When Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary took shape last year, Rep. Andy Barr was staring down the barrel of a messy three-way race with a two-time statewide party nominee and an outsider flamethrower backed by some of President Donald Trump’s closest allies.
Now heading into Election Day, Barr has emerged from the scrap largely unscathed. He’s forced one opponent out of the race and carries an endorsement from Trump that gives him the inside track to advance to the general election and, in deep-red Kentucky, win the race to succeed Sen. Mitch McConnell.
The battle for that endorsement, Kentucky Republican officials and strategists told POLITICO, has colored every facet of the race between Barr, former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron and entrepreneur Nate Morris.
But where Cameron and Morris alienated supporters of McConnell and GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, two enemies of Trump from opposite sides of the party, Barr managed to navigate all three camps in the state.
In doing so, Barr built up support from both the Trump and McConnell factions while neutralizing the state’s Libertarian-leaning rabble-rousers, giving him a comfortable polling lead in the race’s final weeks.
“Barr did not get the Trump endorsement by being a sycophant,” said TJ Litafik, a Kentucky GOP strategist and Barr supporter. “He did it by proving that he was the best horse in the race.”
Early on, each candidate distanced themselves from McConnell to varying degrees, acknowledging the longtime senator’s low approval rating in the state after breaking with Trump on some major issues.
Morris launched his campaign with a video slamming McConnell while throwing a cardboard cutout of the senator in the garbage, setting the tone for a campaign defined by aggressive anti-McConnell rhetoric.
Cameron — McConnell’s onetime general counsel who many in the state assumed would one day be his successor — surprised some in the state when he attacked McConnell by name for his votes against some of Trump’s nominees last year and criticized his support for Ukraine shortly after launching his Senate bid.
Kentucky GOP strategist Tres Watson, who is unaffiliated with any Senate campaign, said Cameron’s turn away from McConnell cut him off from the vast network of donors and organizers who still hold McConnell in high regard.
“Daniel won two statewide elections,” Watson said, referring to the attorney general race and the 2023 GOP gubernatorial primary. “But he won them largely on the back of the machine that Mitch McConnell built, both at the grassroots level and at the fundraising level.”
Donors ultimately never backed Cameron, who lagged significantly behind Barr and Morris in fundraising. Barr entered the last month of the race with more than five times the amount of cash on hand than Morris, who eclipsed Cameron in part through personal loans.
Former state Rep. Adam Koenig said Barr’s more measured rebukes of McConnell — despite Barr interning in his office before serving alongside him in Congress for years — earned him support from former McConnell donors and pro-McConnell voters, which helped him reduce Cameron’s early polling lead.
“Barr did not go out of his way to alienate McConnell fans and other, shall we say, normie Republicans,” Koenig said. “That’s one of the many pieces that you put together to run a winning statewide campaign.”
Cameron’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But state Rep. T.J. Roberts, who has endorsed Cameron, dismissed concerns about Cameron’s fundraising.
“I’ve never been of the opinion that you need the most money in order to win. I’m just of the opinion that you just need enough money,” he said.
Morris eventually dropped out of the race without ever significantly pivoting away from his antagonistic, attack-minded campaign strategy. Some Kentucky Republicans thought Morris, who was endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. and Charlie Kirk and whose super PAC received $10 million from Elon Musk, could follow the playbook of former Gov. Matt Bevin, a former businessman who successfully campaigned as an outsider candidate.
Yet Koenig argued Morris’ hostile rhetoric, coming from a relatively unknown political figure, gave voters a poor first impression that he was unable to shed.
“There’s still a lot of parts of the state of Kentucky that are southern genteel,” he said. “They want to know who you are before you go trashing somebody.”
Morris did not respond to a request for comment. In announcing that he dropped out of the race, Trump said he would be appointing Morris to an unspecified diplomatic post.
Blake Gober, Barr’s campaign manager from January to April, said the dynamics in the race flipped once Morris — who the Barr campaign worried could have galvanized the state’s Liberty movement, which is affiliated with Sen. Rand Paul and Massie — backed Massie’s primary opponent, Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein.
Morris had been making inroads with influential Liberty movement figures. He met with Roberts, the state legislator who is now backing Cameron, who said he’d been told by Morris that he would not endorse against Massie, the thorny GOP representative who joined Democrats to push for the release of the Department of Justice’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump initially opposed their release before signing on.
Gober said the Barr campaign deliberated over endorsing Gallrein to ingratiate its campaign to Trump and force Morris to pick a side in the highly-contested primary. Gober said some in the campaign were worried that backing Gallrein could alienate Massie supporters.
In February, Barr endorsed Gallrein and spent a day campaigning with him in northern Kentucky. The same day, Morris also endorsed Gallrein — reversing on his pledge to Roberts.
“I saw a lot of promise with Nate Morris,” Roberts said. “He told me in private that under no circumstances would he end up endorsing against Thomas Massie. And then he did.”
Gober said the Gallrein endorsement left Morris without a viable path to victory, and helped solidify their polling lead with enough time before Election Day to make the pitch to Trump that Barr would make good on an endorsement and win the primary.
“It’s clear that we boxed them into that corner,” Gober said. “I think that it was one of, if not the, final nail in the coffin of Nate Morris.”
The winner of Tuesday’s primary will likely face in the general election either former state Rep. Charles Booker or former Marine Amy McGrath, the two Democrats who lost the last two Senate races in the state. Some Democrats believe horse trainer Dale Romans also has an outside chance at winning the nomination.
But if Barr wins on Tuesday, he’d enter the general election as a heavy favorite in a state Trump won by 30 points in 2024.
Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state who ran for the Senate in 2010, said Trump’s endorsement of Barr is a testament to his strength as a candidate, which he believes will carry Barr over the finish line in the general election.
“In some respects, you can say, ‘well how do you win a race in 2026?’ You embrace Trump and Trumpism, and you get the endorsement, and you win,” Grayson, a Barr donor, said. “And that’s true, but also he was a good congressman who worked his butt off. He earned his promotion.”
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