Geoff Young is Democratic nominee for Congress. Why Gov. Beshear, party don’t support him.

Geoff Young is a highly unorthodox candidate for political office.

He has run a race for Congress this year focused mostly on foreign policy, he ran for office in the opposite party last election cycle; and he’s lost court battles suing both Kentucky parties, as well as media organizations, for allegedly “rigging” primaries against him. Young is a perennial candidate, campaigning for several offices and as a member of several parties, never getting particularly close to winning the nomination for any political office.

And yet, with 25,712 votes to challenger Chris Preece’s 24,003, the eighth time running for something in Kentucky was the charm.

Young won the Democratic nomination for Central Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District. He moves on to challenge U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, who beat Young in the 2020 GOP primary, later won the general by 17 percentage points, and is running again for a sixth term.

The state’s top Democrats seem none too happy about Young’s presence on the ticket.

Gov. Andy Beshear said at a press conference on Wednesday that he will not be supporting Young. The Kentucky Democratic Party released a statement saying they could not support a candidate who has frequently sued “the party, its officers and virtually every elected official over the past decade.”

Beshear said that Young “needs help,” a comment to which the candidate took offense.

“I think it’s insulting, and I don’t have any mental illness. His implication is pretty nasty,” Young said.

Ethan Wallace, former communications coordinator for the Preece campaign who’s involved with the University of Kentucky College Democrats, called Young “a chaos agent in the Democratic party.” He said that Preece and his supporters “have no desire to work with the Young campaign” or support them, largely because of his foreign policy views.

Young has largely sided with Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, which he falsely claims is not an invasion. He appeared on RT, a Russian state-controlled television network, criticizing U.S. aid to Ukraine the day of the primary.

Not prominent in Young’s campaign materials are Young’s policy priorities beyond foreign policy, which mostly align with the average progressive Democrat. He wants to tackle wealth inequality by more aggressively taxing the rich, to get money out of politics, to pass for Medicare for All, to legalize weed, to end the death penalty; and he’s pro-choice.

Young has previously called himself “a Bernie Sanders Democrat.”

Young: Ukraine, United States are “the bad guys”

So, what’s unique? Young’s focus on foreign policy, in particular his claims about the prevalence of Nazis within the Ukrainian resistance – several hundred scholars of Nazism, genocide and World War II have called claims similar to Young’s “factually wrong” and “morally repugnant.”

Young’s stance on the situation in Ukraine hinges on the belief that the vast majority of Western media coverage from the region is untrustworthy propaganda. He estimated that 95% of reports about Russian war crimes and atrocities are false. Russian news media, however, he says is mostly reliable.

Young argues that Ukraine and the United States are “the bad guys” in the Eastern European country’s ongoing struggle against Russian invasion and that the Ukrainian government – whose president is Jewish – is “controlled by Washington and Nazi Ukrainians.”

Maria Popova, a political scientist at McGill University in Canada who studies Russian and Ukrainian politics, said that Young’s claims are “uninformed or misguided.”

“Ukraine is fending off an unprovoked, imperialist invasion by Russia. The US, but also Europe and Canada, are providing military aid to help Ukraine push the invader off its territory,” Popova said. “Russia violated international law by launching a war of aggression and its army is now committing war crimes, and possibly genocide, in Ukraine.”

She also called the allegations about rampant neo-Nazism in Ukraine “grossly exaggerated.”

“The claim that neo-Nazi or far-right groups hold any significant power in Ukraine is absurd,” UCLA history professor Jared McBride told factcheck.org, a project housed at the University of Pennsylvania. “The most well-known far-right wing party, Svoboda, won 2.15 percent of the vote in the 2019 election and holds one seat in the Rada – meaning they are politically irrelevant.”

Wallace said that reluctance to support Young from former members of Preece’s campaign is largely based on Young’s views on Ukraine, and that those views could damage other Democrats running on the ticket in November.

Most Americans support sanctions on Russia and sending Ukraine weapons according to a CBS News poll, policies that Young sharply criticizes.

Young is generally quite skeptical of U.S. foreign policy priorities that are backed by both Democrats and Republicans

In a campaign video, he called the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “the worst terrorist organizationin the world today,” and said that Barr is a “warmonger.”

Young has also called Amy McGrath, who beat him in the 2018 6th District Democratic primary, a “war criminal.”

Barr campaign spokesperson Alex Bellizzi called Young’s views “dangerously bizarre.”

“It speaks volumes that the Governor—who is the leader of the Kentucky Democrat Party—won’t even support Mr. Young, whose extreme, radical and dangerously bizarre views should disqualify him from serving in Congress, let alone the question of how it was even possible for him to earn the nomination of a major political party.”

Have we seen a candidate like this before?

Kentucky, Central Kentucky in particular, has seen Geoff Young’s name on the ballot many times before. It’s unclear how many with so little support at the highest rungs of their party have made it past the primary ballot, though.

Longtime political observer and columnist Al Cross, Director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, said it’s “not unheard of, but highly unusual,” for a governor to not support the nominee from their own party in a U.S. House race.

He added that Young’s primary win speaks to how short of a bench Kentucky Democrats have of folks who believe they could beat Barr in the district, and same with the party.

In discussing Young, Beshear also made reference to a time when Young said something “nasty” to him when his son was present. Young said he recalls the moment while he was protesting his exclusion from a meeting of other Democratic gubernatorial candidates outside the Kentucky Democratic Party Headquarters.

“I said ‘one of the criminals has arrived,’ referring to Andy Beshear and his habit of rigging Democratic primaries,” Young said. “... I can understand why he feels so hostile, but I wish he hadn’t let his emotions rule over what’s best for Kentucky.”

Young said that the only reason he ran as a Republican in 2020, when he got just 4 percent of the vote in the 6th District GOP race, is because of perceived election rigging by the Democrats.

As for his victory over Preece, Young said that his name recognition from seven previous runs – a 2012 statehouse run as a Green Party candidate, 2014’s 6th District Democratic primary, a run for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2015, 2016 and 2018’s 6th District Democratic primaries, a 2019 Democratic bid for governor, and 2020’s 6th District Republican contest – played a role in his win. He also said his branding as “the peace candidate” was successful.

“I think I had name recognition from all of these past runs. That, and most Kentuckians and most Americans are sick and tired of endless wars. I was and am a peace candidate,” Young said. “My rival was young, hadn’t run for office before, so he was kind of unknown.”

Young beat Preece, a science teacher from Berea who focused his campaign on more traditional Democratic issues like health care and education, in every county but Fayette.

According to the State Board of Elections, Young beat Preece in every county except his home base in Fayette County. Preece won Fayette County by more than 1,000 votes, but Young’s slim margins in all 15 other counties carried the win.

Wallace called Young’s political message “dangerous.”

“His messaging on Ukraine is dangerous… I think the fact that he was able to somehow win this election, by luck or whatever it was, shows that there’s a lot of work to be done by the Democratic party in this state,” Wallace said.

Preece said that the election “did not go as planned” for his campaign, but said that he would remain active.

“The problems people are facing have not vanished and we will be here doing good work to help those who need it most, and to organize for our future,” Preece tweeted.