Kentucky Republican battles Trump challenger with 'army of fanatics'

LEXINGTON — Thomas Massie is not Dalton Henry’s congressman.

But the Floridian still stood outside KET on May 4 to show his support at Massie’s appearance.

Henry, who traveled hundreds of miles, has followed the race closely, and understands that because Trump has taken aim at Massie by endorsing his opponent, he could be in trouble.

“It’s definitely a referendum on whether or not a congressman can be true to his constituents instead of the party,” Henry said of the upcoming primary election.

Massie later told the Lantern during a festival in his native Lewis County on Saturday that he had heard of people from states such as Florida, Arizona and Michigan, traveling to Kentucky to campaign for him.

“Some people are coming in to volunteer, because they feel like — not to be too dramatic about this — but they feel like the future of the country is at stake,” Massie said.

The Republican congressman has represented Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District since his election in 2012, but this year, he is facing one of his closest battles yet to retain his seat. In October, after months of slamming the congressman in social media tirades, President Donald Trump endorsed a candidate to run against Massie — Shelby County Republican and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein.

Kentucky Republican voters in the district will decide on Tuesday next week whether to give Massie another term, or replace him with Gallrein. Though there will be a Democratic challenger on the ballot in November, the seat is widely seen as a safe one for the GOP. The 4th Congressional District spans from Appalachian Eastern Kentucky to Louisville suburbs in the west. Metropolitan Northern Kentucky, just under Cincinnati, Ohio, has become an increasingly Libertarian stronghold in recent years.

But recent polling suggests the race has tightened considerably, with one independent poll from earlier this week putting Gallrein slightly ahead.

One Republican in Gallrein’s home of Shelby County, Judge-Executive Dan Ison, said that this primary election is the “toughest that Massie has had” in his time in Congress, but questioned if “the president did his homework on his endorsed candidate.” Ison supports Trump, he said, “but I do question some of his actions,” and believes other Republican voters do as well.

“I think he just wanted somebody to run against Massie,” Ison said of Trump. He later added that he had not met Gallrein until he decided to run for the local state Senate seat in 2024. Despite having Republican Senate leadership support, he lost the three-way primary to now state Sen. Aaron Reed, and also faced then-incumbent Sen. Adrienne Southworth.

Ison also questions what issues Gallrein would address if elected to Congress.

When asked what bill would he propose if elected to Congress in a Monday telephone interview with the Lantern, Gallrein said his first step in Congress would be to “go up there and build relationships, because (Massie’s) burned every bridge to our district, burned the bridge factory down, ran everybody off that would build a bridge except for the Democrats who hate us.”

Earlier on in the interview, Gallrein said that the race has national implications.

“If we do not take advantage of this narrow window of opportunity, history is going to punish us, and the way it will do that is through our kids and our grandkids and thereafter,” he said.

Gallrein believes the biggest issue in the race is that most voters in the district have repeatedly elected Trump to the White House — a sign that they support his agenda.

“In other words, the voice of this district and the voice of the American people was clear,” Gallrein said, adding that Massie “stands against us.”

Massie has repeatedly said he largely does vote with Republicans, but he breaks on key issues, which often matter to hard-right voters. For example, he voted last year against Trump’s megabill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, saying at the time it would “significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates.” He also led the charge to release the federal investigation files on convicted sex offender and financier Jeffery Epstein — an idea that Trump campaigned on but cooled to after winning a second term.

Massie told the Lantern that he views this race as a referendum on a few things, including those few times he’s voted against the larger Republican agenda.

“And I think I’ve got a national following, because people are paying attention,” he said.

‘Burned bridges’

Steve Frank, a former vice mayor of Covington, the largest city in Northern Kentucky, told the Lantern that he had donated to Massie in the past, but has since soured on him.

“He’s a nice enough guy, but totally ineffective,” Frank said. “That’s my biggest beef with him. I mean, I have others, but lone wolves in legislatures don’t get anything done.”

Frank said that he feels Gallrein will be more effective in office simply because of his relationship with the Trump administration. He also feels like the “the ground shifted” in Gallrein’s favor in recent days, with Trump backing some successful challengers to Republicans in the Indiana statehouse who had opposed midterm redistricting, and Massie not going to the Kenton County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner — the kind of event that brings out party faithful.

Link NKY reported that Massie had sent a surrogate, state Sen. Gex Williams, because Massie was in Washington for a floor vote. However, Frank was skeptical, saying that another Kentucky U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, attended. Barr is Trump’s endorsed candidate in Kentucky’s U.S. Senate primary.

“Thomas could have been in the same damn car and made it to our dinner, but instead, he didn’t, and that just p----- a lot of people off,” Frank said.

Barr endorsed Gallrein against Massie in February.

Massie has also attacked Gallrein for skipping debates, including the KET appearance last week. In April, Massie posted online a photo of himself shaking hands with an empty seat during what was supposed to be a debate sponsored by conservative groups. Gallrein has been reported as saying that he’s “debating him every day” on the campaign trail instead.

Despite the president’s public tirades against the congressman within the last year or so — like calling his second wife a “supposedly a Radical Left ‘flamethrower’” on Truth Social or saying he is a “moron” during the National Prayer Breakfast — Massie sees hope for some reconciliation.

After the KET debate, Massie told reporters that after Trump called Massie a “third rate Grandstander” in 2020 and vowed to oust him from office, he later endorsed him in 2022. Massie said that as part of the endorsement, he told someone on Trump’s political team “it’d be really nice if he called me a first-rate defender of the Constitution.”

And Trump did just that.

Turnout race

Massie told the Lantern that he feels like it is a “close race, but we’ve got a bunch of momentum here.” He said that his campaign’s recent “moneybomb” drives on social media will aid in sending mailers and getting ads up on TV ahead of the primary on Tuesday.

“I think in the last week, it’s going to be about turnout,” the congressman said, adding that it will vary by county.

In some cases, local races, like the competitive judge-executive race in Lewis County, could bring out more Republican voters, he said. Massie’s home county has been a Republican fortress for more than a century; Lewis County hasn’t been won by a Democratic presidential nominee since 1876.

“What we need to do is to get younger people to turn out,” Massie said. The 55-year-old clarified that for him, that means “anyone under the age of 65” and his campaign does well with that demographic.

In recent years, Kentucky primaries often have abysmal turnout. Statewide turnout in 2024 and 2023 was 12.7% and 14.5% respectively. When Massie was last on the ballot in 2022, the statewide turnout was 20.4%.

Frank, the former vice mayor, said that Northern Kentucky often has “very poor” turnout in primaries and “Massie’s got an army of fanatics.”

Even with Trump’s blessing for Gallrein, that “army” behind Massie could decide the outcome of the race.

“I don’t know how big that army is. I think it’s a lot smaller than it used to be, but those folks will crawl over broken glass to vote,” Frank said.

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