After months of ‘Morris vs. Barr,’ PAC finally targets Daniel Cameron in ad
For many months, Kentucky television viewers could have been forgiven for believing the GOP primary race to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell was a two-man fight between Rep. Andy Barr and Lexington tech entrepreneur Nate Morris.
That changed Wednesday, when an ad from a political action committee began airing ads accusing former Attorney General Daniel Cameron of holding previous “soft” on crime positions.
For the better part of a year, campaigns for Morris and Barr have been pelting the air waves with ads touting their allegiance to President Donald Trump, and PACs have hit the candidates hard for being “fake,” squishes on immigration and more. The outside groups have stretched the truth in their hits.
The situation has called to mind for some Kentucky politicos the now-infamous “food fight” ad, where the campaign for former Gov. Matt Bevin had stand-ins for then-candidates Hal Heiner and James Comer fling spaghetti at each other’s faces, portraying Bevin as the staid statesman above the fray.
In contrast to Barr and Morris, Cameron has raised far less money. He’s also the only one to have held statewide office, and he has held onto a significant amount of support in publicly released polling, though it has dwindled some since the early days of the race.
An ad from Kentucky PAC, or KY PAC, a newly formed PAC spending several thousand dollars across the state in this campaign, marked the first utterance of Cameron’s name in a televised ad.
The ad begins with a closeup of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s face and a reference to the American Civil Liberties Union.
“He teamed up with the ACLU to release criminals early,” the narrator says before marking an “X” through Beshear’s face and shifting the camera to Cameron. “Not this guy — this one.”
“Daniel Cameron partnered with the ACLU to end cash bail and put criminals back on the street. Cameron proudly joined with the radical left to reduce penalties for drug crimes. And while president Trump was deporting illegal immigrants, Cameron’s law firm was defending them,” the narrator says.
Details on the funding source for KY PAC are not yet public. Though Cameron’s team has claimed the ad comes from Barr supporters, it is separate from the primary PAC supporting Barr heretofore: Keep America Great PAC.
The ad mostly refers to Cameron’s position as a leader and spokesman within the Kentucky Smart on Crime Coalition, a cross-partisan group spearheaded by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. It included the conservative-leaning think tank Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, as well as the left-leaning ACLU. Cameron was involved with the group in the late 2010s, shortly before he launched into politics as a successful first-time candidate for attorney general.
The group did, indeed, push to eliminate cash bail alongside several other reforms. Most of those did not pass into law in Kentucky. The coalition also backed a bipartisan bill intended to curb the growth of Kentucky’s then-ballooning jails, downgrading certain non-violent, non-sex crimes like drug possession from felonies to misdemeanors.
Cameron’s campaign has framed this effort as Barr supporters “lashing out” because they see Cameron as a serious threat.
“He has always stood strong with law enforcement, even in the face of rioters threatening to burn his house down and harm his family. Andy Barr is running a desperate campaign, wanting you to forget that he bent the knee to Black Lives Matter rioters, blamed police for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, decried their conduct as ‘totally inexcusable’ and called them racists. The choice is clear, and that’s why Daniel Cameron has been endorsed by more than 100 Kentucky law enforcement leaders and the Kentucky FOP multiple times,” campaign manager Nathanael Hirt said in a statement.
This is not the first time that Cameron’s ties to Kentucky Smart on Crime have been scrutinized. In 2023, a PAC supporting former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft used the material for an ad comparing Cameron to well-known progressive district attorney.
Cameron, who had Trump’s endorsement in the 2023 race, ended up winning easily with 48% of the vote, clearing second place by 26 percentage points.
Two publicly released polls of the GOP primary race were conducted in March. One by Emerson College and Lexington TV station FOX56 had Barr with 28% to Cameron’s 21% and Morris’ 15%; another, conducted by Barr’s campaign, had Cameron up at 31%, Barr with 29% and Morris at 13%.
What politicos say
What could make this negative ad campaign different from 2023? For one, the race is tighter. But the difference between Cameron’s funds and that of two other candidates is also even greater this go-around, said GOP consultant Jake Cox. Cox served as campaign manager for 2023 gubernatorial primary second-place finisher Ryan Quarles.
“The difference there is Bevin had money, and Daniel doesn’t. In 2015 you had three well-funded campaigns going at it, and Bevin had just the year before run statewide,” Cox said. “(In 2023), Daniel was able to respond early and often. He had the ability to sort of preempt some things, as opposed to now, when he doesn’t really have the money to go out and respond every attack ad.”
Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state who ran for U.S. Senate in 2010 when Sen. Rand Paul claimed his seat, said there’s a reason Morris, Barr and the groups supporting them hadn’t hit Cameron until now: they figured his support would have fallen more than it has.
Grayson, who is supporting Barr, said the theory goes that “by force of gravity” Cameron’s support would peter out because of his low campaign coffers. Not addressing him at all in ads, and rarely in the one debate with all three candidates, might even distract voters from the fact of Cameron’s candidacy.
Though Cameron’s support has fallen in public polling, his decline may not have happened as fast as forecasted. So now, Grayson reckons, Barr and people supporting him are looking to try and bring him down.
“I’m sure this is what they’re thinking: Now’s the time to go pivot back to Cameron, because (Barr) has sort of taken Morris’s best shot, and now he’s got to focus on the guy who actually can win the race and the guy who’s been winning the race in the polls the whole way, which is Cameron,” Grayson said.
If done effectively, it could freeze voters who still feel a fondness for Cameron based on his previous runs for office and high-profile news events during his tenure like his office’s handling of the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Cox said.
“I think recent polling has shown that Daniel’s got legitimate staying power when it comes to his approval ratings. This close to the election, you want to start knocking that down a little bit, so that way undecided voters, when they go into the polls, don’t remember the last good thing they heard about someone — they remember the last bad thing,” Cox said.
This story was originally published April 10, 2026 at 8:26 AM.
