Money
Before you vote: see who paid for your race
About a quarter of the 15-day window is party and caucus checks. Unique individual donors are the coalition signal. Look up your race.
Kentucky — LOUISVILLE. The last pre-election money reports are in, and here's the part the scoreboard will get backwards. The question is not who raised the most for the cycle. It's who the parties decided to feed in the last two weeks, and whether anyone in the district was still writing a personal check.
About a quarter of the money in that window is party and caucus money. The Republican Party of Kentucky put $60,000 into Daniel Fister in LD 56 and another $60,000 into Ken Fleming in LD 48. That's not a donor base. That's a targeting list with a wire transfer attached.
A party check tells you who the institutions picked. A long list of unique individual donors tells you who still has a coalition. Don't confuse the two.
Suhas Kulkarni in LD 48 is the clearest coalition signal on the board: 211 unique individual donors over the cycle, and no state-party money in the last window. Across the aisle in the same seat, Fleming's late dollars lean on the party. Timothy Hall in LD 31 raised about $67,778 in the same window, and $61,128 of it is one Kentucky Democratic Party mail line. Johnny Turner in LD 95 raised $15,000, all of it one House Democratic Caucus check.
I'm not going to walk every seat here. That's what the map is for.
Look up your race. You'll see when the money arrived, whether it was individuals or the party, and how thin the donor list got at the end. The number that matters in your district is the one on that card, not the statewide pile.
Louisville, same window
Same calendar, different board. Louisville Metro Mayor is nonpartisan on the ballot, and both names filed a 15-day report. The Louisville Democratic Party endorsed Craig Greenberg (LDP sample ballot).
Craig Greenberg has raised about $1.0 million for the general so far. In the last window Shameka Parrish-Wright raised $16,158 from 99 unique individual donors. Greenberg's late haul was smaller and thinner on the donor list. That's the same coalition read as the House board: who still has people writing checks.
Metro Council is nonpartisan on the ballot too, and the late money is thinner. District 7 is the clearest bump: Catherine Timmerman raised about $9,300 in the window, most of it one Jefferson County Republican Party Executive Committee check; Paula McCraney, endorsed by the Louisville Democratic Party on that same sample ballot, raised $2,800, all from individuals. I'm not walking every odd district here. Look Louisville races up on the map too.
Election night: live results mapped on The 120
I'm building a live results screen for election night at the120ky.com/results. Every race, county by county, as the returns come in. Watch this space Tuesday.
I'll be reading the late money the same way I read the precincts: who got helped, and who was left to their own call sheet.
Disclosure: I work in Kentucky Democratic politics. I'm not paid by, and don't advise, any candidate named above.
Source: Kentucky Registry of Election Finance filings, data through Oct 19, 2026.