A Kentucky congressman who spent years bucking his own party’s leadership lost his seat Tuesday night to a former Navy SEAL recruited personally by President Donald Trump, capping a bruising primary fight that shattered spending records and tested the boundaries of Trump’s dominance over the Republican Party.
Ed Gallrein, a farmer and decorated military veteran, turned back incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie by nearly ten points, a margin that stunned even some of Trump’s own allies who had watched the final days of the race with nervous energy.
The president had gone after Massie with language rarely deployed against a member of his own party.
On the eve of the election, Trump labeled the sitting congressman the “worst ‘Republican’ congressman in history” — a designation that Gallrein enthusiastically carried into his own final campaign messaging.
“My opponent, he’s running against President Trump and the agenda that has been put forward by the Republican Party,” Gallrein said in a Monday interview with Fox News Digital.
Standing before supporters Tuesday night, Gallrein struck a unifying tone, thanking the president and laying out his governing vision.
“My focus is on advancing the president’s and the party’s agenda to put America first and Kentucky always,” he told the crowd.
Massie, for his part, did not drag out the evening. He picked up the phone, made the call, and walked to a microphone.
“I have called and conceded the race,” he told his supporters. “We’ve been honorable the whole time, and we’re going to stay that way.”
Before the votes came in, Massie had argued he was in a stronger position than his opponents believed. He pointed to the decision by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to campaign for Gallrein on Monday as a tell.
“They wouldn’t be sending the Secretary of War to my congressional district if I weren’t,” Massie said, suggesting the last-minute move indicated the Trump operation feared he was ahead in internal polling.
He also drew a sharp contrast between his own grassroots operation and what he described as his opponent’s inability to draw a crowd.
“I’ve got the groundswell here, like my events. I’ve got 100–200, sometimes 300 people show up,” Massie told Fox News Digital. “My opponent had to cancel events because he couldn’t get enough people, you know, to fill up a Dairy Queen, half a Dairy Queen.”
“We’ve been able to match them to go toe-to-toe with them on TV using grassroots donors, and it’s really galvanized the nation,” he added.
The money told a different story. Pro-Israel donors allied with Trump flooded the race with outside spending, targeting Massie over his votes against military aid to Israel and against congressional resolutions denouncing antisemitism.
Massie pushed back firmly on the characterization that his positions reflected hostility toward Israel.
“Here’s the thing, I’ve got nothing against Israel. I just have never voted for foreign aid,” he told Fox News Digital. “When I said America First, I meant it. I don’t vote for foreign aid to Egypt, to Syria, to Ukraine. I’ve got a flawless record on this, and I’m not going to ruin it by sending foreign aid to one country.”
Massie’s record gave his opponents plenty of material. He was among a small group of Republicans who voted against Trump’s signature tax cut and spending package, citing its effect on the deficit.
He helped engineer a legislative push to force the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, a move the White House initially fought before eventually endorsing.
And in recent weeks, he had become one of the sharpest Republican voices against Trump’s military campaign against Iran, repeatedly joining Democrats in votes to limit the operation.
Trump had traveled to Massie’s district in March and labeled him “disloyal” to the party and the country.
In his concession speech, Massie reflected on the historic scale of what had just unfolded. “Welcome to the most expensive congressional primary ever in the 250-year history of this country,” he said. “It’s not just the most expensive. This thing went on longer than Vietnam.”
He lamented that working across the aisle has “become a dirty word in this country,” but closed on a defiant note.
“There is a yearning in this country for somebody who will vote for principles over party,” Massie said. “You all don’t like bullies and you don’t tolerate them. And I love you for it.”
The result extends a dominant stretch for Trump in Republican primaries. Earlier this month, five Indiana state lawmakers who blocked a GOP-backed redistricting effort were voted out.
Last Saturday, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — who cast a vote to convict Trump after his second impeachment in January 2021 — was shut out of his own party’s Senate runoff.
Gallrein’s win marks the first time since 2012 that Massie has lost a primary, and by far the most consequential race of his congressional career.
