Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, began a primary challenge to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) last year with President Donald Trump’s endorsement and the promised support of Trump-aligned super PACs.
In the past, that’s been enough to eliminate Trump critics from the GOP. Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) and Tom Rice (R-S.C.) all lost primaries to Trump-backed candidates after they voted to impeach Trump at the end of his first term.
But with a month to go before the primary, it’s not clear if being the president’s man is enough for Gallrein to win. Two polls released this week show Massie has a shot at becoming the rare Republican to face down Trump’s political wrath and survive.
A poll released Thursday by Quantus Insights has Massie leading with 46.8% support to 37.7% for Gallrein. Another survey, by Big Data Poll, found 52.4% of voters in the district leaning toward voting for Massie, compared to 47.6% leaning Gallrein.
Massie, for his part, is acting increasingly confident, challenging Gallrein to a debate he believes will expose his opponent. Gallrein has yet to accept the invitation.
“I’m comfortable debating because I know what I believe,” Massie told HuffPost. “He and his handlers don’t want him in a debate because he doesn’t really have any policy positions. He’s promised just to do whatever the president and [House Speaker] Mike Johnson want, and he can’t even be sure what that is on any given day.”
There’s little disagreement that the big questions in the May primary for Massie’s solidly Republican northern Kentucky district are whether Trump’s endorsement is the most important thing to Republican voters there, and whether those voters find any value in Massie’s willingness to step out of line.
Massie is as conservative as anyone on Capitol Hill, and more rigid in his views than any House Republican – so much so that he’s repeatedly voted against debt-financed tax cuts and spending bills that had the president’s blessing. Because of those votes — plus Massie’s efforts to unseal the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein and his votes against wars — Trump recruited Gallrein.
“Just give me somebody with a warm body to beat Massie,” Trump said at a rally with Gallrein in Kentucky last month, hastening to add that Gallrein has a “beautiful brain” and a strong handshake.
Andrew Harnik via Getty Images
Massie has beaten a Trump-backed primary challenger before, but Gallrein’s got significant support from Trump-aligned groups that have spent millions on campaign ads against Massie, with the Republican Jewish Committee alone spending over $3 million. And Trump does have a strong track record of banishing dissenters from the Republican Party, which has seemingly abandoned core positions on free trade, fiscal responsibility and rule of law.
In an interview with a conservative Kentucky radio host this week, Gallrein called Massie “the Liz Cheney of Kentucky,” referring to the former Republican congresswoman who was driven from the GOP over her refusal to excuse Trump’s criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
But Massie is holding up much better in the available polling than Cheney ever did. In two surveys conducted before her primary loss in August 2022, Cheney was trailing by an average of more than 20 percentage points.
Gallrein is by no means an empty suit — he’s got decades of military service, he’s a farmer, and he’s not entirely new to Republican politics, having served unsuccessfully as the state party’s favored candidate for an open state senate seat in 2024. But there’s no doubt he’s a less experienced public speaker than Massie, who in his decade-plus as a House member has tangled with senior administration officials at hearings and given thousands of interviews to journalists.
Gallrein appears to be trying to coast to victory without much of a ground game. Only 8.6% of respondents in Big Data Poll’s survey said they’d interacted with door knockers from Gallrein’s campaign, compared to 35.5% who said they’d been contacted by Massie’s campaign. It’s not necessarily a bad strategy.
“It may be that it’s better for Gallrein and to just do an air war rather than a traditional campaign and just sort of rely on, ‘Do you like Trump? Then you’re for Gallrein,’” Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky Secretary of State and expert on Bluegrass State politics, told HuffPost.
“A debate would be good for Massie, because his personality would have a chance to come through,” Grayson said. “And it would probably give him a chance to show how, in comparison with Gallrein, how much he does agree with Trump.”
Gallrein’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but he’s made clear his reason for running is to back the president on Capitol Hill. In recent interviews with friendly media, he’s spoken about his visits to the White House and about how Trump was impressed by his firm handshake. And he’s faulted Massie for not being a team player.
“He’s standing against more than the president. He’s standing against our nation,” Gallrein told conservative radio host Bill Cunningham last month. “Everything he does is about ‘get Trump.’ He’s just picked a fight with him and the party.”
When Cunningham asked Gallrein to debate Massie, Gallrein seemed caught off guard. “I got hard work to do, about a thousand other things, but let me get back to you on that,” he said.
Massie said Gallrein has “backed out” of four debates in addition to his unenthusiastic response to Cunningham. It’s likely to be among the most expensive elections in the country, Massie said, so people ought to at least get their money’s worth and see the two candidates debate.
“I think before people vote, they deserve to see more than 30 seconds of somebody in a rehearsed ad before they cast their ballot,” Massie said. “And typically, conventional campaign wisdom is, if you’re ahead, you don’t debate the other guy. You turn down the debates. Ed’s problem is he’s behind, and he won’t debate me, and the reason I’m willing to debate him is I think he could lose the whole race in one debate.”