KY’s 6th District a winnable ‘mirage’? 5 Democrats face off to unseat GOP Rep. Barr

Though the slate of prospective Democratic rivals has grown two years after Republican U. S. Rep. Andy Barr handily won re-election, political strategists are doubtful there’s enough candidate heft — or fundraising — to unseat the incumbent.

Five Democrats, including a social worker, an IT manager, and a nurseryman, are running in the primary for Kentucky’s U.S. 6th Congressional District against Barr, who took office in 2013 and is seeking his seventh term.

The candidate pool ahead of the May 21 primary is more diverse this year than in 2022, when the litigious perennial candidate Geoff Young, who won the bid but never the party’s official support, lost to Barr, capturing only 35% of the vote. Young also lost to Barr in the 2020 GOP primary. He is not running in this election.

But each campaign is grassroots, and fundraising has been lukewarm. Of the three candidates who’ve filed campaign finance reports, they’ve collectively raised just over $101,000, according to the Federal Election Commission filing period that ended May 1.

Shauna Rudd, a social worker from Breathitt County who now lives in Lexington, has raised the most, at roughly $54,000, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Todd Kelly, a local business owner who opened Kelly Nursery off Leestown Road in 1998, has raised just over $45,000.

And Randy Cravens, an IT manager who won the endorsement of his party as write-in candidate against Barr in 2022 — he earned nearly 9,000 votes — has raised just over $2,500.

Don Pratt, a longtime Lexington social and political activist, and Jonathan Richardson, a social justice advocate, have not filed FEC reports.

“You’ve got to have resources in this day and age in politics,” said political strategist Jared Smith. “I’m talking tens of thousands of dollars, being on TV, having paid canvassers. You have to run ads. You have to run a professional campaign.”

Smith said he doesn’t see Barr as particularly vulnerable this campaign cycle.

“If anybody was going to beat him, it probably would’ve been Amy McGrath. And if he can survive that one, unless you get a top-tier candidate” with state-level name recognition, he said, “those are the kind of people that could give Andy Barr a run for his money.”

‘I am not a politician’

After Young ran a campaign in 2022 that largely hinged on a pro-Russia, pro-China stance on foreign policy, the leading Democratic contender — at least as far as fundraising goes — has also cited dissatisfaction with aspects of U.S. foreign policy as her impetus for running.

Though the main pillar of Rudd’s campaign is “wealth inequality,” she said in a Jan. 7 TikTok, she told Renee Shaw last month on Kentucky Tonight that the “genocide in Palestine” is what spurred her to start contacting Barr’s office, even before she decided to pursue that seat herself.

Candidates must hit a $50,000 fundraising bar to appear on KET, and Rudd, the only woman in the race, was the lone candidate to reach that threshold.

Rudd said she called Barr’s office repeatedly after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel in turn launched military operations in Palestine, but she felt they were disregarding her.

“When his people refused to repeat his messages back to me, or when they hung up on me, I started a series on TikTok (about) how to call your representative,” she said. “If you’re not going to listen to me or represent me, what I’m going to do is run against you for Congress and win.”

Rudd disagrees with the federal government’s $95 billion aid package approved last month to assist primarily Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Palestine — a package Barr voted in favor of — that was held up for months by some in the GOP’s far-right flank, including U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky.

Rudd said she doesn’t support the package because too few funds — approximately $1 billion in humanitarian aid compared to Israel’s $26 billion — were earmarked for Palestinians in Gaza.

Shaw asked, “If you were asked if you support Hamas and violence against Jews, what would your answer be?”

“It would be absolutely not,” Rudd said. “I do not support any form of violence, and anyone who knows me knows that I am in no way antisemitic.

“It’s really not about who the people are, it’s about who the genocide is being committed against.”

To a group of people at a campaign stop in Georgetown in April, Rudd said her work as a social worker across the district for a decade makes her the most qualified challenger to Barr.

Her job has acquainted her with the intimate struggles of constituents, Rudd said, and she’s “witnessed firsthand how our American political and social systems are not designed to benefit the regular person.”

A political newcomer, Rudd has never sought elected office before; she said in a TikTok that she started her campaign without a campaign manager. While she was putting herself through school earning her Bachelor’s at Eastern Kentucky University and then a Master’s at the University of Kentucky, she worked as a server at Buffalo Wild Wings.

Contrasting herself against Barr, she told the crowd, “I’m not a lawyer, I have a social work background,” repeating a similar refrain she told Shaw: “I am a regular person; I am not a politician.”

