GOP Rep. Barr challenged by Russia-supporting Dem, write-in for KY’s 6th District seat

Voters in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional district aren’t choosing between a typical Democrat and Republican when they cast their ballots this year.

Incumbent Republican Andy Barr, who is seeking his sixth term in the House of Representatives, is being challenged by Democratic nominee Geoff Young, a perennial candidate with a litigious streak and a decidedly pro-Russia, pro-China stance on foreign policy.

Young recently tweeted that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin “are 2 of the best leaders in the world today. Washington has some of the very worst politicians in the world today.”

Though Young narrowly won the May primary to face off against Barr, the Kentucky Democratic Party and Democratic Governor, Andy Beshear, have refused to back him. Instead, party chair Colmon Elridge has responded to Young’s tweets by publicly encouraging support for a Democratic write-in candidate, Randy Cravens, calling it a “clear imperative.”

“Randy is a good guy, works hard, and believes in values shared by Democrats and common sense Republicans alike,” Elridge tweeted. “Dems still have a choice this election.”

In a statement, Kentucky Democratic Party Executive Director Sebastian Kitchen said the party will spend the remaining days of the election cycle “supporting candidates who share our values and lift up our party instead of furthering conspiracy theories, suing the party countless times taking resources away from other candidates and who spend more time praising our leaders and democracy rather than idolizing dictators.”

D. Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky and expert in elections and voting behavior, said it would be easy to throw stones at the state’s Democratic Party for allowing an outsider like Young to win the nomination.

“But this election cycle is bad for Democrats, and is going to be especially bad for Kentucky Democrats,” Voss said. “This really is not a year where you try to make gains; it’s a year where you try to shore up what you’ve got and not lose territory, knowing that by the odds, in two years, it’s going to be much more promising for Democrats to advance.”

Barr’s campaign did not respond to Herald-Leader interview requests, and he did not take questions from reporters at a recent public appearance in Lexington. But the Republican Party of Kentucky has been quick to seize on Young’s controversial stances.

“The Kentucky Democrat Party is in disarray,” Republican spokesman Sean Southard said in a statement. “Just take a look at Twitter. For the people of Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, the contrast could not be more clear: a Democrat who is soft on China versus Andy Barr, who will always be tough on China.”

Southard called Barr “the clear choice” for voters.

Cravens, a Richmond resident, knows he faces an uphill battle as a write-in candidate, but he hopes to offer voters a reasonable alternative to Barr and Young.

“I think really what people are looking for is decency and dignity,” Cravens told the Herald-Leader. “They’re looking for someone who can go to Washington and represent them, that is like them, that’s had to scrape to get by in the past, has had some adversity in life and is not simply using the race as a platform for spouting some very out of the mainstream ideology.”

Barr: It’s time to ‘enact a new majority’ in Congress

Barr, who first took office in 2013, has, like many Republicans, aligned himself with former President Donald Trump in recent years. Trump appeared at a rally for Barr at Eastern Kentucky University in 2018, when Barr was facing a tough re-election battle against Democrat Amy McGrath.

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2020, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Barr did not vote to overturn election results, but did issue a letter to constituents saying he was “deeply concerned about the abuses and irregularities that occurred in the 2020 elections” and would “strongly support” a Congressional commission to investigate alleged voting irregularities.

Barr also voted against impeaching Trump in January 2020, saying he saw the vote “as less about upholding the standards of the presidency and more about carrying out an act of political vengeance, which will further divide an already divided country and pour gasoline on an already scorching fire.”

He has since urged his congressional colleagues to engage in “less talk” about Jan. 6 and get back to the issues of “ending inflation, stopping fentanyl, and reducing crime.”

At a get out the vote rally in Lexington last weekend, Barr told attendees that the first two years of President Joe Biden’s administration have created problems around crime, inflation, immigration, energy and the economy.

“It’s time to stop the crises and enact a new majority in the United States Congress,” he said. “When we take back the majority, we can actually fix the problems.”

He said he’d like to “defund those 87,000 IRS agents,” not police.

“We don’t need new IRS agents. We need new border patrol agents,” he said, adding, “We are going to finish the wall.”

