadership position, what would happen? I think he has done a very good job of trying to keep the caucus together. At the end of the day, even though he and I might not agree on how to do it, he does want what is best for Kentucky.”
‘Treated with respect and dignity’
Maintaining the political upper hand still feels new to Osborne, who was first elected in 2005.
At the time, and still today, he’s a career real estate agent. Osborne renews his license every year, sometimes barely. He holes up in front of the computer around Christmas, his wife, Lori, cajoled in May from their historic Oldham County home, which Osborne said is the oldest two-story stone house in the state.
As an adolescent, Osborne was no stranger to political campaigns. His great, great-grandfather was a Kentucky representative, and as a child he remembers tagging along with adults to volunteer and knock on doors.
“One of my oldest memories is knocking on doors with my mom for Gene Snyder, before he was a highway,” Osborne said of the former Republican representative who was first elected in the 1960s.
“I’ve always had an interest in it, always liked being involved in it. Never really thought about running for office, quite frankly. And it just so happened there were lots of things that kind of came to a head in 2005, both around career, family, that all of a sudden afforded me a little time that I’ve never thought I’d had before,” he said. “In this world, you can’t ever pick your time. Time picked me at that point.”
That time was a special election after then-Rep. Tim Feeley was appointed to be a family court judge by former Gov. Ernie Fletcher.
“I almost hate to say it, but it was almost on a dare,” Osborne said of his choice to run. “There was an article that came out in the newspaper about some people who were the frontrunners to take Tim’s seat, and it just wasn’t a very good representation of what Oldham County had to offer.”
He’d never served in public office before, and his first campaign mostly highlighted “pro-business,” Chamber of Commerce-type issues, he said. Social wedge issues that have since become benchmark policies of his party were not front and center.
He spent the next 11 years in the minority until Republicans made history in winning control of the House on the coattails of the 2016 election of Trump.
In the decade since, the Kentucky GOP has swelled to a supermajority of 80 of the House’s 100 seats. But as the party makeup becomes more binary, so do political extremes. It’s a whirlpool Osborne wishes his party would try harder to swim against.
The tenor of politics — and the policies prioritized by the GOP — have shifted markedly since he was elected 20 years ago, he and others in the GOP said.
“In 2005, when me and David Osborne both started, we were both called right-wingers. Now we’re called RINOs — Republicans In Name Only,” House Majority Floor Leader Stephen Rudy said in an interview this summer.
“But I don’t think either one of us has changed that much in our position. It’s the pendulum of how (the party) swung and where it is today.”
In the last near-decade, under the leadership of Osborne and Senate President Robert Stivers, Republicans have passed policies that more traditionally align with the conservative platform: They’ve lowered the state income tax, made Kentucky a right-to-work state and repealed a prevailing wage requirement.
The Kentucky GOP has also passed many controversial policies against the advice of field experts but in line with the farther right-leaning party platform under Trump, which aims to combat “wokeness” and champions a “return to common sense.”
Republicans under Osborne and Stivers have eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion offices and initiatives in higher-education settings, criminalized abortion with a near-total statewide ban, they’ve banned transgender teenage girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, and outlawed access to gender-affirming health care for trans teens and many trans adults.
Osborne has shepherded some of these bills to final passage, but he has purposely avoided becoming a mouthpiece championing them. He will share his candid thoughts with members in caucus, he said, but he declined to share personal opinions about them for this story.
Mostly, he tries to turn down the volume and understand what motivates each member.
“Individually, no one is poorly intended,” he said. “Their views are based on what they believe is best for Kentucky and best for the people as a whole, so you can’t dismiss that, even though some people are better than others at communicating those things and working in groups.”
At the same time, Osborne resists today’s hyper-partisan political landscape, one that feeds on anger and vitriol over political compromise. In this vein, he admits that at times his membership has lacked compassion toward the people who bear the brunt of those policies, including trans Kentuckians.
But at a time of such heightened partisanship, level-headed diplomacy alone isn’t necessarily enough to protect the interests of all underrepresented Kentuckians, said Attica Scott, a Louisville Democrat who served in the state House from 2017 to 2022.
“When it comes to politicians, including Speaker Osborne, and they talk about feeling conflicts with vitriol and hatred, racism and sexism, I don’t have the stomach for it (and) it doesn’t matter to me; you’re in a position to help halt a lot of that,” she said.
“If you’re a publicly elected official, people want to see your action in public,” Scott said, “not the behind the scenes, back-door politicking, because it’s what has gotten us where we are now.”
“What we need from the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate is the kind of leadership that says we are not going to play into the divisiveness,” but rather, “what can I do to make sure everyone in the Commonwealth thrives, not just the people who donate to my campaign, not just the loudest voices or the supermajority.”
Critics of those GOP policies, including Beshear, have characterized them as hateful, rebuking the party for “politicizing issues that are literally killing our children.”
When asked about this perception, Osborne paused for 11 seconds before answering.
“We clearly have a very passionate and conservative base in the legislature,” he said. “My hope is that we never lose sight of the fact that we’re talking about people.
“I spent a decent amount of time talking to our caucus about that: Never lose sight of the fact that everybody is a person. It doesn’t necessarily change the way you view policy, but at least you view them as real people that have real lives and need to be treated with respect and dignity.
“We can disagree, but that doesn’t excuse us from not having compassion for people. I hope we somehow figure out a way of doing a better job of showing that compassionate side, (because) I don’t think we show it enough. I really don’t.”
