Saturday was the deadline for federal candidates and political action committees to file their final campaign finance reports for 2025, with those reports showing many millions of dollars ready to be spent in Kentucky on competitive primary races this May.
Chief among those races is the Republican primary for U.S. Senate to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell. Candidates and aligned PACs spent $15 million last year, and could exceed that total again in the coming months.
Multiple polls in the GOP primary race have shown Daniel Cameron with a comfortable lead, as the former Kentucky attorney general runs for statewide office for the third time in the past seven years. Cameron's lead is despite both of his two main Republican rivals — Congressman Andy Barr and businessman Nate Morris — raising and spending several times what he did last year.
Barr and Morris both raised more than $6 million in 2025, with the latter aided by $4.4 million of personal loans to his campaign. Barr has spent nearly $4 million — with more than $6 million left in the bank — while Morris spent $4.5 million, mostly on advertisements.
Cameron has maintained his polling lead despite spending less than $1 million last year and not yet airing any TV ads. He raised $1.6 million all of last year, which is roughly the same total that the campaigns of Barr and Morris spent in the final three months of the year.
Cameron’s money imbalance with his GOP primary opponents is even larger when factoring in the pro-Barr and pro-Morris super PACs that have already spent $6 million on attack ads pummeling each other, and could spend many times that in 2026.
Keep America Great PAC, which is supporting Barr, reported spending nearly $4 million on ads in the latter half of 2025 that largely attacked Morris. The PAC’s largest contributions were $1.3 million from cryptocurrency company Foris DAX, as well as $1.1 million from Defend Us Inc., a 501(c)(4) dark money group that does not have to disclose its donors. It also received $200,000 from Chance Aluminum, a manufacturer based in Pennsylvania, and $100,000 each from Churchill Downs and the thoroughbred owners of Lexington’s Spendthrift Farm.
Morris is receiving support from two PACs that combined to spend more than $2 million on ads attacking Barr last year, but is primed to spend much more ahead of the primary, thanks to two billionaire benefactors who are among the wealthiest in the world.
The new filing of Win it Back PAC shows the $2 million of anti-Barr attack ads it purchased were bankrolled by a $2 million contribution in September from Jeff Yass, the billionaire financial investor from Pennsylvania.
Yass has been one of the largest GOP donors in the country in recent years, including in Kentucky. He spent roughly $8 million in an unsuccessful effort to elect Cameron as governor in 2023, and then spent $6 million in support of a 2024 ballot amendment to allow public money to go towards private education, which also lost.
The other super PAC supporting Morris is Fight For Kentucky, which spent relatively little last year, but could outpace everyone in 2026. The new filing of the PAC indicated it raised a little over a half million by the end of the year, but shortly thereafter it announced receiving $10 million from billionaire Elon Musk. That money has already been put to use, as Fight For Kentucky reported spending $1.6 million last week on TV and radio ads supporting Morris.
No PAC has emerged yet that will be supporting Cameron with independent spending on ads.
Despite the huge amount of spending by supportive PACs, his campaign and himself, Morris has stayed at around 10% in the last three polls conducted on the GOP primary race. Barr has consistently polled in second place at about 25%, with Cameron leading at 40%.
The campaigns of Cameron, Barr and Morris have each tried to brand themselves as the most pro-Trump candidate, though the president has so far refrained from making an endorsement in the race.
Nine other Republican candidates have filed to run for the Senate seat, but none of their campaigns reported raising a significant amount of funds, if any.
McGrath, Romans lead fundraising for Democratic Senate candidates
While political analysts view Kentucky’s open Senate seat as a very likely victory for Republicans — where the GOP has won every statewide federal race since 1996 — seven Democratic candidates have entered the race, hoping an anti-Trump or anti-incumbent wave could help lead them to victory.
The new campaign finance reports filed Saturday show a familiar name leading the fundraising race among the Democrats, as 2020 Senate candidate Amy McGrath raised more than $1.3 million since entering the race in early October. Of the 19 donors to give her a maximum $7,000 contribution in that period, all but one live outside Kentucky.
McGrath, a Marine pilot veteran, was a prolific fundraiser in her 2020 race, raising and spending more than $90 million in her unsuccessful bid to replace McConnell. McGrath wound up losing to McConnell by nearly 20 percentage points, after narrowly defeating Charles Booker in the Democratic primary, despite her large spending advantage over Booker.
Booker is running again for Senate this year, after losing by 23 percentage points to Sen. Rand Paul in 2022. A late entry to the race in early December, Booker reported raising only $77,154 in less than a month.
One newcomer to the race on the Democratic side is Dale Romans, a thoroughbred trainer and first-time candidate. Romans entered the race in mid-November, with his campaign reporting he raised $762,957 through the end of December — including $230,000 of personal loans from himself. Most of the 31 maximum donors to Romans are in the horse industry, along with a $3,500 contribution from three-time Kentucky Derby-winning jockey John Velazquez.
The campaign of Romans, who bills himself as a centrist and “independent Democrat,” said in a November press release that he raised more than $750,000 in his first week as a candidate, with only $30,000 of that total coming from his personal loan. However, his filing on Saturday showed only $425,000 of contributions to Romans in that first week. A campaign spokesman did not reply to an email seeking comment on the discrepancy.
Logan Forsythe, an attorney and former Secret Service agent, reported raising just $46,000 since joining the Democratic primary in mid-September.
State Rep. Pamela Stevenson of Louisville also joined the Democratic primary in April, but reported spending nearly all of the $262,000 she had raised at the end of October in her campaign’s last filing. Stevenson’s campaign missed the Saturday filing deadline and has still not filed a report for the last quarter of 2025.
