Trump and Kentucky Republicans are Uniting Against Massie; He Could Still Win
Thomas Massie took the microphone and cut right to the point. President Donald Trump was against him. But Massie had battled for gun owners and had the support of the National Association for Gun Rights to prove it. He said he had local farmers’ backs with a bill that would ease meat processing requirements.
“These are the kind of things that I fight for,” he told the room of Republican activists that had gathered in a mess hall near the banks of the Ohio River south of Cincinnati to hear from local candidates on a dreary Saturday afternoon. “I will fight for you.”
Randy Berling disagreed.
“He’s a Democrat in a Republican hat. … He takes credit for stuff that he says he’s a part of, but everybody knows he’s not,” Berling, a Republican from nearby Melbourne, said as he headed for the door after the speech. Who did he plan to vote for in the May 19 primary? “Not this guy.”
Massie’s frequent rebellions against the president and GOP leadership are catching up to him as he faces his toughest reelection in over a decade.
Local Republicans have been jonesing to oust Massie for years, convinced he’s been more focused on headline-grabbing fights over foreign wars, spending bills and the Jeffrey Epstein files than on putting Kentucky first. Now, with the president finally fronting a primary challenger to Massie in former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, those Republicans see their best opportunity since he won his seat in 2012 to take him out.
But they may well fall short.
The few public polls of the race show Massie with a small lead over Gallrein, suggesting Trump’s imprimatur has some limits. Gallrein, a farmer and former state Senate candidate, has never run a federal race and has comparatively low name ID across the district. It’s all left some Massie detractors worried they won’t be able to unseat him now — or ever.
“In my heart of hearts, I think Massie may win,” said Steve Frank, a former commissioner of Covington, a major Cincinnati suburb and the largest city in northern Kentucky, who has grown critical of the incumbent over Israel and local matters and is backing Gallrein. “And if he can withstand this, who’s coming after him?”
Massie is running hard to make sure he holds on, barnstorming his northern Kentucky district and fundraising aggressively as he seeks to counter the glut of spending stacking up against him. Ad spending from anti-Massie groups has topped $10 million.
“I’m actually glad everybody’s in with both feet and the chips are all pushed in,” Massie told POLITICO while tucked into a two-top in the Hebron hotel where he’ll hold his election-night party on May 19 — one he’s confident will be a victory celebration. “For me, it means they tried me and they couldn’t do it.”
All politics is local
Massie has established deep roots in his district. The libertarian-leaning deficit hawk who rose to power during the Tea Party wave won his seat in 2012 and has been unbeatable by either party since.
He has amassed a loyal following within the state’s “Liberty” movement, a small but rising force in Kentucky politics that is rooted in his district and promotes his core ideals. He’s helped muscle allies into positions of power within the Kentucky GOP and acolytes into seats in the state Legislature, knocking out some influential Republicans in the process.
But his sharp elbows and establishment-bucking approach have made Massie plenty of enemies — from local leaders to Trump himself, who decided to jump into the race when Massie voted against his signature domestic tax-and-spending bill last year.
When the president recruited Gallrein, he opened the door for heavy spending from pro-Trump and pro-Israel forces against Massie. MAGA KY, the super PAC formed by Trump’s top political lieutenants to target Massie, has spent over $3 million hammering the representative for opposing the president’s immigration priorities and his tax cuts. Pro-Israel groups have spent even more.
That’s lit the fuse for local Republicans, who have their own gripes against Massie.
“This is the first time that Massie has drawn a strong opponent,” said Trey Grayson, a Republican former Kentucky secretary of state who is neutral in the race. “Now we will find out if it is possible to build a winning coalition consisting of voters that think Massie doesn’t sufficiently support Trump and those who think he doesn’t sufficiently support northern Kentucky.”
The grievances rolled off their tongues in interviews: Massie voted against a funding vehicle for a major bridge project in the district. He’s rankled the business community repeatedly, nearly drawing a primary challenge from a former leader of the powerful Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce over a decade ago. He’s also drawn complaints about his constituent services, including from Frank, the former Covington leader, who said he once struggled to renew his Global Entry pass through Massie’s office.
Adam Koenig, a former state senator who was ousted by one of Massie’s protégés, told POLITICO he “lost track of the number of times that [Massie’s] office sent people to me,” even on federal matters.
But, Koenig admitted, “we live in a world where constituent services don’t matter as much as they used to. It obviously hasn’t hurt him so far.”
Massie’s heard it all before.
“Did you talk to Adam Koenig?” he asked when presented the critiques during an interview. “That’s one of the guys I took out. And those are things he says. And they’re not true, and he’s just bitter. There’s people who are bitter.”
