The Booker v. McGrath Vote Count and Each Candidate's Chances Against Mitch McConnell
I don’t know who is going to win Kentucky’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, and I don’t think anyone else really does either. As of 2 p.m. today (June 24), there had been about 56,000 votes tabulated for Charles Booker, Amy McGrath or Mike Broihier. That trio had about 88 percent of the total vote (McGrath 44 percent, Booker 38 percent, Broihier 6 percent.) For comparison’s sake, the three top contenders in last year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary race received about 386,000 votes combined. That simple math would suggest at most 15 percent of the votes have been counted.
That’s far too few votes to draw many conclusions in a race this tight. The Courier-Journal’s Joe Sonka, who has been closely tracking absentee ballots and other voting data in this race, has estimated that less than 10 percent of the total vote has been tabulated. (His math suggests that the total number of voters in this primary will be significantly higher than the 2019 gubernatorial primary, which I suspect as well.)
Bottom line: We. Don’t. Know. Who. Is. Going. To. Win. Okay. Probably. Not. Broihier. Stay tuned till June 30, when we expect full results.
What we do know right now has some elements of good news for both candidates.
Booker was very strong on Election Day in the Lexington area. The results from the in-person voting in Lexington were released on Tuesday--and Booker won 72 percent, compared to McGrath’s 23 percent. It’s good for Booker to have done so well in the area where McGrath lives.
That result was not shocking--Booker was getting a ton of positive buzz in the run-up to the election. And it’s important to emphasize that Booker only won 1,566 votes in Lexington in-person voting on Tuesday, (compared to McGrath’s 499). That is a very, very small fraction of the votes he will need to win the election. (In last year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, the winner, now-Gov. Andy Beshear, had about 149,000 votes.)
McGrath was strong in other areas of the state. I’m assuming that most of the results that we have from other parts of the state are also largely from Election Day voting (as opposed to mail-in votes.) Even with Booker’s recent surge, McGrath seems to have won in-person Election Day voting in a lot of counties in both Eastern and Western Kentucky.
But overall, if more than 80 percent of the vote is uncounted, we basically don’t know anything. About a quarter of the votes in the 2019 gubernatorial primary came from Louisville, and we have no results so far from the city in this race.
So let’s move from speculation about who will win the primary to speculation about who will win the general election. Booker and McGrath are very different candidates, but they would both be huge underdogs to McConnell, simply because of the redness of Kentucky. A Democrat last won a U.S. race in Kentucky in 1992 (Wendell Ford.) The most logical path to victory, in my view, for either candidate would be pretty similar--Beshear’s playbook in his win over then-Gov. Matt Bevin last year.
You can think of Beshear’s victory last year and the potential path for a statewide Democrat in Kentucky in three ways:
Geography---Booker or McGrath needs to A. Win the Louisville and Lexington areas by huge margins (Beshear carried Louisville by 36 percentage points);
B. Do well in the Northern Kentucky areas near Cincinnati, Ohio;
C. Win a few counties in the state’s rural areas, particularly in Eastern Kentucky, and not get blown out in the rest
or
2. Demographics (Read this excellent poll from Centre’s Benjamin Knoll and others for more info.)
A. Win over not only the majority of the state’s independent voters, but also some Republicans, particularly those under 40 and those who are not evangelical Christians, two blocs that are somewhat wary of the GOP under Trump;
B. Get as many black, under age 40 and/or college-educated Kentuckians to turn out to vote as possible;
C. Not get blown out among those over age 65
or
3. Political dynamics
A. Hope that Trump is more unpopular in Kentucky this November compared to 2016 and that Biden is better liked here than Hillary Clinton was, so that some conservative-leaning Kentuckians stay home in November. It is hard to imagine a Democrat getting anywhere near victory in this Senate race if Trump wins the presidential contest in Kentucky by 30 percentage points again;
B. Hope that some Republicans who like Trump dislike McConnell and don’t want to send the longtime senator back to Washington. This happened in 2019. Beshear, according to Knoll’s survey, won about 16 percent of the votes in his race against Bevin among Kentuckians who had a favorable view of the president;
C. Withstand McConnell’s attacks. McGrath, at a private fundraiser in Massachusetts during her 2018 House campaign, said of herself, “I am further left, I am more progressive than anybody in the state of Kentucky.”
Booker, with his support of a universal basic income, Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal, may actually be the most liberal candidate in recent memory to run for a major office in Kentucky. So McConnell won’t have to do much work in casting either of his potential opponents as too liberal for the state.
And if Trump remains way behind Biden in the national presidential race, that could boost the Kentucky senator’s campaign. Conservatives both in Kentucky and nationally could get deeply invested in the campaigns of McConnell and other Senate GOP candidates as a way to save America from full Democratic control of the government. (Democrats are expected to keep a majority of seats in the U.S. House.)
Thanks for reading.
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