Primary Day!

It is Primary Day in Kentucky as well as a few other places. Polls are only open here from 6am-6pm, but schools are closed which gives election day a holiday sort of feel. When I arrived in Kentucky twenty years ago bars were not allowed to open until polls closed, but fortunately saner minds prevailed and your typical Kentuckian can get a typical amount of blitzed before enjoying his or her franchise.

We have a few races of interest here:

• The GOP Senate primary has been a lot of “fun,” and will almost certainly be won by Andy Barr, a Lexington Republican who has represented KY-6 for the last fourteen years.
• The Democratic Senate primary involves some familiar faces (Amy McGrath, Charles Booker), and the prediction markets expect Booker to win.
• There hasn’t been a lot of good polling in KY-6, but seems like it will come down to Zach Dembo vs. Cherlynn Stevenson vs. Friend of the Blog Erin Petrey. Fingers crossed for Erin, who’s running in the progressive lane.
• Everyone is watching KY-4, where Ed Gallrein is trying to unseat incumbent Thomas Massie. Gallrein enjoys immense out of state support (including from Pete Hegseth!) and polling has been tight.
• The Lexington Mayor primary will narrow candidates down for general election. The major issue this year was snow removal, which has been a problem for two straight years. The current occupant is Mayor Linda Gorton, who I like. Worth noting that of Lexington’s last five mayors three have been women and one has been an openly gay man. We’re holding out hope for you, New York City! Someday you’ll figure it out!

And of course there’s the city council and a variety of other state primaries to worry about. Here’s a good account of Kentucky’s weird ass political culture:

Ever since Daniel Boone crossed the Cumberland Gap into what is now Kentucky, the state has served as an incubator for colorful figures who stand out for their quirks, their rejection of party orthodoxy and their national success despite long odds.

The reasons are complicated, and have partly to do with a political culture dominated by the state’s 120 counties — more than any state except Texas and Georgia — as well as a Civil War border-state history and diverse geographic regions. Kentucky politicians “usually start out as smaller characters on the local scene,” said Greg Stumbo, a Democrat who served as the state’s attorney general.

Below is a look at some of Kentucky’s most prominent political leaders — most of whom, in a heavily white Southern state, have been white men.

But first, a poem, written around the turn of the century by a Kentucky politician named James H. Mulligan, who captured the state’s political essence:

Mountains tower proudest

Thunders peal the loudest

The landscape is the grandest —

And politics — the damnedest

In Kentucky.