KY-06 Democrats discuss healthcare & more. No Alvarado in pro-Trump GOP debate
In marquee debates on Kentucky Educational Television late Monday night, Democrats and Republicans running to replace Rep. Andy Barr got to make their cases directly to Central Kentucky voters.
Only two of the three Republican frontrunners took the stage Monday night, with Rep. Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester, and former pharmaceutical executive Greg Plucinski in attendance. Former state senator Ralph Alvarado was not there, with his team citing a “prior scheduling conflict.”
The discussion table was more crowded for Democrats. Businesswoman and bourbon writer Erin Petrey, former state representative Cherlynn Stevenson, former federal prosecutor Zach Dembo and former Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council member David Kloiber participated.
The groups painted a very different picture of current affairs when questioned by KET moderator Renee Shaw.
Plucinski and Dotson praised President Donald Trump and the war in Iran, but also focused on boosting the regional economy. They touched on several social issues, like transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, and both repeated the false claim that Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
Democrats railed against the Trump administration, and weighed in on how they’d approach healthcare, the economy, immigration enforcement and more. They also worked to convince voters that a member of their party could win the seat, given that it’s been in Republican hands since Barr unseated former representative Ben Chandler in 2012.
In explaining his absence from the debate, Alvarado spokesperson Andy Westberry contrasted somewhat with Barr, who also did not attend a recent KET scheduled debate between GOP candidates in his bid for U.S. Senate. Barr’s spokesperson called the station “a left-wing outlet,” but Westberry noted that KET “consistently (provided) fair, balanced, and professional coverage to both Republicans and Democrats.”
He also said Alvarado was leading the race, and there was no margin in participating.
“With a dominating double-digit lead in the polls and a massive fundraising advantage, participating would do nothing more than give increasingly desperate, deeply flawed candidates one last chance to distract from the obvious: Their campaigns are irrelevant and clearly flat lining,” Westberry wrote.
Democrats in Kentucky and Washington seem to believe the district is in play to flip, given Trump’s low national approval rating leading into this year’s midterm election. The House Majority PAC, tied to U.S. House Democratic leadership, recently announced $670,000 in television ad placements for the general election in the Lexington market.
Meanwhile, many Republicans believe the district, which dropped politically purple Franklin County in the latest round of redistricting, is a mirage for Democrats hoping to flip the U.S. House.
Republicans on economy, Trump
Plucinski and Dotson mostly agreed on policy but diverged in how they presented themselves.
Dotson, who has been in the state legislature representing Clark County and a slice of Fayette County since 2021, drew on both his legislation against transgender women in women’s sports and women’s bathrooms, as well as his business and pastoral acumen. Originally from Pike County, Dotson has been a pastor in Winchester for several years; late last year, he held a fundraiser on the church’s campus, raising questions for one campaign finance expert.
“I have been a social conservative, and I’ve been a champion of those social issues. ... These are common sense policies that we shouldn’t have to pass legislation for. But because of the woke ideology that’s being pushed on our families (and) our children, somebody had to take a stand, and I took that stand. But aside from just the social issues, I’m also a businessman, and I’ve been able to bring back record funding to my district,” Dotson said.
Plucinski said he came to the conclusion that his perspective as an outsider — he’s never run for any office before, and has largely self-funded this run — was needed after going to a few of Dotson and Alvarado’s events.
“For 24 years, I was building an economy right here in the 6th Congressional District. While our career politicians were talking about it, I was busy doing it, and that investment continues today with $20 million a year flowing into the Bluegrass,” Plucinski said.
Plucinski was president and chief operational officer of Summit Biosciences, which specialized in nasal sprays. It was acquired by a larger pharmaceutical group in 2024.
On the economy, Dotson said he would strive to act as the “CEO of the 6th district,” and work to attract investment.
“When you look at Kentucky on the map, Kentucky is within one day’s drive of 75% of America. Here in the sixth district, we are the heart of Kentucky, so we are poised and primed for great growth economically. As a U.S. congressman, you have to be a CEO, like of a Fortune 500 company, going out there, recruiting the Amazons, recruiting the Elon Musks of the world to come here and do business,” Dotson said.
When asked about political rhetoric, which many blame for a recent spate of political violence, Plucinski and Dotson said they would seek to turn the temperature down while also stating that Trump was not to blame for worsening rhetoric.
Other areas where they expressed alignment: Trump’s general leadership abilities, criticism of government spending, unfettered support for the Second Amendment, immigration enforcement, the need for term limits in Congress and the war in Iran.
When asked about Trump’s plan in Iran, where U.S. forces have eliminated much of Iran’s military capacity, but Iran continues to hamper the world economy via control of the Strait of Hormuz, Plucinski said he trusts the president.
