WASHINGTON — Rarely does a primary race in today’s Republican Party become much more than a competition to show loyalty to President Trump. Even rarer still is one dominated by issues of race.
But as Representative Thomas Massie fights to hold off a Republican opponent and defend his seat in a deeply conservative and overwhelmingly white district in northeastern Kentucky, race has become a central line of attack in the increasingly bitter contest, with both candidates accusing each other of bigoted views.
Mr. Massie was the first to broach the subject in April, when he shared a series of Twitter posts and articles that contained racist and anti-immigrant tropes written by his challenger, Todd McMurtry. After The New York Times reported on the material, Republican leaders who had backed Mr. McMurtry renounced him.
Now Mr. McMurtry, who has never disavowed the posts but has since deleted them, is portraying Mr. Massie as the racist in the contest. Less than two weeks before the election, in what has become the most expensive Republican House primary in Kentucky’s history, Mr. McMurtry has seized on a charged moment as protesters across the nation call for systematic change to address discrimination against black Americans. The unrest has gripped the congressional district, which is 92 percent white and includes the suburbs of Louisville, where Breonna Taylor, a black woman, was shot and killed by the police in her home during a drug raid.
“I have personally seen photographs of Congressman Massie flying the Confederate flag over his Kentucky home,” Mr. McMurtry told a local news outlet in one interview of several he has done recently on the topic. “So him attacking me as a racist is pretty ironic.”
The charge, confirmed in photographs Mr. Massie posted to his blog in the summer of 2006, comes as lawmakers and organizations across the country — including NASCAR, the Army and Congress — are discussing banning or replacing symbols of the Confederacy, including flags, statues and military bases honoring Confederate figures.
Mr. Massie began a blog nearly two decades ago to document the building of his family home on his farm in Garrison, and in July and August 2006, he posted photos showing the progress on the structure. In those pictures, two flags are visible hanging inside the house: one American and one Confederate. A second Confederate flag can be seen hanging from a piece of construction equipment parked outside.
“The Confederate flag, to me, is kind of the epitome or distinction that shows the idea of white supremacy, and it should be rejected and condemned,” Mr. McMurtry said Monday night on Kentucky public television, adding that “a person like me who has a multicultural family” and “a history of working with cities and police officers” would be better equipped than Mr. Massie to fight for racial justice. (Mr. McMurtry’s wife is Puerto Rican.)
Mr. Massie, who has not had a primary challenge since he was elected in 2012, conceded in an interview that he had allowed the flags to be displayed on his property. He said one of the construction workers had hung them in what he assumed to be “a little bit of a jab” at Mr. Massie for returning to Kentucky after having lived for several years in New England.
His “first instinct wasn’t to take it down — let them have their fun,” Mr. Massie said. But he added that he removed the flags after a dressing-down from his grandmother when she visited the house.
“She reminded me that her grandfather fought Union, and out of respect for her and my great-great-grandfather, I took it down,” he said. “In fact, she said, ‘That better be down the next time I come here.’”
As for Mr. McMurtry, Mr. Massie said: “I don’t know if I’ve ever called him a racist, but he’s promoting articles that say there’s racial disparity in I.Q. That’s a long stretch from a flag being displayed at a construction site.”
Even in Representative Steve King’s primary race in Iowa, in another predominantly white, ultraconservative district, his Republican challengers shied away from addressing his long history of racist comments. Instead, they glossed over the substance of his remarks and noted that they had led party leaders to strip him of his committee assignments, making him a less effective representative. Mr. King lost.
But in Kentucky, both Republicans have gravitated toward the issue of race and racism. The primary pits Mr. Massie, a fourth-term congressman known for his libertarian views and contrarian streak, against Mr. McMurtry, a lawyer who gained prominence when he represented a Covington Catholic high school student who sued CNN over its portrayal of an encounter at the Lincoln Memorial between young white men and a Native American man.
Mr. Massie has spent just under $1 million in the race to keep his job, while Mr. McMurtry has poured about $300,000 into the effort to unseat him, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, making it the most costly House Republican primary in the state’s history.
Mr. Massie, long a thorn in the side of Republican congressional leaders, angered both them and President Trump in March when he forced members of the House to return to Washington during the pandemic to approve a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, rather than allowing it to pass without a recorded vote. Mr. Trump angrily tweeted that Mr. Massie should be thrown out of the party, and top House leaders announced they would donate to Mr. McMurtry in a bid to oust their colleague — a position they quickly reversed once they learned of Mr. McMurtry’s past comments on social media.
Mr. McMurtry, for his part, has sought to tie himself closely to the president. But Mr. Massie has gone to great lengths to deflate those efforts. In January, he bought airtime on Fox News in South Florida while Mr. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago resort for an advertisement titled “Todd McMurtry, the Trump Hater,” which showed a series of Facebook comments Mr. McMurtry had posted criticizing the president.
“Sad but true. Trump is the epitome of a weak male,” read one such post, featured prominently in the ad.
More recently, the nasty exchanges have centered on racism. Mr. McMurtry’s campaign to expose evidence that Mr. Massie once flew a Confederate flag appears to be an effort to deflect from the racist posts unearthed by Mr. Massie, which local reporters have continued to question Mr. McMurtry about.
In one tweet from December 2019, Mr. McMurtry wrote of the “need to push back against demonization of white people,” adding that “we should not be willing scapegoats for someone else’s agenda.” In another, he complained that “some cartel-looking dude is playing a video of some wild Mexican birthday party at full volume” in an airport, and cited it as a reason that “we should question unlimited immigration. We just cannot integrate so many people.”
In a separate tweet, he approvingly shared a 2016 blog post subtitled “A Very Brief Primer on Being Alt Right,” which referred to “IQ disparities between different racial groups” and condemned as “cowards” people who describe themselves as conservatives and embrace a progressive agenda, saying they were afraid of being branded “racist, sexist, homophobic.”
Mr. McMurtry has stood by the posts, and faulted Mr. Massie and the news media for bringing them up.
“That’s the way the left plays things oftentimes; everybody’s called a racist today,” Mr. McMurtry said Monday night. “I reject that characterization. I mean, how often has the president been called a racist? Very many times.”
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