Ed Massey, former Kentucky state representative and current GOP candidate for Kentucky district 66, held a campaign kickoff event Tuesday night at The Oriental Wok restaurant in Lakeside Park, seemingly unphased by a resolution passed the night before by the Boone County Republicans censuring him as a candidate.
“I wear it as a badge of honor; I really do,” Massey told LINK nky, “because that’s not the kind of people I want to be a part of. That’s not the kind of people I represent or represented.”
Massey served as the state representative for district 66, which encompasses a sizeable chunk of Boone County, from 2019 to 2023. He lost to current district Rep. Steve Rawlings, who is now running for a Kentucky Senate position, in the 2022 primary. In May he will face off against T.J. Roberts in the Republican primary, the winner of which will face Democratic candidate Peggy Houston-Nienaber in the general election in November.
Tuesday’s event marked the kick off of his campaign. Massey and former gubernatorial candidate and ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft gave brief statements to the crowd and solicited campaign contributions.
“Without Ed, we wouldn’t have hope in this district,” Craft said, addressing the crowd.
The event came on the heels of a meeting of the Boone County Republicans, which unexpectedly ended in a resolution to censure Massey’s candidacy.
Massey and Roberts both attended the event and both corroborated the broad strokes of what happened. Boone County Commissioner and the Chair of the Boone County Republicans Chet Hand also spoke with LINK nky about the meeting.
Hand declined to share the identity of the person who brought the measure to the floor, but Roberts and Massey both said it was Karen Strayer, the erstwhile leader of the Boone County chapter of Moms for Liberty, who proposed the censuring resolution. Hand and Massey both confirmed the resolution was not on the agenda, although Hand said that precinct captains proposing resolutions was allowable.
Everyone confirmed the resolution passed by quite a margin, although no one could give an exact vote tally. Massey said that Boone County Judge/Executive Gary Moore also attended the meeting and voted the against the resolution, but Moore did not respond to an inquiry for comment.
Roberts, who also serves a precinct captain, recused himself from the vote at the meeting.
The resolution, a copy of which Massey shared with LINK nky, levels multiple criticisms at Massey, arguing that he donated to Democratic candidates, such as Hilary Clinton, gave money to abortion clinics, and voted against impeaching “radical left-wing Governor Andy Beshear” among other charges. It concludes by asking Massey to either “represent the Republican platform or leave the Republican Party.”
Massey said that these claims either misrepresented the facts or were outright false. For instance, Massey said, the charge that he had given money to Democrats occurred when he was the president of the National School Board Association and paid to get access to an event where Democratic politicians were present.
In any case, Massey said that he planned to file a grievance about how the meeting proceeded with the Republican Party of Kentucky in the future.
At Tuesday’s event, Massey addressed his opponents’ actions as well as their behavior online.
“Some people use [social media] because they’re afraid to confront people face-to-face,” Massey said. “They’re afraid to have an honest discussion. And they’re so divisive, that it’s either their way or the highway. And we can’t run a state like that.”
When asked what the key differences were between him and Roberts on a policy level, he admitted that they had many things in common but said that he was “not nearly as extreme on some issues as [Roberts] is.”
“I’m conservative, but I’m not crazy,” Massey added.
Roberts told LINK nky that even though he didn’t take part in the vote on Monday, “it is clear that my opponent and I have fundamentally different views on the direction the Republican Party and the Commonwealth should take.”
Chet Hand said that the Boone County Republicans would be sending out a press release on the results of Monday’s meeting, but LINK nky had not yet received it at the time of this article’s publication. We will update this story once we receive it.