Cravens, similarly, is touting his non-politician, accessible status as a strong suit.

“What makes me the most viable candidate is my ability to get out, person to person, in town halls, direct meetings — things that don’t require a ton of money to accomplish — to make the case that not only myself, but that all the local and state-level Democrats are out here for the benefit of the vast majority of the constituency,” he told the Herald-Leader.

Cravens, the only Democrat on the primary ballot who has run in the 6th District before, said what the party has to offer this go around is different.

“We’ve gone to the ballot box time and time again, and (Barr) has produced little to nothing in the way of tangible benefits to the residents of Central Kentucky,” he said. “He’s actually participated in the erosion of our personal rights, including our right to privacy and bodily autonomy.”

“It’s a case that’s prime to be made,” he said.

But one that requires much more fundraising to actually put the message in front of enough of the district.

While Cravens said the failure of McGrath’s bid shows “money does not win elections,” it’s still crucial to giving a political candidate a fighting chance.

Rudd agreed.

“We have to raise enough money and campaign well enough to contact every voter we can in the 6th District, and then we’ve got it,” she said. “People will only feel represented by me if they’ve heard me.”

A ‘mirage’ for Democrats

McGrath in 2018 came the closest to unseating Barr since he was first elected in 2012.

For that race, the former Marine fighter pilot raised a historic $8 million to Barr’s $3.5 million, and she lost by 3 percentage points.

Following Barr’s narrow victory over McGrath, in 2022, the Republican-controlled Kentucky General Assembly redrew the state’s congressional district map, notably removing Franklin County, where the oft-Democratic leaning state capital sits.

The redrawn map absorbed Frankfort into the 1st District, which snakes up narrowly through central Kentucky from West Kentucky, where the bulk of the district spans.

The 6th District still comprises Fayette County and Kentucky’s second largest city, Lexington, which houses the state’s largest university system, as well as the more suburban collar counties with smaller university-centered towns, like Richmond and Georgetown.

“Suburban, based around a college-heavy town: I think the district fits a profile that, in other parts of the country, Democrats have been competitive and, in some cases, been able to flip,” Republican political consultant Tres Watson said.

But the 6th District being winnable to Democrats, at least on paper, is almost a “mirage,” he said.

To upset Barr, who Watson described as a measured policy wonk, it will take a candidate who either has widespread homegrown clout, or is a moderate Democrat that appeals to progressive constituents in Lexington, and Blue Dog Democrats and conservatives in the district’s more rural counties.

Either type would also need deep fundraising pockets and financial support from the national Democratic party, Watson said, and that hasn’t happened since 2018.

“I think it’s very tricky, and I don’t know if that candidate exists,” he said.

“With the amount of money McGrath raised and the good campaign she ran, the fact that she couldn’t knock Barr off, I think that’s why you’ve seen a couple cycles in a row where he has gotten nominal opposition at best.”

Barr has likely steadied his appeal among his centrist constituency for refusing to cave to the far-right tilt of some in his party, including some of his GOP colleagues in Kentucky’s congressional delegation.

He voted in favor of the bipartisan package to provide aid to Ukraine. And he voted against the GOP-backed measure to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana — an effort spearheaded by Massie, who represents the district to the north of Barr’s.

But on issues like abortion rights, Barr has remained unflinching in his conservatism; he holds an A+ grade Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America for his voting record on restricting abortion access; and he praised the Supreme Court’s overturning of 50-years of abortion protections in Roe v. Wade.

This is potentially a vulnerability point Democrats could knock Barr, Smith said, since a swath of his 16-county constituency — this includes portions of Anderson and Bath counties — doesn’t appear to support this hard line stance.

In 2022, the year Barr handily defeated Young, eight of the 16 total counties in his district voted “no” on a state GOP proposal that would have changed the Kentucky Constitution to make clear there was no inherently-protected right to abortion.

Margins were thin, in some cases; just 13 “yes” votes kept Bath County from voting against the measure. But overall, the near even split suggests nuance within the constituency, a position that often is not reflected in Barr’s voting history on reproductive rights policies.

Rudd, Kelly and Cravens have knocked Barr on this issue and vowed to restore reproductive rights as primary tenets of their respective campaigns.

But, again, candidate visibility hinges on fundraising, and so far that has been lacking, said Rebecca Blankenship, former Kentucky Democratic Central Executive Committee member and treasurer for the Madison County Democrats.

“There’s a lot of heart in some of the candidates,” Blankenship said. “But there’s not either the level of message discipline or the level of organization and fundraising that would be necessary to unseat Congressman Barr.”