The End of the McConnell Era: Barr and Booker Fight for Kentucky's Senate Seat

Kentucky closes a political era on Tuesday. Sen. Mitch McConnell — first elected in 1984, the longest-serving Senate party leader in American history and Kentucky's longest-serving senator — is retiring, and his seat is contested for the first time as an open race in a generation.

The Republican nominee is Andy Barr, who has represented Lexington's 6th Congressional District in the U.S. House since 2013 and carries the establishment's organizational strength in central Kentucky. The Democratic nominee is Charles Booker, a former state representative from Louisville who has run for the Senate before and built a statewide profile on economic and racial justice themes.

The race's shape follows Kentucky's modern pattern: Democrats must run up enormous margins in Louisville and Lexington while holding down losses across the state's rural counties, which vote heavily Republican; Republicans must simply hold the map that has made Kentucky a Senate fortress for decades. Forecasters rated the seat likely Republican for most of the cycle, but both parties have contested it seriously.

McConnell's legacy hangs over the choice in ways that cross party lines: the judicial confirmations he engineered, the federal money and influence a Senate leader steers home, and the question of what Kentucky loses when its senior senator is no longer the most powerful Kentuckian in Washington since Henry Clay.

The winner takes the seat in January for a six-year term, joining Kentucky's junior senator, Rand Paul, in a delegation that will be entirely post-McConnell for the first time since the Reagan administration.

Polls close at 6 p.m. Kentucky time — among the earliest in America — so the Senate era's end will be one of the first stories the nation reads on election night.