Warren County: six House seats, $527,000, and nobody to spend it on

LOUISVILLE — Sixth of twenty, and the one where the ballot is the story. Same five questions: the paper, the ballots, the turnout, the map, the money. The fifth one is short.

What the paper says. Warren County has 93,175 registered voters on the August file: 37,261 Democrats, 43,586 Republicans, 12,328 in neither column. That's 40.0% Democratic, 46.8% Republican, 13.2% no-party. In 2010 it was 56.1% Democratic and 36.6% Republican — a nineteen-point Democratic county on paper. Sixteen years later the Republican column has nearly doubled, from 23,909 to 43,586; the Democratic column has added 680 people. The county grew by 28,000 voters and the Democrats got 680 of them. That's the western Kentucky version of the eastern Kentucky story: a Democratic registration edge that was inherited, not chosen, being replaced one new voter at a time. The purge took 3,250 names off since Election Day 2024 and 3,100 of them were Democrats — this is a county where the cleanup is correcting the column, not just clearing the dead.

What the ballots say. The biggest swing in the series so far.

On a federal ballot Warren is Republican by about twenty and has been since 2008: Romney by 22, Trump by 24, then 17, then 24 again — the 2020 dip gave every point back. On a governor's ballot Andy Beshear carried it by three in 2019 and by four in 2023. That's a 28.5-point swing between the same voters on consecutive Novembers — Kenton's was 27, Louisville's 24, Oldham's 22 — and it's the second county in the series, after Kenton, where the swing crosses all the way to a Democratic win. Warren is a Beshear county. It is not a Democratic one, and the paper that used to say it was is being corrected at 3,000 names a year.

Who's turning out. The gap is smaller than Northern Kentucky's, and it's growing.

In 2018 the gap was three points, 52.5 to 49.2. In 2019, two. In 2022, seven — 46.9 to 39.6. In 2024, ten: 66.4% of Warren's registered Republicans voted and 56.4% of its Democrats did. The direction matters more than the level: this is a county where the Democratic column was a paper majority for decades, and the paper Democrats — the ones who vote Republican or don't vote — are the ones sitting out. The no-party column, 12,328 voters, turned out at 25.4% in 2022 and 21.5% in 2023, the lowest off-year rate of the six counties so far.

Warren swings 28 points between Trump and Beshear, the most of any county in this series so far. In November it will swing nothing, because there is nothing on the ballot to swing.

Where it happens. What I can show you is 2022. Warren reported its 2024 presidential results by 53 vote centers, not by its 88 precincts, and its 2023 governor's returns are on lines that don't match the map I have. So the last election that fits the precinct map is the 2022 Senate race, Booker against Paul, on 84 of 87.

Booker carried 31 precincts — the city — 7,058 votes, by 1,680. Paul carried 53, the rest of the county, 30,499 votes, and won it by 7,811. That's Bowling Green and everything else: a Democratic city that casts a fifth of the county's vote and a Republican county around it that casts the rest. Three of the four House districts — the 17th, 19th and 20th — take a piece of the city; the 22nd takes none of it. When the county publishes a 2024 precinct file on the old lines, I'll run the real test here. The 2022 map says the same thing the Beshear swing does: the city moves, the county doesn't, and the county is four times the size.

What's on the ballot, and who's paying. Two Senate districts and four House districts touch Warren County. All six are Republican. All six are unopposed.

Max Wise in Senate District 16 has $175,464 and no opponent. Mike Wilson in the 32nd, $123,942, no opponent. Michael Meredith in House District 19, $95,334; Robert Duvall in the 17th, $61,784; Kevin Jackson in the 20th, $59,862; Shawn McPherson in the 22nd, $10,860. Five hundred twenty-seven thousand dollars sitting in six accounts, in a county Andy Beshear carried twice, and not one Democrat filed against any of them. Not in the 20th, which has fifteen of Booker's 31 precincts — more of Bowling Green than any other seat — and went Republican by 12,103 to nothing in 2024. Not in the 17th, which has ten more of them. Nowhere.

I wrote last week that 43 House seats have no Democrat and that you don't learn a district's number by leaving it blank. Warren County is where that costs the most. The 20th is a district with a Democratic city in it, in a county the governor carried, and the last time anybody measured what a Democrat could do there was before the current lines. The money in those six accounts is leadership money now — it'll go to the 31st and the 48th and the 65th in the last three weeks, because it has nowhere to go here.

The read. Warren is the county that proves the swing isn't enough. It swings 28 points, more than anywhere, and it swings from Republican by 24 to Democratic by four, which means there's a Beshear majority in Bowling Green that exists exactly once every four years and is never asked to do anything else. Nobody is on the ballot to ask it. The Republican column votes ten points harder than the Democratic one, the Democratic column is a paper majority being corrected downward, and the third column votes at a fifth. The only thing that changes any of that is a candidate, and this year there isn't one.

What I'm watching in November: nothing on this ballot, because there's nothing to watch. What I'm watching in 2028: whether anyone files in the 20th.

Tomorrow: Hardin.

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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.