Kentucky's Blue Grass Resistance... And Another Conservative "Any Blue Will Do" Dem Flips To The GOP

Rand and Robin... and their guy

Don’t forget the Sarah Longwell focus groups that found that Republican voters don’t appreciate independent thinkers in Congress. They want submissive Members of Congress to rubber stamp whatever Trump asks for. But Paul Kane reported yesterday that in far right Kentucky— where Trump beat Kamala 1,337,494 (64.5%) to 704,043 (33.9%), winning all but two of Kentucky’s 120 counties— there’s a blue grass resistance brewing to Trump’s agenda, “an unlikely stronghold for Republicans who oppose Trump’s policy agenda. Rep. Thomas Massie (R) served as the most vociferous GOP critic of the massive tax-and-border bill that passed the House on May 22 by a single vote, the latest in a string of votes against Trump’s wishes.”

Kane wrote than Rand Paul, one of Massie’s libertarian allies “was one of just two Republicans to oppose the Senate’s budget outline for its version of that legislation in early April. He remains opposed to the emerging details of the Senate bill because it will include possibly adding $5 trillion to the Treasury’s borrowing authority. Massie and Paul have sung from the same hymnal as Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) in opposition to the president’s on-again-off-again tariffs after years of clashing with their state’s traditional conservative elder statesman. While the overwhelming majority of Republicans cower in fear of primary challenger threats against anyone who opposes him, these Kentuckians brush aside the Trump bluster. They believe they can support most of his policy ideas while maintaining some principled policy stands against him.”

“When American officials court the favor of an adversary at the expense of allies, when they mock our friends to impress an enemy, they reveal their embarrassing naivete,” McConnell said in a March speech slamming Trump’s handling of Russia’s war against Ukraine. 

He is the only Republican to vote against three Trump nominees with controversial backgrounds: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

This unusual show of independence comes from a place that hasn’t been a swing state, at the presidential level, since 1996. Last year, Trump won almost 65 percent of Kentucky’s vote, the seventh-highest state tally and more than his share in conservative bastions like Mississippi and Tennessee.

Trump is so popular in Kentucky that several Republicans hoping to succeed McConnell are auditioning for the presidential endorsement by running campaigns as if they never met the state’s longest-serving senator— even though in real life he served as their political mentor.

And yet, despite Trump’s widespread favor, the commonwealth’s eight-member delegation of seven Republicans and one Democrat might split down the middle 4-4 on some of the hot-button issues of the moment.

… [T]he modern Kentucky GOP coalition has in many ways been built by three men: McConnell, who spent decades recruiting traditional conservatives like Guthrie; Paul, who brought on board younger libertarians like Massie; and Trump, who drew in alienated Democrats who wanted a fighter to blow up Washington.

In March 2020, as the pandemic was beginning its rampage across the globe, Massie was the lone lawmaker who did not agree to unanimously pass the more than $2 trillion Cares Act without a majority of lawmakers present, forcing a couple hundred to travel back to the Capitol to vote.

…Trump blasted him as a “third-rate Grandstander” and vowed to “throw Massie out of Republican Party.” Yet a few months later, Massie won the GOP nomination with 81 percent of the vote.

In 2022, after Trump considered him back in good graces and endorsed him, Massie won that primary contest with a smaller margin. So as Trump focused on Massie’s opposition to the presidentially proclaimed One Big Beautiful Bill— again calling him a grandstander and vowing to defeat him in a primary— Massie took it in stride.

“They were gentle attacks compared to how I’ve been attacked before. He was very nice in the room,” Massie told reporters, explaining that Trump is tougher for the TV cameras than he is in person.

“I got 81 percent when he was against me. And 75 percent when he was for me. Like, it’s not gonna be that consequential.”

Massie, 54, won the 4th congressional district in 2012, running as an acolyte of Paul in a state party dominated by McConnell’s traditionally conservative disciples. He walks the Capitol halls with a lapel pin button flashing updates on the national debt and is open to the kind of politically toxic cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that most Republicans, including Trump, hide from.

… The president and Paul have a decade’s worth of up-and-down experiences.

Trump opened his first presidential debate, in September 2015, with an unprovoked attack, saying “Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage,” belittling Paul’s polling numbers. Paul finished fifth in the Iowa caucuses and dropped out to focus on his Senate race.

Paul won reelection by almost 15 percentage points in 2016, and by almost 24 percent in 2022, and has remained cautiously supportive of Trump ever since. He voted to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and then never formally endorsed Trump’s 2024 election. 

As chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul has moved Trump’s nominees quickly to the Senate floor for consideration. And he said that he supports most of the policy in the “beautiful bill,” but he has some policy red lines.

Paul feels abandoned by some Senate colleagues and dozens of Freedom Caucus members who, whenever there’s a Democratic president, demand trillions of dollars in offsetting cuts to federal spending in exchange for increasing Treasury’s debt authority.

“This bill will be a vote for the largest increase in the debt ceiling ever,” Paul said. “It will be a historic vote and I think it’s a mistake of conservatives, and also I think we lose the high moral ground if there’s no one left who says debt is bad, deficits are bad.”

He has enjoyed being on the same page on tariffs as McConnell, after many years of their disputes over Paul’s efforts to rein in powers of national security agencies. Now, back home, both senators win accolades for opposing Trump’s trade wars.

“I have yet to have a single businessman or woman come up to me in favor of tariffs in my state,” Paul said.

McConnell served as a key ally to Trump during his first term, shepherding the 2017 tax bill and three Supreme Court justices through the Senate. But McConnell broke from him after the 2020 election and the Capitol attack, prompting Trump to spend years ridiculing McConnell in deeply person terms.

Massie will be the first political test of this Bluegrass resistance, in next year’s primary. Some supporters believe he has become even more willing to risk it all following his wife’s death last year— they were high school sweethearts— but the lawmaker points to his 2020 move to oppose the pandemic bill.

“She was alive and supporting me then,” Massie said. “So I think the question should be, now that he’s been to hell and back, has he gotten soft? And the answer is, no, I’m the same person. Having the president mad at you, I’ve been through that.”

And… as long as we’re on Kentucky, state Sen. Robin Webb, who has represented Boyd, Carter, Greenup and Lewis counties in the very red northeast of the state since 2009 just announced she has switched parties— now a conservative Republican instead of a conservative Democrat. She was one of only two rural Democrats left in Kentucky and accused the Democrats of a “lurch to the left... It has become untenable and counterproductive to the best interests of my constituents for me to remain a Democrat. I will continue to be a fearless advocate for rural Kentucky and for the residents of eastern Kentucky who have been so good to me and my family.”