“I think that the President has a plan, and he doesn’t share that with everybody. You look at what he’s doing today, but he’s probably 10 steps ahead of us in planning out his exit out of Iran. So right now, we’re looking at it, and we’re saying, ‘We’re confused, because we don’t know his plan.’ Well, he’s not going to share that with us. He’s a strategist, and he’s going to make this work for the American people,” Plucinski said.
Unfounded claims of a rigged 2020 election — and, conversely, the legitimacy of the 2024 election that Trump won — were also areas of alignment.
“I do not believe Joe Biden won that election fairly. I believe it was a rigged election,” Dotson said of 2020.
Plucinski said he doesn’t “believe for a second” that Biden got as many votes as he did in 2020, but Trump’s win in 2024 was plain because he “was so popular everywhere he went.”
There is no proof for the claim that Trump won the 2020 election.
Democrats on AI, economy & Medicare For All
The Democrats at the table were less unanimous in their opinions and much harsher on the Trump administration.
They represented a spectrum of thought among Democrats across the country and Kentucky. The most progressive of the bunch was Petrey, who emphasized her support for Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a total moratorium on data centers in Kentucky.
“I’m an unapologetic progressive Democrat. What that means is that I believe in Medicare for all, I believe in abolishing ice, I believe in making sure that we actually are moving forward, because I’m tired of Democrats just negotiating against ourselves before we even come to the negotiating table with Republicans,” Petrey said.
She was the only candidate to say outright that she would work to abolish ICE, which came under fire for its handling of protests in Minnesota this past winter. Kloiber added that he would like to “dismantle” the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE — he called the agency a bloated, mismanaged “Frankenstein.” All candidates spoke of the need for practical reforms to both ICE operations and the U.S. immigration system.
One point of contrast on the opposite end of the spectrum was when Shaw asked the candidates to raise their hands if they supported Medicare for All. The only one to not raise their hand was Dembo.
He raised the prospect of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic who briefly ran for president as a Democrat in 2024 before joining Trump’s cabinet, controlling the primary health plan for the nation. Dembo said he would push for a public option healthcare plan, but added that he didn’t want to pull people satisfied with their current plans off of them.
“I think for those folks who like their employer sponsored health care plans, we should not be forcing them off of that in favor of the federal government overreaching into that,” Dembo said.
Both Dembo and Stevenson focused much of their comments on flipping the district and why they were better suited to do so.
“I am running for Congress because I believe that it is far past time that we have a representative that not only understands our politics, but truly understands our lives. I am the only candidate in this race that has flipped a district from red to blue and then held that district,” Stevenson said.
Stevenson won three tight general elections to her formerly purple seat. Then, in 2024, she lost to Rep. Vanessa Grossl, R-Georgetown, by less than a point.
Candidates were aligned on their proposals to hold artificial intelligence companies accountable, given their huge boom in market capitalization and concerns about their impact on the environment and the economy. They all pushed for more guardrails on the development of the data centers that fuel AI.
Petrey — whose resume includes a stint at Amazon Web Services, one of the country’s biggest players in the data center space — tried to separate herself as the most opposed.
“I’m the only candidate in this race who has actually called for a full moratorium on data centers in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and I don’t do that lightly. I have actually worked in that industry before, and I understand it very deeply from the inside. ... I know exactly how these companies need to be regulated, because currently seven companies control almost the entire value of the S&P500, and that is all bloated due to AI. We are on the precipice of yet another tech bubble, yet another recession,” Petrey said.
All the candidates agreed in their opposition to the Trump-led war in Iran as well as the president’s budget bill, which effectively will cut Medicaid spending. They were also clear in their desire to do something about economic inequality, long a concern of Democrats.
All candidates raised their hand when asked if they supported a “living wage,” meaning that minimum wage for a 40-hour work week must be robust enough to cover basic needs without assistance.
“There is absolutely no reason that a secretary, or a nurse, or a police officer, or a school teacher should be paying a higher tax rate than a corporate CEO. Trickle down economics has not worked. We have seen CEO pay raise (in) astronomical numbers, at a time when wages for working Americans, working Kentuckians, (have) stayed absolutely stagnant,” Stevenson said.
Dembo and Kloiber both offered examples of specific loopholes they’d like to cut to address that.
Dembo railed against the “carried interest loophole,” which allows major hedge fund managers to pay lower functional income tax rates.
Kloiber, whose family trust is worth many millions, and who touts his slate of concrete policy proposals, said he would target a tax break for borrowing on margin, a practice employed by some of the wealthiest people to borrow against their assets for an acquisition.
“If we assessed a tax and a fee on that, we could generate trillions of dollars over the next 10 years to help us relieve that deficit, and it would not affect the average worker in this country. That’s a net benefit to the economy. It’s a real, solid solution that helps us address the problem and perhaps get some of these programs off of the wish list and into reality,” Kloiber said.
