Home » Posts tagged 'Attica Scott'
Tag Archives: Attica Scott
Open Louisville U.S. House race, U.S. Senate contest up Tuesday in Kentucky primary
Charles Booker seeking Democratic nomination to try to take out Republican U.S. Senator Rand Paul
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
LOUISVILLE (CFP) — Democratic voters in Louisville will pick their likely next Congress member in Tuesday’s primary, while Kentucky voters statewide are expected to set up a fall showdown between Republican U.S. Senator Rand Paul and Democratic challenger Charles Booker.
Rand Paul and Charles Booker expected to face off in fall U.S. Senate race
Legislative and local offices are also on the ballot Tuesday; contests for statewide offices aren’t held until 2023.
Polls for in-person voting open at 6 a.m. and close at 6 p.m. in both the Central and Eastern time zones.
In the 3rd U.S. House District in metro Louisville, where Democratic U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth is retiring, State Senator Morgan McGarvey and State Rep. Attica Scott are competing for the Democratic nomination in the state’s only Democratic-leaning district.
Seven Republicans are also competing in the 3rd District, including businessman Stuart Ray and Mike Craven, a former union official who ran unsuccessfully for the seat in 2018 and 2020.
None of Kentucky’s other five House seats – all held by Republicans – are expected to be competitive.
In the Senate race, Paul, from Bowling Green, is facing five little-known Republican challengers in his bid for a third term, while Booker is the biggest name in a four-candidate Democratic race.
Booker, a former state representative from Louisville, broke onto the political scene in 2020 when he nearly upset Amy McGrath, the anointed candidate of the Democratic establishment, in the state’s U.S. Senate primary. She was later crushed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Booker launched his uphill run against Paul in July 2021 and opted to stay in the race rather than switching to the metro Louisville U.S. House seat when Yarmuth retired.
We tweet @ChkFriPolitics Join us!
Democrat Amy McGrath will not run for Kentucky governor in 2019
Recent poll shows Republican Governor Matt Bevin vulnerable to Democratic challenge
LEXINGTON, Kentucky (CFP) — Amy McGrath will not seek Kentucky’s governorship in 2019, despite the urging of supporters who wanted the rising Democratic star to jump into the race against Republican Governor Matt Bevin, whose sagging popularity has made him vulnerable.
Amy McGrath
In a December 19 email to supporters, McGrath said she was “humbled by the encouragement” to get into the race but decided not to seek the governorship or any other statewide office next year.
“That doesn’t mean I’ll stop working for the values and beliefs we all care about,” she said. “I deeply wish to help move Kentucky and our country forward and I can assure you that I will continue to speak out on the important issues of the day.”
McGrath, 43, a retired Marine combat pilot, burst on the political scene in 2017 when a video announcing her run for the 6th District U.S. House seat went viral.
She went on to win the Democratic primary and raise $8.6 million for the race, the most by any Southern Democratic House challenger in the 2018 election cycle. In the end, she lost to Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Barr by 9,700 votes.
McGrath’s potential candidacy for governor faced a possible hurdle — Kentucky’s Constitution requires six years of continuous residence to run for governor, and McGrath had lived out of state during her military service before returning to run for Congress.
Had she run, the courts would have likely decided if McGrath’s out-of-state military service disqualified her.
However, that state requirement would not bar her from seeking federal office again — including the U.S. Senate seat held by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is up for re-election in 2020.
Bevin announced in August that he plans to run for re-election in 2019. However, he has yet to file the paperwork needed to begin raising money for the race.
A Mason-Dixon poll taken Dec. 12-15 found Bevin’s approval rating at 38 percent, with 53 percent saying they disapproved of the governor’s performance. A year earlier, his approval was 45 percent in the same poll.
Earlier this month, the Kentucky Supreme Court unanimously struck down a pension reform bill crafted by Bevin and Republicans in the legislature, which sparked angry protests by teachers and state employees when it passed last spring.
Bevin then called lawmakers into special session to push through the pension measure again, only to see GOP leaders adjourn after one day without taking any action, which the governor criticized as “one of the worst financial days to have ever descended down on the Commonwealth.”
The legal fight to overturn the pension law was led by Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, who is running to unseat Bevin. The Mason-Dixon poll showed Beshear with a 48 percent to 40 percent lead over Bevin in a hypothetical match-up, right at the poll’s margin of error.
Also in the Democratic race is House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins from Sandy Hook. The biggest unknown is whether Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes will run now that her father, Jerry Lundergan, has been indicted on charges of illegally funneling money into her 2014 U.S. Senate campaign.
Grimes, the only Democrat other than Beshear to hold statewide office, has not been implicated in the case. But her father’s trial is scheduled for August, right in the middle of the campaign.
Other Democrats considering the race including former State Auditor Adam Edelen from Lexington and State Rep. Attica Scott from Louisville.
Kentucky is one of five states that elect their governors in off years, along with Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and New Jersey. Among those states, Mississippi and Louisiana are also up in 2019.
While Republicans hold most state and federal offices in Kentucky, and President Donald Trump carried the commonwealth by 30 points in 2016, Democrats have had more success winning the governorship.
Bevin is just the third Republican elected governor in the past 50 years, and no Republican has won re-election since the Constitution was changed in 1992 to allow governors to succeed themselves.
Chicken Fried Politics 