A soft launch in a thirsty Senate race

There's nothing quite like an early Senate primary race to rekindle an old flame.

Feb 14, 2025

My first assignment as a national political reporter for Politico was a U.S. Senate race. Remember Scott Brown’s Massachusetts upset of Martha Coakley in 2010? On my first day in Washington 15 years ago, I was asked by Charlie Mahtesian to write-up an exit poll of the shock result that picked up the early angst around Obamacare:

Fifty-two percent of Bay State voters who were surveyed as the polls closed said they opposed the federal health care reform measure and 42 percent said they cast their ballot to help stop President Obama from passing his chief domestic initiative.

I was soon assigned a campaign blog where I feasted on Senate races on nearly a daily basis, eventually producing a “Daily 10” feature, listing the 10 most competitive races of the moment and declaring a winner. Every day, during the final stretch. Yes, this was the Politico mindset. Win the…minute. I still remember the vitriolic calls from campaign consultants who worked for candidates on the losing end of my lists. The hellfire wrath of Danny Diaz and Tony Fabrizio come to mind. Eric Schultz was a regular tormenter on the Democratic side. We can laugh about it now, I think. But that formative experience of hyper-covering the 2010 and 2012 cycles through a U.S. Senate lens made it a sort of expertise of mine. So any time I’m asked to hop on a Senate race storyline, it gets my juices going. Puts me back in my zone. Nudges me to make the writing tighter, the analysis smarter. And so we sit at the outset of the 2026 midterm cycle when the top tier races are expected to be in Georgia (Ossoff!), Michigan (open seat!) and North Carolina (Tillis!) But before the general election comes the primary, and a fascinating one is already developing in the commonwealth of Kentucky, largely due to the widespread expectation that Mitch McConnell will announce his retirement in the coming months. (A source informed me of McConnell’s expected departure last March.) But McConnell — who took another tongue-lashing from Trump on Thursday — isn’t exactly icing the race to replace him. In fact, the top contenders are already in the midst of their soft launches. For McClatchy Newspapers here’s my read of the early #KYSEN swarm:

Andy Barr would begin with a federal campaign account affording him millions of dollars but have to confront the reality that he’s little known to most of Kentucky.
Daniel Cameron could ride the familiarity of having run statewide twice but carries the scars from his humbling loss in the governor’s race.
And Nate Morris would occupy the outsider’s lane of a non-politician but soon find himself answering questions about his stewardship of a Lexington company now struggling financially.

I’d love for you to satiate your Senate appetite by clicking through to read my entire analysis of all the under-the-table machinations in Kentucky, including some (early) oppo dumping, but I’m also going to swipe seven seconds to ask if you’ll consider a paid subscription so I can continue to do the more adventurous and creative writing and reporting outside the architecture of mainstream media.

If not … yet … that’s OK too. There’s always another post to lure you in.

For now …