There is a fierce multi-way primary going on to replace the retiring McConnell in Kentucky next year, and much to McConnell’s chagrin the race has turned into a referendum against his legacy. It’s so bad for McConnell that the Kentucky GOP, under serious pressure from Morris, abandoned a scheme this weekend to award McConnell the “lifetime achievement award” at its annual dinner headlined by emcee Scott Jennings and Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV) — instead just having McConnell give the award to a longtime activist.
“Morris took issue with McConnell’s presence even before the night began. In June, he criticized an invitation he received to the event that called on speakers to refrain from ‘speaking ill’ of Republicans who aren’t running for the Senate seat,” the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Lucas Aulbach reported from Lexington on Monday morning. “Morris at the time said he’d heard McConnell was set to receive a lifetime achievement award from the party at the dinner — that award was presented by McConnell to Cathy Bell, who’s held several roles with the state GOP over more than three decades.”
Morris has made criticism of McConnell’s strange anti-Trump behavior a centerpiece of his surprise bid for the U.S. Senate, catching McConnell allies and Morris rivals former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron and Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) off guard in a massive way. Morris’s meteoric rise from abject poverty to leading a major trash company has also been a core part of the Trump-aligned candidate’s message, as he rode in on a garbage truck discarding McConnell, Cameron, and Barr paraphernalia in his opening ad and has since captivated the attention of Republicans statewide and Trump supporters around the country.
Staff for the super PACs of Barr and Cameron have admitted to colluding on potential anti-Morris ads in a desperate bid both to rescue McConnell’s legacy and to slow the rise of another future U.S. Senator who would quite clearly move the state into the pro-Trump future.
The explosive revelation of collaboration was unearthed last week in a story by NOTUS journalist Reese Gorman, who ran it under this headline: “Team of Rivals? Inside the Weird Super PAC Pitch in the Kentucky GOP’s Senate Race.”
The sub-headline of the story made it even clearer: “Some allies of Daniel Cameron have pitched Rep. Andy Barr’s team on a super PAC to take down Nate Morris.”
Gorman’s story uncovers actual collusion between the establishment, McConnell-aligned candidates against the outsider Trump-aligned candidate.
“As the Kentucky Senate race heats up, donors and Republican operatives have been getting pitched on an unusual idea: a super PAC run by allies of two GOP competitors to take down another rival in the race,” Gorman writes. “Theoretically, the PAC’s purpose would be to oppose Kentucky businessman Nate Morris, which would benefit Rep. Andy Barr and former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron. (All three men are running for Senate.) According to seven sources familiar with the matter, Barr and Cameron’s allies have discussed starting a super PAC to attack Morris. Donors, Senate GOP aides and operatives have all been pitched on the super PAC.”
Gorman reveals in the story that a man named Jonathan Duke — a political consultant working for Cameron’s super PAC who “has ties to Kentucky politics” — is the shadowy figure “currently spearheading the idea.” Interestingly, Duke is someone who has been regularly paid off by McConnell through an organization the former Senate GOP leader used to operate called the Senate Leadership Fund.
“Duke’s firm, Deep Root Analytics, was a longtime vendor for the Senate Leadership Fund under McConnell, according to Federal Election Commission filings,” Gorman writes.
Duke and the other McConnell stooges — including everyone working for Cameron and Barr and their affiliated organizations like the super PACs backing them — are getting desperate for big money to come in quickly against Morris because he has quickly become the GOP frontrunner in this race. Morris has won the endorsements of several key America First movement leaders such as Sens. Jim Banks (R-IN), Bernie Moreno (R-OH), and Turning Point’s Charlie Kirk. Morris also has won high praise from Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., on whose podcast Triggered Morris recently announced he was running in the first place. Morris is also particularly close with Vice President JD Vance. In other words, McConnell world is terrified that Morris is taking off like a rocket ship in Trump-world and that the endorsement that matters most — from the president himself — won’t be far behind.
Barr-aligned sources even confirmed the McConnell-world conspiracy against Morris to Gorman for his story, putting both McConnell-aligned candidates and their enterprises at the center of the collusion plan to stop him. More here from Gorman’s thermonuclear story:
One source close to Barr told NOTUS that Duke approached them about starting a super PAC together to go after Morris, but said no one had reached an agreement.
Despite Duke telling people this would be a joint venture between Barr and Cameron, the source said Barr’s team has no appetite to join forces with their opponent, noting that Barr already has a super PAC that is well-funded while Cameron’s is struggling to raise money.
Another source familiar with the effort told NOTUS that it all started when an activist in Kentucky reached out to Duke with the idea of starting a super PAC to hit Morris. Duke then had conversations with people, which the source described as “casual,” but insisted there are no plans to move forward with the super PAC.
While the effort does not appear at this time to be coming together formally in the form of a unified joint PAC funded to attack Morris — partially because it was exposed before it took off — the whole effort also casts serious doubts on any actions either Barr or Cameron, or their aligned super PACs or frankly any other establishment people in Kentucky, to tarnish Morris.
On Wednesday morning, Politico Playbook revealed that McConnell’s donors funded their first coordinated hit on Morris to the tune of more than a million dollars through a group aligned with Barr.
“The Andy Barr-aligned Keep America Great PAC is going up with a $1.2 million ad campaign against Nate Morris in the Kentucky Senate GOP primary,” Politico Playbook wrote. “The spot calls Morris ‘fake’ MAGA, citing his donations to support Nikki Haley and Mitch McConnell.”
There are several major factual issues with the ad, and as such it seems to be already backfiring on the McConnell stooges behind it, namely Barr himself.
Morris’s supposed donation to Nikki Haley was actually made to an outside group one month after Haley went on television and promised the world she would not run against Trump in 2024. What’s more, Morris’s wife previously told the Wall Street Journal that the donation was not about support for Haley, but so she could get a signed letter from Haley for her dying uncle who resided in South Carolina. Around the time of the dinner, she also paid for a cameo video from Donald Trump Jr. for her uncle as well.
The inaccuracies in the ad aside, the effort is not working in Kentucky or among Trump supporters beyond the commonwealth’s borders, per former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. In an interview with journalist Mark Halperin on Wednesday about this ad, Spicer confirmed that Morris will in fact be the GOP nominee in Kentucky next year.
“It’s a proxy,” Spicer told Halperin about the race between Morris versus the McConnell guys Barr and Cameron in Kentucky. “Of all of them, this is McConnell versus Trump. You’ve got two prominent McConnell acolytes in Daniel Cameron… and Andy Barr… against Nate Morris. To your point, it would be an understatement to say [Morris] has a lot of support — he has the entire MAGA infrastructure behind him.”
“But not the president,” Halperin said, to which Spicer replied: “Well, so far.”
“I would argue that I found that ad sort of ineffective and over the top — I actually think whoever funded it should be really pissed off about how it just doesn’t work,” Spicer added.
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