WASHINGTON — Some Kentucky Democrats hold a theory about Charles Booker’s U.S. Senate candidacy: He will generate excitement with his rhetoric, raise considerable sums of national money from liberals who loathe Rand Paul and might even parlay the experience into a cable contributorship on MSNBC or CNN.
But come next November, he will lose. And it likely won’t even be close.
“He won’t break 40%,” said Jim Cauley, a chief of staff to former Gov. Steve Beshear, who ran Barack Obama’s first Senate race in Illinois. “You’re misreading the Kentucky electorate if you’re thinking running as a progressive will win.”
And with this week’s off-year elections showing double-digit swings toward Republicans in the bluer bastions of Virginia and New Jersey, the case for flipping Kentucky in 2022 has arguably gotten demonstrably weaker.
“Kentucky has gone right for a generation … If he breaks 40%, he’s doing well,” Cauley asserted. Another Democratic consultant approximated that a single-digit loss would be a respectable showing for Booker, predicting his ultimate deficit is more likely to land in the range of 12 to 15 points.
Recent Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, with varying degrees of expectations, have all hovered around that 40% marker once the tallies are finalized. Despite a $100 million warchest, Amy McGrath registered only a dismal 38% of the statewide vote against Mitch McConnell in 2020 while Jim Gray managed 43% against Paul in 2016.
But over the last decade, they’ve all resulted in double-digit Democratic losses, a trend demoralizing enough to spur someone to try something totally different.
Booker’s candidacy is set to test a long-running theory that animates liberals: Can a full-throated progressive prove to be more competitive in a blood red conservative state than a mollified centrist by inspiring casual and altogether new voters?
The initial thinking, according to conversations with a dozen Kentucky Democrats, appears to be no -- or not by much.
“It’s uphill all the way for Booker, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” said Adam Edelen, a former state auditor who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor. “There’s no precedent in Kentucky for what Charles is attempting … Rather than fight over slivers of the pie, it’s ‘let’s make more pie.’”
But Edelen added, “We don’t have the benefit of the demographic trends that are happening in other places in the South.”
Georgia on the mind
The 37-year-old Booker, who served a single term in the Kentucky House representing Louisville, is formulating his challenge to Paul on the premise that the commonwealth isn’t an inevitably red state but a disenfranchised state, where the number of people who don’t vote outnumber those who do.
He’s hired a Georgia-based organizer to steer his campaign in an attempt to replicate Democratic gains in the Georgia, where Stacey Abrams and a cohort of affiliated groups registered and engaged tens of thousands of new voters, predominantly younger and people of color.
That organizational might, fostered over several campaign cycles, pushed Georgia into Democrats’ presidential column last year for the first time since 1992 -- the same year Kentucky last elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate.
“One thing I remember hearing Stacey say a lot in Georgia is, you can’t run Democrats like Republicans. What’s the point of having a Democrat on the ballot if they’re just like a Republican?,” said Bianca Keaton, Booker’s campaign manager during an interview with McClatchy in August. “In Kentucky, there was a push to run more conservative. I think it matters at the end of the day that when Democrats believe they will have a Democrat in office they will be more inclined ... and they will turn out.”
But Georgia is not Kentucky.
Whereas a third of Georgia’s residents are Black, only 8% of Kentucky’s are.
“Even if you mobilized all African Americans it still wouldn’t be enough to win an election,” said Beau Weston, the Democratic chair in Boyle County. “That he’s reaching out to poor white people in the east is more hopeful.”
But, Weston conceded, “There’s antipathy to Louisville politicians in the rest of the state.”
Democrats see the libertarian Paul as a detached, quirky and a sometimes outright dangerous figure who provides them ample targets. Paul’s obsessive attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s chief medical officer, over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic have left many of them exasperated.
“We call him Covidious in Kentucky,” said Ned Pillersdorf, a progressive attorney from Prestonsburg, Kentucky. “He’s an aloof, flaky guy running around with these anti-vax theories ... Paul’s not doing business on planet earth.”
But there doesn’t appear to be consensus on the best argument to wield against him. Hammer his vaccine and mask skepticism as a threat to public health? Perhaps, but the pandemic is waning and many Kentuckians admire Paul’s contrarian nature and are ready to resume normal life.
Focus on his long trove of “no” votes in the Senate, particularly on infrastructure and other projects that would benefit Kentucky? It’s a more conventional option, but unlikely to reverberate in the way Booker needs.
Paul won his re-election by 15 points in 2016 after his White House bid fizzled out. Though he’s seen as a more vulnerable target than McConnell, it’s only slightly.
The ghost of McGrath
What most Democrats appear to agree on is, don’t be Amy McGrath.
“It is uphill for Booker to win, but then again nobody can run a worse campaign than Amy McGrath last year. That was a disaster from start to finish,” said Pillersdorf.
Virginia Woodward, chair of the Jefferson County Democrats, said that McGrath was never able to develop a voice of genuine conviction that Booker naturally carries. It’s his special brand of authentic charisma that separates Booker from the string of past failed candidates like McGrath, Gray and even Jack Conway, some Democrats argue.
“There is a slim pathway forward to beating [Paul]. It will take a very strategic race, one that is well run and manages their money well,” Woodward said.
At least yet, Booker hasn’t attracted the outside notoriety that filled McGrath’s fundraising coffers. He ended the last fundraising quarter with just a half million dollars in the bank, compared to Paul’s $7 million.
While they admire Booker’s relational organizing and personal skills, many Democrats are wary of how Booker’s pitch will sell outside of Louisville and Lexington, the state’s two major urban enclaves.
“Outside of Jefferson or Fayette county, I think it takes a different strategy,” said Will Barnett, the chair of the Shelby County Democrats, who advised Booker to steer clear of national issues and the battle for control of the Senate that consumes Washington. “As much as progressive Democrats would love it, a Bernie Sanders is not going to win Kentucky.”
A Booker spokeswoman did not respond to inquiries seeking reaction to these Democrats’ assessments.
Virginia’s Red Flare
On Tuesday, Booker tweeted a picture of Paul next to a photo of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, as voters were heading to the polls there.
“Spot the difference,” Booker asked.
The intended joke was they aren’t that different, sweater vest and all.
But Youngkin went on to win and Kentucky Democrats took notice.
“Listen, you could run a cat turd right now as a Republican in Kentucky and at least get 50% of the vote,” said Nema Brewer, a Democratic education and labor activist and self-described “agitator” in Fayette County.
She thinks if Booker can draw Paul into a battle over ideas, he can illuminate his concrete plans to deliver for working Kentuckians. But even Brewer acknowledged that issues have their limits in a polarized political environment turning against Democrats.
“You know as much as I do watching Virginia that doesn’t matter. All that matters is all this culture lying bullsh--. All this fear. They don’t have any ideas. Their ideas are to scare the voters to death and then move on,” she said.
Booker will at least be fun to watch, because “he’s not going to take any crap and he’s going to say it straight up,” according to Brewer.
But Cauley, the veteran consultant and pragmatist who admitted aloud his blunt appraisal would land him in trouble with other Democrats, said he gets no satisfaction from a vanity run that lacks a true path to victory.
“The point is to win, the point is not to get 45%,” he said. “He’s going to prove what we’ve all known. If he runs as a progressive he will get the same 38% that she got,” Cauley added, referring to McGrath. “If I was advising him, I would tell him to run for Congress. He can win in Louisville.”
But on Wednesday, Booker ignored those appeals and formally filed for the Senate race, declaring that Kentucky’s new story would be a history-shattering one: Sending a young Black man from the hood to represent them in Washington.
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