The announcement that Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot, would be running for a U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky again in 2026 was met with a mixed reaction from Democrats and Kentuckians who remember her $94 million bid five years ago. McGrath, however, told Salon that any suggestion that she was running for the money was “total bullshit” — while adding that she would drop out if her state’s popular Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, decides to enter the race himself.
In 2020, McGrath generated hype among national Democrats with a biography that many thought could be appealing in a conservative state. But despite record-breaking fundraising, McGrath went on to lose by more than 20 points to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., her campaign becoming the prime example for critics who say Democrats have too often fallen prey to expensive but futile campaigns and fundraising tactics that are unsustainable.
McGrath’s announcement garnered pushback from some elected Democrats, like Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who said, “Amy has previously run for this seat [and] only succeeded in enriching consultants [and] bleeding well-meaning donors dry, one text at a time.”
Former Rep. Susan Wild, D-Pa., also responded to the announcement, saying, “please don’t.” Multiple Kentucky papers likewise published opinions expressing skepticism over McGrath’s second Senate campaign.
In an interview with Salon, McGrath addressed the controversy over her campaign announcement, saying, “We’re all fighting for the same goals: to protect people’s health care, to make lives better for people, to lower costs.”
“We are also all fighting for a Democratic majority that delivers for Americans,” McGrath said, “and in this moment, we’re all fighting to protect our democracy, and I’ve always had deep respect for anyone doing this work. I think you know we need to stay focused on the real fight here, and not each other.”
McGrath defended running again despite losing to McConnell in 2020, arguing that the loss — her second in as many years — shouldn’t preclude her from trying again.
“Ask Bernie Sanders how many times he ran,” McGrath said.
At the same time, McGrath said she would be willing to step aside. “Of course, I would support Andy Beshear” in the event he announced a bid for Senate, she said. “He’s been an incredible governor.”
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McGrath, when asked why she chose to run for Senate again, rather than Kentucky’s 6th House District, which she almost won in 2018, said that she no longer lives in the district, which encompasses Lexington and the surrounding area, and that she believes voters there are entitled to a representative who lives in the district.
Her strategy this time, she said, is to focus more on state-level concerns than on what’s happening in Washington, DC.
“You don’t focus on yourself. You don’t focus on what national politicians are talking about,” McGrath said, explaining that she believes healthcare will be central in the 2026 race after Republicans cut nearly $1 trillion in health care funding. “You focus on the cost of groceries. You focus on keeping hospitals open. You focus on showing up.”
She also alluded to the “chaos” brought on by Trump’s policies, like the ongoing government shutdown.
“This chaos that you’re seeing from Trump hurts Kentucky families,” McGrath said. “It hurts them. Tariffs raise the prices, shutdowns threaten our military pay, attacks on our democracy, [dividing] our neighbors.”
McGrath also said that Trump would loom large over the midterms.
“I have been strong on Donald Trump and been honest about him. Now, what? What do I say to Kentuckians, you know, who voted for him? Look, he promised a lot of stuff. He promised he wasn’t going to go after Medicare and Medicaid. And what is, what is he doing? He did just that, you know, what about these tariffs? People didn’t vote for Donald Trump for these tariffs. I mean, they didn’t vote for higher prices,” McGrath said.
When asked what she had learned from the governor’s success in the state, McGrath said that “the best campaigns are built on listening and Andy Beshear is really good at that.” Beshear has won two statewide elections in Kentucky, first in 2019, when he won the gubernatorial race by less than a point, and again in 2023, when he won by five points.
McGrath also addressed some criticisms stemming from the immense sum of money raised for her campaign and the Democratic fundraising and consultant complex more generally. She said it was “total bullshit” to suggest that “consultants somehow got rich off of my campaign.”
“No one got rich off my campaign,” she said.
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McGrath also touted the “largest field operation in Kentucky history” and said that after her campaign had ended, “we used our operation, what was left of the operation, to raise money and help out for the two Georgia Senate candidates who were left.”
McGrath was referring to the PAC she founded after her loss in 2020, Democratic Majority Action, which, despite being created after the general election, raised $874,000 in the 2020 cycle and is still active today. In total, the two Senate races in Georgia in 2020 saw $507 million in ad spending, according to the ad spending tracking firm AdImpact.
The amount of money raised by DMA or transferred to the Kentucky state party by the McGrath campaign does, however, pale in comparison to the amount of money spent on advertising by the main PAC supporting her candidacy, Honor Bound PAC. According to FEC filings, the McGrath campaign spent just shy of $59 million on advertising that cycle.
Some agencies received millions of dollars for advertising, like Buying Time, a DC-based ad firm that managed more than $5 million in ad buys in just one week in October, and Do Big Things, an Illinois-based political consultancy firm that managed a single $2 million buy around the same.
McGrath’s campaign manager, Mark Nickolas, also received a salary of about $175,000 a year during the time he was working on the campaign, as well as a lump sum payment of nearly $368,000 on November 9, 2020, about a week after the election.
While the totals disclosed in FEC filings represent the total sum spent on advertising, including production costs and the price of airtime, ad agencies typically are paid a percentage of the total spend on advertising, meaning the more a campaign spends, the more advertising consultants make.
Though the issue is not specific to McGrath’s campaign, many Democrats have become increasingly critical of the advertising-centric campaign spending, particularly in the wake of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed 2024 bid, which raised a record $1 billion.
