The Atlantic: “To outsiders, Kentucky’s politics can be hard to grasp. In some respects, the state is no different than any other Republican stronghold. Outside of the urban centers of Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky is largely rural and conservative. The state has not backed a Democrat for president or for the U.S. Senate since the 1990s. All but one of Kentucky’s six House members are Republican, as are the majorities in both chambers of its legislature.
But even as the state has gone decisively for Trump the past three elections, it has twice elected a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. And the pair of Republicans that voters have sent to the Senate, McConnell and Paul, are as different from one another as any two senators from the same party in the country. McConnell is the institutionalist: a Reaganite and a Kentucky power broker who is now one of the last members of the GOP’s old guard still serving in Congress. Paul arrived in Washington as part of the Tea Party wave of 2010, having upset a McConnell-backed front-runner in the primary by campaigning as a spending hawk. Massie won election to the House two years later on the Tea Party banner. “We’ve always been a bit all over the place in the candidates that we support,” Rick VanMeter, a strategist from Kentucky who has worked for several Republicans in the state, told me.”