Gallrein’s team is preparing to play up these home-grown complaints against Massie down the primary’s home stretch, including through targeted digital ads showcasing people who say they’ve encountered difficulties with the representative’s office.
“Every day, we hear from people who feel let down by Thomas Massie,” said Michael Antonopoulos, a political strategist advising Gallrein. “That record along with his betrayal of President Trump will be front and center in this final stretch.”
Across a trio of events in northern Kentucky earlier this month, Massie addressed those criticisms — and others, like his opposition to the war in Iran and aid for Israel, and his work with Democrats to release the Epstein files — head on.
He insisted his votes against district priorities were a byproduct of their inclusion in larger bill packages with other problematic components. He said he sits on committees critical to the region’s economy and transportation systems. He emphasized that he’s against all foreign aid, not just aid to Israel. And he claimed it’s the administration that’s shifted, not him.
“A lot of the positions that may be counter to the administration that I take now are positions the administration once held, whether that’s getting warrants for [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], whether it’s releasing the Epstein files, whether it’s going after waste, fraud and abuse and cutting some of the spending,” Massie said.
He also defended his work at home: “We have great constituent services. We help people with Social Security and their taxes and their visas and their passports.”
Tammy Nolan, a local GOP activist, agreed. Massie’s office is helping her brother acquire disability insurance through Social Security. She had been waffling on whether to vote for the incumbent again, but said those efforts won her over.
“I’m going to support Massie because he supported our family,” she said. “Massie has made mistakes. Trump has made mistakes. But Massie stepped up.”
A difference in approach
Massie is positioning himself as an underdog as he vies for another term — a David against the Goliath of the Trump political machine.
He’s racing to win over voters in his sprawling district that spans from the staunchly Republican eastern suburbs of Louisville that are Gallrein’s home base, to the purple Cincinnati metro area and east into Massie’s home in rural-red Appalachia. He’s called up local Republican groups to add himself to the roster for their events. He’s ramped up his fundraising — smashing his own records and doubling his opponent’s most recent haul — as Trump-aligned forces try to drown him out on the airwaves. Overall ad spending in the race has topped $16 million, according to tracking firm AdImpact.
Interviews with more than a dozen Republican voters showed many struggling over which candidate to choose. Some were grappling with how to reconcile their support for Massie with their support for Trump. Others said they were disillusioned with both. Still others who had grown disaffected with Massie said they didn’t know enough about his challenger beyond Trump’s endorsement to make up their minds.
Gallrein, a farmer and combat veteran, is relying on Trump’s endorsement and his military service to sell his candidacy. He has avoided several debates and forums that his supporters say cater toward Massie-friendly crowds.
Massie has repeatedly criticized Gallrein’s absences. And voters have taken notice.
“We’ve heard Massie speak. And the other guy, honest and true, has never showed up to anything,” Newport Republican Kerri Cadd said after a Campbell County GOP forum that Gallrein declined to attend. “I can’t even remember his name,” she said of Gallrein, and is leaning toward Massie because of it.
Gallrein’s team declined to make him available for an interview. But they argued the choice between the two candidates is already clear — Gallrein is with Trump, Massie isn’t — and said the veteran has been “actively campaigning across the district for months.”
“If the question is about communication with voters, it would seem that it’s Thomas Massie who has the problem because they’re about to kick him out of Congress,” Gallrein spokesperson Alexandra Wilkes said in a statement.
Trump’s shadow over the race is inescapable. But Massie believes it’s not a binary choice between him and the president, in large part because Trump is not on the ballot himself.
Polling appears to support his argument: A Quantus Insights survey from early April that showed Massie with a nine-point lead also found half of likely voters want an independent-minded representative, compared with 37 percent who said they preferred a strong Trump supporter.
But the president’s endorsement is enough for some.
Over beers and deviled eggs at a brewery off the main drag in rural Alexandria, Republican Kevin Carmack was emphatic that he wouldn’t vote for Massie. But Gallrein was also giving him pause. Hadn’t he left the party?
Yes, Gallrein had. He switched his voter registration from Republican to independent in May 2016, as Trump clinched the GOP nomination for the first time. He returned to the party in June 2021, per county clerk records reviewed by POLITICO. It’s one of Massie’s top attack lines — that his opponent is the true GOP turncoat.
But Trump gave Gallrein a pass when the two rallied together in Hebron in March, praising his pick for returning to the party fold. Informed of Trump’s pardon, Carmack nodded.
“I’ll back Ed then,” he said, “if Trump endorsed him.”