County Read No. 5 · Boone County
Not one Boone County precinct went to Harris. Beshear carried nine.
Boone is the fastest-growing big county in Kentucky and the most Republican of the twenty on a federal ballot. Trump carried it by 37; Kamala Harris carried none of its sixty precincts. Beshear cut the margin to twelve and carried nine. Its Republicans out-vote its Democrats by eleven points in a presidential year, and three of its six House seats have no Democrat on the ballot.
LOUISVILLE — Fifth of twenty, the second of the Northern Kentucky three, and the first county on this list where my side has nothing to point to. That's the read, and I'm not going to soften it. Same five questions: the paper, the ballots, the turnout, the map, the money.
What the paper says. Boone County has 105,690 registered voters on the August file: 28,879 Democrats, 58,970 Republicans, 17,841 in neither column. That's 27.3% Democratic, 55.8% Republican, 16.9% no-party — the second-highest no-party share in the state after Kenton. In 2010 it was 36.2% Democratic and 51.7% Republican. The county has added 25,000 voters in sixteen years; the Democratic column lost 264 of them. Every net new voter in Boone County since 2010 registered as a Republican or as nothing. The purge took 9,333 names off since Election Day 2024, split almost evenly — 4,391 Democrats, 4,717 Republicans — which is what a clean file looks like: the dead and the moved, not a column being corrected.
What the ballots say. The steadiest line in the series.
Romney by 39. Trump by 42, then 36, then 37. On a federal ballot Boone County hasn't moved in twelve years; it's the only one of the five counties so far where the presidential line is flat. The governor's line moves the way it moves everywhere — Beshear cut a 37-point county to fifteen in 2019 and twelve in 2023 — but it never crosses. That's a 25-point swing between Trump and Beshear on the same voters, and it ends at Republican by twelve. Kenton's swing crossed the line. Boone's runs out of road with a third of the county still to go.
Who's turning out. Same gap as Kenton, same direction, every year.
In 2024, 64.9% of Boone's registered Republicans voted and 53.6% of its Democrats did — eleven points, matching Kenton for the widest gap in the twenty so far. In 2022 it was 44.6 to 35.6, nine points, the widest midterm gap of any county I've done. Even in 2023 the Republicans out-voted the Democrats by five. The no-party column, 17,841 voters, turned out at 28.6% in 2022 and 24.1% in 2023. Same story as next door: the Democratic column here is a quarter of the county and shows up like a fifth, and the column that could move the numbers stays home.
Boone swings 25 points between Trump and Beshear and never gets to even. The Democratic column is 27% of the paper and votes like 22.
Where it happens. Sixty of 64 precincts with two years of returns, and the three-election test produces something I haven't seen yet.
Zero precincts voted for Harris. Fifty-one voted for Trump and for Cameron — 56,460 votes, Trump by 22,196, Cameron by 4,994. Nine voted for Trump and then for Beshear: 7,771 votes, Trump by 1,738, Beshear by 335. That's the entire persuadable map in Boone County — nine precincts, on the Kenton side, where Beshear won by a combined 335 votes. Five of the nine are in the 69th, three in the 60th, one in the 63rd. Louisville has 149 flip precincts, Lexington 51, Oldham 18. Boone has nine and none of them are Democratic on any ballot except a Beshear ballot.
What's on the ballot, and who's paying. Six House districts touch Boone and one Senate district. Four of the seven have a Democrat.
The 69th is the only line worth watching, and I wrote about it yesterday: Wilanne Stangel has out-raised Steven Doan, $18,498 to $16,325, in a Trump +23 district, and five of Boone's nine flip precincts are in it. It's not a race that flips. It's the one place on this ballot where a Democrat is doing the work.
The 60th is Marianne Proctor's, Trump +33, with $62,782 against Tracey Reid, who has no report on file. The 66th is T.J. Roberts's, Trump +40, $25,839 against Jason Ellis's $1,284. The 61st, 63rd and 78th — Maddox, Cuzick, Hart — have no Democrat, and the 61st is the most Republican House district on any ballot in this series, Trump +60. Senate District 20, shared with Kenton: Jay Williams $51,269 against Stella Pollard's $23,605.
The read. Boone is what Kenton becomes without Covington. Same no-party share, same eleven-point turnout gap, same Beshear swing — minus the river city that gives Kenton a Democratic core, and so the swing lands at Republican by twelve instead of Democratic by six, and the map has nine persuadable precincts instead of a district. There is nothing on this ballot for my side to win and the money says nobody's pretending otherwise. What Boone is worth watching for is the trend it doesn't have: it is the one county in the top five where the presidential line has moved less than two points since 2012, in a suburb that's grown by a third. If that ever moves, Northern Kentucky changes. It hasn't.
What I'm watching in November: the nine flip precincts, and whether Boone's no-party turnout gets off 28%.
Tomorrow: Warren.
Disclosure: I work in Kentucky Democratic politics and consult campaigns in this state. I have no client relationship with any candidate named above. I read this county the same way whether or not it's good news for my side — that's the job.