Five Things I Think We Learned From Booker v. McGrath

I’m intentionally writing this before we know the results of the Kentucky U.S. Senate primary. (Yes, we probably won’t know the winner until next week anyway, but I wanted to write this well before we had any inkling of the final results.) Why? Because people in sports media often claim after a game has been played that obviously Team X won the game because it had Strategic Advantage Y--but the sports analysts didn’t say this before the game started. Political pundits, strategists and writers often do the same thing--clearly Candidate X should have taken Approach Y is easier to assess after you know the results of an election!

For this piece, I’m assuming that both Charles Booker and Amy McGrath get between 30 and 65 percent of the vote. Yes, that’s a very wide range. But there are still clear lessons from what happened in this race, whether McGrath gets 30 percent or 65; same for Booker. 

You can’t rely on your standing as the frontrunner and your fundraising too much. McGrath for months basically acted like there was no Democratic primary. She essentially ran a general election campaign, offering little to Democratic voters, particularly hardcore liberals, other than bashing Mitch McConnell. Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, she held very few public events. She got the backing of the Democratic Party establishment in Washington, but didn’t do much to court leaders within the state, leaving bad feelings that would come back to haunt her once Booker emerged as a real rival. 

I covered McConnell (2014) and Andy Beshear (2019) when they faced competitive primaries. Both of them arguably did way more than McGrath to make sure that they appealed to co-partisans and won those intra-party contests, even though those two had much stronger political brands than McGrath within the state and probably could have coasted a bit. 

If McGrath wins this primary, she will have done so while annoying the core activists and officials who she should want to be very enthusiastically behind her in a general election. Most of them will come on board anyway, because they desperately want to beat McConnell. But her primary campaign could have been moderate on policy but aggressive in connection and outreach to core Democratic constituencies in the state. And it just wasn’t. McGrath left a big opening for Booker--there was a sizable bloc of Democrats frustrated with her campaign even before his surge. 

There is a visible anti-racism, pro-racial equality contingent outside of Louisville and Lexington. The Black Lives Matter protests outside of the state’s biggest urban areas will be something that I never forget. (There were 32 areas in Kentucky other than Louisville and Lexington that had protests or events, according to this great New York Times analysis.)  

Those protests were not affiliated with Booker’s campaign, but he came and spoke at many of them. Seeing large groups of white people in heavily-white Kentucky towns applaud a young black man running for the U.S. Senate was striking. It’s not that I assumed people outside of the state’s urban areas did not care about racial equality, but I had not before seen such a visible manifestation of their concern about those issues. 

“I won’t say I was surprised, but I was definitely blown away,” Booker told me in a brief interview last week, talking about the protests outside of Louisville that he attended. “This is further proof that we’re ready for this moment. Estill County, it’s like 99 percent white and they’re yelling out, ‘No lives matter until black lives matter.” 

Louisville may be changing politically. For most of the last three decades, the mayor of Louisville has been a left-but-not-that-left white male Democrat (longtime former mayor Jerry Abramson, longtime current mayor Greg Fischer) who tries to appeal to both the city’s sizable-but-often-politically-powerless black population and its white-dominated business class. Louisville has a mayoral election in 2022. Fischer can’t run again because of term limits, but even if he could, he would have a hard time winning after his controversial handling of the fallout from Breonna Taylor’s killing by police here. 

I wonder if Booker’s candidacy and the growing liberalism of both the national Democratic Party and Democrats in Louisville means that the mayor elected in 2022 is different from those who have run the city in the past, demographically, ideologically or both. 

The protests in Louisville had sizable blocs of white people. There are Booker signs all over my neighborhood (the Highlands, which is overwhelmingly white.) It’s likely that Booker wins the city of Louisville even if he loses this race to McGrath. And there may be a coalition for future Booker-style candidacies in the future, if the person can appeal to:

1. Black people in West Louisville, where a huge chunk of the city’s black residents live 

2. Black people in the rest of the city 

3. White people under age 45 (younger white people tend to be more liberal) 

4. More liberal white people over age 45 

Those groups combined are probably not 50 percent of the city’s voters, but they might be 50 percent of the city’s Democrats--and the winner of a Democratic mayoral primary in Louisville is likely to win the general election. 

Booker, if he is not in the U.S. Senate, is now an obvious mayoral candidate. So are other Louisville black politicians like David James, the city council president, and State Rep. Attica Scott. But I don’t think this void has to be filled by a black person, so perhaps white political figures like developer Gill Holland, State Senate Democratic Leader Morgan McGarvey or city councilwoman Barbara Sexton-Smith will run a mayoral campaign appealing to these same blocs of voters. 

Kentucky’s Democratic Party may be changing. In December, Rocky Adkins, the longtime leader of the Kentucky House Democrats who represented a statehouse district in Eastern Kentucky, stepped down to take a job in the Beshear administration. Statehouse Democrats chose Joni Jenkins to replace him. Adkins is a somewhat centrist man from coal country, Jenkins is fairly liberal, from Louisville and the first woman ever selected to lead Kentucky’s House Democrats.

Jenkins and more than a dozen other Kentucky House Democrats endorsed Booker in mid-May, when he seemed to have little chance of victory, in a clear diss at the national Democratic Party for getting behind McGrath without really connecting with local officials. Perhaps House Democrats would have endorsed Booker under Adkins’ leadership too. 

But with Jenkins, McGarvey and Beshear, all from Louisville, in leadership roles, Kentucky Democrats may be finally accepting the obvious---the growing urban/Democrat v. rural/Republican divide both in Kentucky and the nation probably means Democrats here have to accept that they are the urban, liberal party and win that way, as opposed to trying to change the perception that they are the urban, liberal party. In other words, it may be more logical for Democrats to have candidates like Beshear or Booker, who talk about structural racism and their support of abortion rights, and hope those candidates run up huge margins in urban areas and win some voters outside of urban areas, as opposed to running candidates like Adkins, whose bases are in rural, culturally-conservative areas where simply saying you are a Democrat is a huge barrier to people voting for you. 

Kentucky is part of trends happening in national politics. When Booker started surging, virtually every national progressive group endorsed him, as did liberal figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Why? Well, liberals nationally want to defeat more moderate candidates like McGrath in an attempt to move the Democratic Party left. And after seeing Sanders and other liberal candidates struggle in part because they did poorly with black voters, national liberal activists are interested in joining forces with black progressive candidates. Liberal activists think black progressives like Booker might connect with progressive and young voters of all races but also older and/or more moderate black voters who might not be inclined to support a white liberal candidate like Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Sanders. 

In terms of these national dynamics, McGrath v. Booker has a lot of similarities to the congressional primary on Tuesday in New York between longtime congressman Eliot Engel and Jamal Bowman, his younger, black and more progressive rival. 

I saw the potential in this fusion between white progressives, black voters and a black candidate when I attended a Booker event last week where he spoke in the parking lot of Highland Coffee. There were about 100 people there--a few young black folks, some older black folks, some older white ones and a ton of white people who appeared to be under 30. Also on hand was Evan Weber, the 20-something co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, a national environmental group that is pushing the so-called Green New Deal and is backing Booker’s candidacy. 

Thanks for reading. 

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