Barr also said he wants to “hold big tech and big woke Wall Street accountable.” He said the “crisis at the pump” is connected to “Wall Street collaborating with the progressive left.”

“We have seen the disaster of one-party rule in Washington,” he told the crowd. “Imagine a world in which Nancy Pelosi is retired.”

Barr has more than $2 million on hand as he seeks another term representing Fayette and surrounding Central Kentucky counties in Congress, according to campaign finance filings.

Young: Democrat with a fondness for Russia

Young is no stranger to running for office. In the last decade, he’s run for the 6th District seat four times before — he even ran as a Republican against Barr in 2020 — and has run twice for governor and once for state house. Young has sued media organizations and both political parties for, he says, rigging elections against him. But he also said he knows his best shot at winning comes from running with a mainstream party affiliation.

This May marked the first time Young won a primary, narrowly defeating Chris Preece by 1,715 votes. Young won 15 of the 16 counties in the district; only Fayette opted for Preece.

Voss, the voting expert, said part of Young’s success may have come from name recognition, but there’s more to it than that.

“Where Geoff Young’s sort of left wing flank attack succeeded was in the sort of territory where Bernie Sanders has been succeeding, which is fairly Republican territory,” he said. “They’re able to win with a democratic populist message in these rural, Republican areas among Democratic primary voters.”

In some ways, Young does align with liberal Democrats: he supports Medicare for all, abortion rights, increasing taxes on the wealthy, getting “big money” out of politics and legalizing marijuana (and all other drugs, too).

But Young also calls himself a “2nd Amendment Democrat,” which is based on his agreement with the NRA on many issues addressed in its candidate survey.

His campaign in 2022 has largely been focused on foreign policy.

“If I see a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, I did everything that I could to prevent that from happening,” Young told the Herald-Leader in an interview. “At the rate we’re going, there will be a nuclear war soon. It’s all the fault of the federal government in Washington. It’s not any other country’s fault. It’s all our fault.”

Young said he wants to see President Joe Biden impeached for “risking World War 3” with Russia and China and all economic sanctions against foreign countries reversed. Most controversially, Young has taken a pro-Russia stance on the war in Ukraine, falsely claiming that it is not a Russian invasion.

“It seems that no one in Washington — or very few people — have realized that those sanctions have all failed. They’re all destined to fail, and they’ve all backfired against us,” Young said. “Economic sanctions are the main cause of inflation in this country and western Europe today. So if somebody doesn’t get into Congress with sane ideas about what we should be doing in Ukraine and also near Taiwan, we’re going to sanction ourselves into another Great Depression.”

Voss said Young’s victory in the primary has put the Kentucky Democratic Party into “damage control” mode because of his foreign policy stances.

“When it looks like, ‘Okay, we’re going to lose this anyway, let’s just hope that the voters pick out a kind of normal, sacrificial lamb so he can go on to lose to Andy Barr,’” Voss said. “That probably seemed a smart investment. What the Kentucky Democratic Party clearly failed to anticipate is the amount of support Democrats in these more rural areas were willing to give a candidate like Geoff Young.”

Cravens: We can’t give Andy Barr a pass

Cravens, the write-in candidate, knows he faces an uphill battle.

The May 2022 massacre of 19 students and two adults at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school that spurred Cravens, a father of three, to enter the race. Since then, Roe vs. Wade has been overturned and Barr voted against a federal same-sex marriage bill, and Cravens said his dedication to the campaign has only grown.

Barr, Cravens said, likes to talk about what’s broken in America, but in 10 years in Congress has done little to make any progress.

“I don’t think that this is one of those elections where you can give Andy Barr a pass and just send him into another term in Washington,” Cravens said. “And it’s certainly not one where you can risk a vote sending someone like Geoff Young in opposition, when we already have backbench bomb-throwers in Washington like Rand Paul.

“The people in the 6th District, we deserve someone that will go up to Washington and negotiate and to legislate on the behalf of the people of the district.”

Cravens holds mainstream Democratic positions on a variety of topics: He supports greater gun-control measures, the right to abortion and the legalization of marijuana. He supports reforming — not defunding — police departments and providing mental health professionals to respond to some calls with officers.

Herald-Leader reporter Karla Ward contributed to this story.