If all goes as scheduled, Erin Marshall, the First District Democratic candidate for Congress, will have put more than 1,000 miles on her car this long Fancy Farm picnic weekend.
The Frankfort resident who is challenging incumbent Republican James Comer is almost halfway there.
On Thursday, Marshall drove solo 250 miles for the annual pre-picnic Alben Barkley Democratic Dinner in Paducah.
After she spoke, she returned to Frankfort because Friday was her son Teddy’s first day of kindergarten. He was staying with the candidate’s parents, Audrey and Jerry Marshall.
Marshall departed Paducah at 8:30 p.m CDT, drove through a rainstorm, and got to the state capital at 1 a.m. EDT.
This morning, she duly enrolled Teddy. Plans called for Teddy again bunking with his grandparents tonight.
After packing for an overnighter and dropping off her dog Deacon with a friend (Marshall is a Wake Forest grad), she expected to head west again – 232 miles to Kentucky Dam Village State Park for tonight’s Judge Mike Miller Memorial Marshall County Bean Dinner. Then it’s 22 miles back to Paducah to check into a hotel.
On Saturday, she figures to be on the road again for the 29-mile leg to the state’s premier political picnic. Then, she’s homeward bound, 271 miles east.
At the Barkley dinner, Marshall led to the mic a procession of four other Democrats who aim to unseat entrenched GOP state House incumbents: Fredrick Fountain and Carrie Singler, both of Paducah; Linda Story Edwards, Benton; and Lauren Hines of Murray.
Marshall and Comer are set to cross paths for the first time at Fancy Farm, where candidates barb each other in short speeches while the assembled partisans raucously cheer, jeer, and boo, depending on who’s on the stump.
At Paducah, Marshall warmed up for Fancy Farm by tossing a few jabs at Comer. She said her goal was “to make him run the first campaign he’s had to run since 2015 when he lost – a loss to Matt Bevin, which is really saying a lot.”
That earned her the first of many rounds of applause, cheering, and laughter.
Marshall meant the 2015 Republican gubernatorial primary in which Bevin edged Comer by 83 votes. Bevin beat Democrat Jack Conway in November, but lost his bid for reelection to Democrat Andy Beshear, the current governor, in 2019.
The Barkley dinner is named for President Harry Truman’s vice president, who was from Paducah. Best known as “The Veep,” he was also nicknamed the “Iron Man” for “his prodigious ability to make any number of campaign stops and speeches in a day,” said Kentucky historian George Humphreys, author of The Fall of Kentucky's Rock: Western Kentucky Democratic Politics since the New Deal.
Humphreys said Marshall’s odyssey — the equivalent of a one-way trip from Frankfort to 116 miles beyond Austin, Texas — would qualify her as the “Iron Woman,” especially since the First District now stretches more than 300 miles from the Mississippi River to Frankfort.
At the Barkley dinner, Marshall also claimed she was “so excited that our current congressman has an excuse to spend some time in the district” instead of appearing on Fox News.
The U.S. House Clerk’s website lists Comer’s “hometown” as Tompkinsville, in south central Kentucky, but he has a house in Frankfort, which state GOP lawmakers redistricted — gerrymandered, according to the Democrats — into the First District. “I’m super glad he’s able to live in the district again,” Marshall deadpanned.
Marshall suggested that she and Comer, who chairs the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, could have carpooled to Fancy Farm. But because “he can’t control his committee” she doubted she’d “want to be a passenger in his car.”
On the serious side, Marshall said Comer, a strong supporter of Donald Trump, is “one of the least effective members of Congress.” The incumbent “has voted against women, unions, our children’s safety every day that they go to school, and voted against the wellbeing of the First Congressional District.” (Marshall is Kentucky State AFL-CIO-endorsed.)
Marshall said that when she became pregnant unexpectedly, she and her boyfriend broke up, and she moved back to Kentucky and chose to give birth, rather than terminate her high-risk pregnancy.
Since then, the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v Wade, and the GOP supermajority state legislature enacted one of the country’s most stringent abortion bans. Marshall told the crowd that she wanted women today to have the same choice she did.
Comer’s opposition to abortion has earned him an A+ rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a conservative group which says its “mission is to end abortion” by electing anti-abortion candidates and promoting anti-abortion laws.
Marshall vowed “to reshape the landscape of the First Congressional District this year” and said “it’s time to send another Democrat to Congress to fight for us.” Rep. Morgan McGarvey of Louisville is Kentucky’s sole Democrat on Capitol Hill.
More than a few district Democrats think Marshall is the first viable Democrat to run for Congress from the district since 2000 when Brian Roy of Benton, a longtime Marshall County sheriff turned federal marshal, took on incumbent Ed Whitfield. Comer succeeded Whitfield. Democratic insiders speculate that because Roy lost, no other name Democrats chose to run.
As a result, Comer has easily defeated a procession of underfunded and largely unknown Democrats, all of whom received little media coverage. But no sooner did Marshall. a party activist, toss her hat in the ring in January than Joe Gerth featured her in one of his Louisville-Courier columns, headlined “Why Jamie Comer's latest foe is like no one he’s ever faced.”
In addition, she released a campaign kickoff video that Bruce Maples, publisher of online Forward Kentucky, “the progressive voice for Kentucky politics,” said “hit it out of the park.”
Wrote Maples, “Erin Marshall calls out Rep. Comer for his hypocrisy as ‘an anti-abortion Republican who once took his girlfriend to get an abortion.’ According to reports by the local media in Kentucky, Comer allegedly abused an ex-girlfriend and took her to obtain an abortion in Louisville. She [Marshall] also criticizes Comer for conducting ‘phony investigations into President Biden’s family.’”
In April, Mother Jones magazine hailed the video as “the best political video of 2024 (so far).” "The abortion lift for Ds may not be enough for Marshall to close such a large gap,” wrote MJ’s Washington Bureau Chief. “But with this ad, she and her team are showing the Democrats how to fight this battle without flinching.”
A footnote: Marshall is a delegate to this month's Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 349 miles from Frankfort. She be taking a bus with others from Kentucky Democratic Party headquarters in Frankfort.
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The video may be viewed on her campaign website. You can also donate to her there.
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