Kentucky Congressman Andy Barr rode an endorsement from President Donald Trump and a large spending advantage to win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate on Tuesday.
Barr had 64% of the vote when the race was called by the Associated Press, with former Attorney General Daniel Cameron placing second in the Kentucky GOP primary with 28%.
Barr has served seven terms in the U.S. House from his central Kentucky district, choosing to run for Senate last year when longtime Sen. Mitch McConnell announced his retirement.
The Republican primary was a heated three-way race until May 1, when Trump convinced businessman Nate Morris to drop out of the race in return for an ambassadorship in his administration, followed by the president’s endorsement of Barr.
Early polls showed Cameron — running for statewide office for the second time in four years — leading the primary race, but by April polls showed Barr taking a small lead, helped in part by his huge spending advantage. Barr’s campaign and aligned PACs spent roughly at least $27 million on ads, whereas Cameron spent less than $1 million on ads over the course of the campaign.
The race was largely a competition among the three candidates to prove who was the most loyal to Trump. This was reflected in the more than $50 million of spending in the race, with Barr and Morris ads alternately praising their affinity to Trump and questioning opponents’ adherence to the president’s agenda.
For example, even after the president endorsed Barr, Cameron would not say if he has ever disagreed with anything Trump has ever said or done. Cameron accused Barr of being insufficiently conservative and supported by corporate lobbyists in the D.C. “swamp,” but would not extend those criticisms to the president.
In the final two weeks of the campaign, Barr and aligned PACs owned the airwaves across the state, spending $5 million on TV ads touting his endorsement by Trump, with the underfunded Cameron only purchasing less than $200,000 of ads.
While the Republican candidates in the primary hoped to succeed McConnell, they did not seek to embrace the man who led the Republican Party from irrelevance to power in Kentucky over the past four decades. Morris ran campaign ads in which he tossed a cardboard cutout of McConnell into a garbage truck and called his opponents “puppets” of the seven-term senator, while Barr and Cameron both minimized their past work with McConnell.
Barr will face the Democratic nominee in the general election this fall, with Amy McGrath and Charles Booker still in a close race Tuesday night. The Republican enters the race as a heavy favorite to win, as Kentucky has not elected a Democratic senator since 1992. Though voters in the state have shifted heavily rightward over the past three decades, Kentucky did elect Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear by narrow margins in 2019 and 2023.
