Rural strategy helps former fighter pilot win Democratic primary upset for Kentucky congressional seat - Entrepreneur Generations

McGrath (R) celebrated after Tuesday's primary victory.
(Herald-Leader photo by Alex Slitz)

Retired fighter pilot Amy McGrath won Tuesday's Democratic primary for Kentucky's 6th Congressional District, "setting up a November election that will attract national money and attention as Democrats try to make Kentucky part of a possible blue wave in 2018," Daniel Desrochers, Lesley Clark and John Cheves report for the Herald-Leader in Lexington.

The Herald-Leader said she is a "candidate who fits the Democratic moment . . . a political newcomer at a time Democrats across the country are looking for a fresh response to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump." 

Though this is Lt. Col. McGrath's first political campaign, she's no stranger to politics or government work: she graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a political science degree and later taught the subject there. She also served in the Pentagon as the Marine Corps' liaison to other federal agencies such as the State Department, and was the defense and foreign affairs policy advisor to Rep. Susan Davis of San Diego, according to her Naval Academy bio.

McGrath began considering running for office after Trump's election, whom she said "represented the opposite of the ideals she was taught at the Naval Academy," Michael Tacket reports for The New York Times. She contacted Ben Chandler, the last Democrat to hold the 6th district seat in her native Kentucky and asked him about running for Congress. Chandler recommended his former campaign manager, Mark Nicholas, who had given up politics for filmmaking in New York. But Nicholas was persuaded to sign on after meeting McGrath.

Though McGrath's campaign announcement went viral and swiftly brought in donations from across the country, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee officials bet on Jim Gray, the popular mayor of Lexington who led by a formidable margin in early polls. 

"Nickolas, who had never worked in a campaign in the digital era, saw the Washington rebuke as an opportunity to run the campaign his way, without having to hew to the DCCC playbook," Tacket reports. "That meant buying ad space in small town newspapers for opinion pieces by Ms. McGrath, buying billboard space, and building a field operation in rural areas where few Democrats have dared to even campaign in recent years." 

The campaign's aggressive rural strategy paid off: Gray won in urban Fayette County, but McGrath won the other mostly-rural 18 counties in the district, the Herald-Leader reports.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2x9xRjS Rural strategy helps former fighter pilot win Democratic primary upset for Kentucky congressional seat - Entrepreneur Generations

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

Tweet