KY’s GOP Secretary of State Michael Adams, running as moderate, wins second term
Kentucky voters on Tuesday gave Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams a second term as the state’s top elections official.
Adams defeated Democrat Charles “Buddy” Wheatley, a lawyer and former state representative from Covington.
The secretary of state works with county clerks and the state Board of Elections to oversee voting. The job is also responsible for keeping the state’s paperwork in order, including official acts of the governor, business records and land records.
The job currently pays just under $150,000 a year.
Having survived a three-way GOP primary challenge in May, Adams campaigned as a moderate Republican willing to expand ballot access and square off against election deniers in his own political party.
Notably, some of his campaign materials featured him alongside Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, spotlighting their bipartisan work together to ensure that elections ran smoothly during the public health restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A number of local Republican parties censured Adams for dismissing their election fraud claims — inspired in some cases by former President Donald Trump — as “hogwash.” Meanwhile, he worked with Democrats and Republicans in the legislature to craft new election access measures, like adding three days of early voting and an online portal for voters to request absentee ballots.
Also on his watch, Adams said, Kentucky made the transition from electronic voting machines to paper ballots. It banned connections between voting machines and the Internet. More than 150,000 dead voters were dropped from the rolls, thanks to public databases that can show when Kentuckians have moved elsewhere and died, he said.
Tossing him out of office would have delivered a message that centrists in both parties might regret later, Adams warned in a recent interview with the Herald-Leader.
“If I lose, then there won’t be another Republican who runs with my platform or my positions. It’s done,” Adams said. “I’m the thread that’s keeping the sanity together in the legislature on election issues.
“We’re the only red state that’s making voting easy,” he said. “That’s not an accident. That’s because of my leadership and my willingness to engage my party and tell them when they’re wrong. If they don’t have me as their scold for the next four years, it’s going to be a lot tougher.”
Although voter turnout in Kentucky elections tends to hover around 40 percent, which means the majority of eligible voters don’t go to the polls, Adams said a lot of that is outside his control.
“My goal is to increase convenience for voters, not to hit some arbitrary threshold,” he said.
“Studies show that turnout percentages correlate more with particular states’ civic cultures — active volunteering, charitable giving — than with how many voting days they have,” Adams said. “Tennessee has two weeks of early voting, yet lower turnout than Kentucky has. Also, people who do not vote tend not to be informed about issues and candidates, and thus not motivated to participate. That’s why they don’t vote.”
A native of Paducah, Adams is an elections lawyer who previously worked as general counsel for the Republican Governors Association. He remains an active member of a national law firm — Chalmers, Adams, Backer & Kaufman — that represents political committees, lobbyists, corporations and politicians seeking office.
Asked about the potential for a conflict of interest, given his state elections duties, Adams said he spends minimal time on his private law practice, and he does not presently have any clients inside Kentucky.
As of their most recent campaign-finance reports, filed in late October, Adams reported $341,595 in receipts to Wheatley’s $221,010.
This story was originally published November 7, 2023 at 8:00 PM.
