Former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein made his way to victory over Congressman Thomas Massie with a sizable margin on Tuesday night, but Massie remains unapologetic about his splits with the president.
Kentucky Public Radio’s Joe Sonka and Sylvia Goodman followed the race closely. They break down the results of one of the most closely watched primaries in the country.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JS: It wasn’t even close. Congressman Thomas Massie lost to Trump’s hand-picked candidate Ed Gallrein Tuesday night by nearly 10 percentage points. Sylvia, why did Trump target Massie in this race?
SG: There are a few reasons. And Massie for his part regrets none of his choices. He’s voted against the president’s big policy packages. He’s fought against his military operations, most recently in Iran. He’s opposed unilateral executive-imposed tariffs.
But perhaps the biggest one is the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That really got Trump’s hackles up. And like I said Massie is deeply unrepentant for pushing back against the president and doesn’t sound like he’s done yet. Here he is in his concession speech.
MASSIE: Today is the six-month anniversary of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. We've taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture, and that was just six months. I got seven months left in Congress.
Massie has also made no apologies for his opposition to President Trump’s war in Iran.
MASSIE: [joining crowd] No more wars! No more wars! Guys, knock that off. You’re going to make me feel good about losing.
The county-level results really show a pretty much across-the-board win for Gallrein, except for a couple counties. I mean, you’ve actually been following Massie’s political career kind of since the beginning, right?
JS: Yeah I covered and interviewed Massie all the way back in 2011 before he was in congress, when he was the newly elected judge-executive of Lewis County and speaking at Tea Party rallies. I remember him trying to sell me on the virtues of drinking raw milk, and he really took that full circle in his concession speech last night by toasting the crowd with a glass of raw milk alongside his wife.
MASSIE: She said, ‘OMG, I didn't realize the lactose lobby was so intolerant.’ So let's have a drink!
He really has been the leader of a pretty successful so-called “liberty” movement in northern Kentucky that kind of stemmed from the Tea Party and campaigns of Ron Paul and Rand Paul, as Massie-aligned candidates stressing radically small government have been successful there in local and state GOP primaries over the past decade.
But the epicenter of that northern Kentucky movement has been Boone County, one of the largest in Massie’s district, and it turns out that he did really poorly there. He ended up losing Boone County by 10 percentage points, which shocked a lot of people, including me, and was a clear sign he wasn’t going to win last night. He ended up only winning his home county and just narrowly in one neighboring county.
Let’s talk a little bit more about Gallrein, who didn’t do any debates with Massie or really any interviews with the media. What did he talk about on the campaign trail?
SG: He held out on doing those media interviews really until the last week there. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he had a lot of issues, plural. He seemed to have a single thing he cared about and that was loyalty to the party, and perhaps more importantly, loyalty to Trump. He used the Kentucky state motto a lot on the campaign trail — “United we stand, divided we fall” — to that point. Here’s Gallrein during his victory speech:
GALLREIN: Now my focus is on advancing the president's and the party's agenda to put America first and Kentucky always.
People from across the country were following this race. Massie and Gallrein really set it up as a referendum on how much loyalty Republican voters want their congressman to pledge to the executive branch. And to match all that attention, there was also a lot of money put into this race.
JS: Yes, there was at least $33 million spent on this race, which is an all-time record for any congressional primary race, and Massie was heavily outnumbered in the final weeks. $11 million of negative ads on TV were against Massie by PACs that were largely funded by pro-Israel PACs and billionaires, which was often cited by Massie during his campaign. In his speech last night, he said he would have conceded earlier but he couldn’t find Gallrein in Tel Aviv.
Sylvia, you talked to voters in Massie’s district. Were they noticing this influx of spending? And what’d they tell you about how they would be voting?
SG: I talked with Republican voter Carrie Rehla in Trimble County this morning and she says she’s sick of all the negative ads that she was getting all over the place.
REHLA: Gosh, look at the money they could save on all that, you know, gosh, save it, take the money, spend on that, and help feed some people.
Rehla voted for Gallrein. She says it was a tough decision but that Massie has maybe been in Washington a little too long. Another Trimble County voter, Scott Crawford, told me he liked Massie but worried he just can’t be effective in Washington anymore.
CRAWFORD: I like the fact that he's fiscally conservative, big time like that. But I'm just afraid he's almost got himself to a point now where he's so much of an outsider or a [Republican in name only], or what have you, like a John McCain type.
Over in Oldham County, Kent Robinson told me he voted for Massie because he’s exactly who he says he is.
ROBINSON: His reasons that everybody hears from the ads and from President Trump about what he disagreed with, it’s not accurate. He had an important role to play. He had a stand that he wanted to make.
But I guess that sentiment did not win out this time around. We’ve seen the Trump endorsement carry the day in a few other races too this cycle, right?
JS: Yeah, this is the trend we’re seeing everywhere, that Trump is targeting Republicans he views as disloyal and taking them out in primaries. He did it earlier this month by taking out Indiana lawmakers who disobeyed him on redistricting, and then Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial.
Massie’s inability to overcome Trump in Kentucky isn’t a great sign for Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, as Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Ken Paxton in the GOP primary runoff that will happen there next week.
It should be noted that Trump’s endorsed candidate in Kentucky’s GOP Senate primary Andy Barr won by a very wide margin over Daniel Cameron. In his victory speech last night, Barr attributed his win to standing by Trump.
BARR: The reason why the people of Kentucky gravitated towards me is because they know I’m with the president all the way. I support him, and this is a state that wants us to make America great again, and they voted for this agenda — this America first agenda — and this president by over 30 points.
SG: We now just have a general election to look forward to. Thanks Joe for breaking it down with me.
JS: Thanks Sylvia.
