Fancy Farm: Where Kentucky Politics Comes to Fight, Laugh and Come Home
By T. J. Litafik
There are certain places every Kentucky political junkie ought to visit at least once.
The Capitol on a cold January morning. Election night at a county courthouse. The back room of a country restaurant where half the county’s business gets settled before the biscuits get cold.
And, above all else, Fancy Farm.
My first pilgrimage came in 1995.
I was 15 years old, from Pike County, already afflicted with what has turned out to be a lifelong and apparently incurable fascination with Kentucky politics. That summer, Republican Larry Forgy and Democrat Paul Patton were locked in one of the great governor’s races of my lifetime.
I had to see Fancy Farm.
My mom, Dema Ann, went with me.
Now, I don’t remember exactly how I sold her on the proposition that we ought to drive from Pike County practically to Missouri so we could stand outside in the August heat while several thousand people screamed at politicians.
But she agreed.
And I thought I had arrived at the center of the universe.
Fancy Farm was glorious.
It was hot. It was loud. It was crowded. Signs were waving everywhere. Republicans were yelling at Democrats. Democrats were yelling louder at Republicans. The candidates were trying to deliver speeches while half the audience was doing its dead-level best to make certain nobody heard a word they said.
In other words, it was Kentucky democracy functioning exactly as intended.
There was no Twitter. No Facebook. No consultants sitting backstage studying real-time social-media analytics.
You knew whether a line worked because the crowd either roared with laughter or booed you halfway back to Paducah.
That’ll sharpen a politician’s instincts.
Fancy Farm has always been our Commonwealth’s great political equalizer.
I’ve been back many times, but I never fail to think of the Kentucky political history that has passed through those grounds.
Alben Barkley. Doc Beauchamp. Wendell Ford. Generations of governors, senators, congressmen, constitutional officers and candidates have stood beneath that pavilion.
Some arrived as conquering heroes.
Some left looking like they’d been mugged by a barbecue sandwich.
And some discovered that there is a considerable difference between delivering a speech in an air-conditioned ballroom and trying to land a punch line while several thousand members of the opposing party are trying to shout you down.
That’s Fancy Farm.
And my mom hasn’t been back since 1995. Thirty-one years.
I’ve managed to turn that teenage obsession into a career in politics, lobbying and campaigns. My mother apparently concluded that one Fancy Farm per generation was plenty.
Until now.
This year, Dema Ann is making her triumphant return.
And she’s fired up.
She wants to see Andy Barr elected to the United States Senate in November, and she’s already looking toward 2027 and hoping to see James Comer elected Governor of Kentucky.
So the same mother and son who traveled across Kentucky to watch Forgy and Patton square off in 1995 will make that trip again in 2026.
Only Kentucky politics looks very different today.
Back then, Democrats dominated much of rural Kentucky. Eastern and Western Kentucky courthouse politics was practically synonymous with the Democratic Party. Republicans could hold their state legislative caucus meetings in a good-sized phone booth.
Today, Kentucky is one of the most Republican states in America.
Parties changed. Coalitions changed. Technology changed. Campaigns changed.
Fancy Farm didn’t.
The barbecue smoke still rises.
The signs still wave.
The hecklers still heckle.
And ambitious Kentucky politicians still make that trip to Graves County knowing full well that whatever title appears before their name, at Fancy Farm they have to stand there and take it.
There is something wonderfully Kentucky about that.
We have never treated politics as an antiseptic exercise in public policy.
Kentucky politics is personal.
We remember our politicians. We tell stories about them. We imitate them. We argue about them over breakfast. We remember something a governor said in 1974 as though he said it last Thursday.
Our political history isn’t confined to textbooks.
It’s folklore.
And Fancy Farm is where that folklore comes alive every August.
It’s where Happy Chandler told a heckler he’d been farther up a tree than the shouting man had been out of Graves County.
It’s where Louie Nunn told then-Lt. Gov. Steve Henry (married to former Miss America Heather French) that he’d heard of politicians riding into office on a coat tail, but Henry was the first one he knew of that was trying to get in on a petticoat tail.
It’s where Jack Conway tried to act tough and cussed, but came across badly instead. Conway lost bids for governor and U.S. senator and left politics.
When I walk onto those grounds this year with Mom, I’ll be 46 years old instead of 15. I’ve worked campaigns, watched election nights come and go, made friends throughout Kentucky politics and learned that victories never last quite as long as you hope and defeats never hurt quite as long as you fear.
But when that crowd starts roaring, I suspect I’ll be that teenage boy again.
I’ll look over at my mom.
And somewhere in my mind, Larry Forgy and Paul Patton will still be up there battling for governor.
Thirty-one years will disappear in about thirty-one seconds.
That’s the magic of Fancy Farm.
It’s loud.
It’s hot.
It’s partisan.
It’s funny.
It’s sometimes outrageous and frequently ridiculous.
It has launched political careers, humbled powerful people, produced some legendary one-liners and probably caused more than one candidate to reconsider his choice of profession on the long ride home.
But most of all, it’s ours.
Only Kentucky could turn a Catholic church picnic into one of America’s great political traditions.
And thank God we did.
I’ll see you at Fancy Farm.
And this time, I’m bringing my mom back with me.
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