Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie falls to Trump-backed GOP challenger Ed Gallrein
Northern Kentucky Republicans embraced President Donald Trump’s choice for Congress on Tuesday, advancing GOP primary challenger Ed Gallrein to the Nov. 3 general election and rejecting seven-term U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Trump targeted for defeat.
The Associated Press called the race shortly before 8 p.m.
Gallrein will face Democrat Melissa Strange of Erlanger, a supply chain director for a global nutrition and agribusiness company, in November.
The Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District was the nation’s closest-watched race on Tuesday.
More than $32 million was spent as an angry Trump worked to unseat Massie for his perceived lack of personal loyalty to the president, making it the most expensive House primary in recent history, Politico reported.
Gallrein repeatedly thanked Trump for his endorsement Tuesday night and said he’ll prioritize Trump’s and the Republican Party’s agenda, though he did not specify what policies he’d push for.
“Now my focus is advancing the president and the party’s agenda to put America first and Kentucky always,” Gallrein said.
He made a subtle joke on immigration before reminding people what inspired him to run.
“I want to keep it simple because again I speak fluent Kentuckian,” he said, and a few supporters chuckled. “Remember I didn’t join to be a Navy SEAL, I joined to make a difference, and being a Navy SEAL was a path to do that.”
He told supporters he’ll serve his district “with the same audacity” as when he joined the Navy.
The political newbie also shouted out his former teachers, including a World War II veteran who taught with the Kentucky FFA Association, a youth agricultural education program.
Gallrein called them “the type of people that shaped me into the young man I was.”
After a few minutes of thanking his team and local voters, the crowd chanted, “U.S.A. U.S.A.”
Gallrein walked away from reporters into a private room and denied journalists’ requests for questions after his acceptance speech.
“We still have the general (election),” he said. “We don’t count our chicks before they hatch.”
When the Herald-Leader asked what’s next for him, he said, “a bale of hay.”
Massie, an iconoclastic budget hawk and libertarian, sometimes disagrees with Trump — for example, forcing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein sex abuse files, voting against Trump’s massive 2025 tax-and-spending bill and demanding congressional authorization of the U.S. war on Iran, which he opposes.
Those occasional breaches, rare in the Republican-controlled Congress, were enough to earn Trump’s loathing.
Trump lashed out at Massie again on Tuesday, telling reporters in Washington: “Thomas Massie is a terrible congressman. He’s been a terrible congressman from Day One. Dealing with him is just a horrible — I don’t think he’s a Republican. I think he’s actually a Democrat.”
Massie’s concession speech didn’t take a despondent tone though. He kept the crowd’s attention for around 30 minutes with jokes, gratitude and a toast to raw milk.
He said he was proud of his supporters and his campaign for “staying the course” and not resorting to “dirty tricks or throwing a foul ball.”
“Those SOBs in Washington tried to buy my vote,” Massie said. “They couldn’t buy it. Why did the race (get) so expensive? Because they decided to buy the seat, and it got really expensive.”
He touted his work and beliefs that he advocated for in Congress, including policies supporting the Make American Healthy Movement and the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
But Massie also pointed out he has struggled throughout his tenure to identify with one party.
“I’m not even sure that I’m bipartisan,” Massie said. “Bi means you like both. I might be trans partisan because I can’t identify with either … I don’t know which cloak room to go in.”
Despite losing, his advice to a crowd of around 500 people was not to “get even, mad or dig in” and instead get the things they care about done. Massie said before knowing the race’s results, he believed his supporters and him won either way because they started a movement.
“We weren’t really running against Ed Gallrein,” Massie said. “We weren’t running against Donald Trump. We were running for what we believe in.”
At the end of his speech, the crowd of supporters started chanting “2028.” Massie played it coy, asking if they wanted him to run for Congress again. Multiple people said no and started shouting for Massie to run in the 2028 presidential election.
“I need a medical margarita right now, and we’ll talk about it later,” Massie said.
Gallrein made it clear early that, if elected to Congress, he would do what Trump wanted him to do.
“This district is Trump Country. The president doesn’t need obstacles in Congress — he needs backup,” Gallrein said in the press release announcing his campaign last year.
Ted Sandmann, a worker on Gallrein’s campaign, said his team will have a private conference call about Gallrein’s next steps, including policy plans, Wednesday morning. When the Herald-Leader asked what policies are in store, Sandmann said, “he’s got a lot of that on his website,” and again, noted Trump. “He is supportive of President Trump and the MAGA agenda.”
Kentucky’s GOP primary on Tuesday followed the president’s recent successes purging other Republicans he considered disloyal to him, in Indiana state legislative primaries and Louisiana’s U.S. Senate primary. Although Trump has low approval ratings overall at the moment, thanks to rising prices and other woes, his hold on the Republican Party faithful appears strong across most of the country.
Trump recruited Gallrein, a Shelby County farmer and former Navy SEAL who fell short of winning a seat in the Kentucky Senate in 2024. The president stood on a Hebron stage to endorse Gallrein in March and sent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to campaign with him Monday, all while showering insults on Massie.
It was a brutal campaign. Sometimes using AI images, political action committees tied to Trump and Israel ran attack ads trying to connect Massie to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and liberal lawmakers like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Just last week, a Republican who campaigned against Massie in 2012 posted a video interview alleging that Massie offered a former girlfriend hush money to drop a complaint against one of his allies in Congress. Massie immediately denied the claims.
Voters in the 4th District first sent Massie to Congress in 2012 after he served a term as the Lewis County judge-executive. He’s a farmer with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., where he founded a startup company, SensAble Technologies, Inc.
In frequent interviews during the campaign, Massie said he didn’t enjoy being the target of Trump’s wrath. But he said most people in his district understood that his principles were sincere.
With the Epstein files, for example, Massie teamed with a Democratic colleague to force the U.S. Justice Department to disclose a vast trove of information that has embarrassed Trump and many other powerful people with close ties to the disgraced financier.
“I’ve pissed off enough billionaires who are clearly amoral people that I might have shortened my expected lifespan,” Massie told The Atlantic earlier this year.
Sen. Rand Paul, who also sometimes bucks Trump, declined to comment on Massie’s defeat when approached at a Congressional picnic Tuesday night, a short video posted on the social media platform X by CNN’s Kit Maher showed.
This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 7:59 PM.
