A Very Important, Telling Week In Louisville

What happened in Louisville over the last several days was fairly dramatic and surprising: 

1. Police Chief Steve Conrad announcing his plans to resign amid the controversy over the killing of Breonna Taylor at her home by Louisville police officers back in March 2. The FBI starting an investigation of Taylor’s death 3. Commonwealth Attorney Tom Wine moving to drop charges against Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, who fired at the officers that night. (Walker and his legal team have stated Walker and Taylor did not initially realize the people who entered Taylor’s home were police officers.) 

There are a lot of contested facts about what exactly happened that night. But the fallout from Taylor’s death, in my view, is another illustration of what the national news website Vox has described as “The Great Awokening.” Americans, particularly Democrats and more precisely white Democrats, have become increasingly conscious and concerned about issues of race, racism and racial injustice since the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and the resulting protests and activism both there and around the country which are generally referred to as Black Lives Matter. Polls show that while Americans of all races and political beliefs are now more conscious of racial discrimination, white Democrats are shifting their views the most. Republicans (who are overwhelmingly white) are still more skeptical of the prevalence of racial discrimination, and black Americans perceived a fairly high amount of racial discrimination in America pre-2014. (We don’t have much data to look for shifts among Latino and Asian Americans.) 

I don’t have polling about racial attitudes in Louisville, but I would assume this shift has happened here as well. Why does that matter this week regarding Taylor? Well, it’s hard to imagine Conrad, Wine and the FBI’s decisions happening if only black activists in Louisville were protesting Taylor’s death. I don’t mean to minimize the importance or power of local Black Lives Matter figures, but rather to suggest the city’s largely-white political leadership might not feel that much pressure to placate them alone. 

But over the last month, Taylor’s killing became national news--something that might not have happened pre-2014. The (mostly white) people who run national news organizations are arguably part of the Awokening, both more willing to cover killings of black people by the police and to regard police justifications for their actions with more skepticism than before. Secondly (but probably related to the national coverage), white leaders in Louisville and Kentucky, including Gov. Andy Beshear, Democratic Senate candidate Amy McGrath and congressman John Yarmuth, started raising concerns about Taylor’s death. Before Conrad stepped down, Courier-Journal columnist Joe Gerth, who is white, bluntly wrote, “When is Louisville's mayor going to realize it's time for his police chief to go?” 

With this broad of a coalition questioning the circumstances of Taylor’s death, the resignation of Conrad, who was already embattled, was basically inevitable. The big questions now are: 1. What will these investigations surrounding the shooting find? 2. Will Taylor’s death result in major changes to policing or prosecuting practices? 3. Will there be broader shifts around racial attitudes and policies in Louisville as a result of this incident? 

Don’t Pay Too Much Attention To This Poll! The national firm Public Policy Polling released a survey this week showing Sen. Mitch McConnell at 47 percent, compared to “his Democratic opponent” at 44 percent. McGrath and Charles Booker, another Democratic Senate candidate, touted this survey as good news for them. But here’s the thing--McConnell will not be running against a “Democrat opponent.” He will be running against another living and breathing person, who has a biography and a record that the veteran senator can criticize. 

So this survey doesn’t tell us much--it certainly does not tell us that Booker or McGrath specifically is within three points of McConnell. 

There was a more useful finding in that survey---just 41 percent of Kentuckians approve of McConnell, compared to 48 percent who disapprove of him. That’s consistent with other polling. McConnell is not beloved. And there is a real blue voting base in the state--41 percent of voters backed McConnell opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes in 2014, Democrat Jim Gray won 43 percent in 2016 against Rand Paul. The Democratic candidate against McConnell is very likely to get 40-44 percent of the vote.

But how does he or she get to 49 or 50 percent, as Andy Beshear did last year? The Democratic Senate candidate needs to win over some Republicans and Trump voters, as I explained recently in a piece for WFPL. That won’t be easy--it’s not clear Kentucky Republicans are as wary of McConnell as they were of then-Gov. Matt Bevin. 

Speaking of Booker and McGrath--Ahead of the June 23 Senate primary, a big bloc of Kentucky state legislators endorsed Booker, even though everyone expects McGrath to win. Politicians generally don’t endorse candidates who are likely to lose. So what’s the deal here? 

Part of the explanation is likely that the legislators know Booker better, since he has served with them in Frankfort. Booker is running on a more liberal platform than McGrath, so that might appeal to very progressive legislators. 

But I think another element is at play here--some Kentucky Democratic leaders feel that national Democrats anointed McGrath as U.S. Senate candidate without getting much input from key Democrats in the state. Joni Jenkins, leader of the Kentucky House Democrats, criticized the national Democratic figures who have backed McGrath, telling the Courier-Journal, “I don't think they speak for Kentuckians.” A lot of Kentucky Democrats I have talked to share Jenkins’ perspective---McGrath is the candidate of Washington/national Democrats/the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee/Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. 

McGrath was anointed by national party leaders, who coalesced around a candidate in most of the key U.S. Senate races around the country this year, including Kentucky. The American Prospect described the national party’s approach in a recent piece that included Kentucky sports talk radio host Matt Jones complaining to the reporter that national party leaders effectively blocked his candidacy in favor of McGrath. That backing from national party leaders has arguably been a huge boost to McGrath in the primary. She has a huge fundraising advantage over her Democratic primary rivals and that’s in part because Democrats in other states who desperately want to see McConnell defeated have likely assumed that McGrath is the candidate taking on the senator and that they should give to her. So Mike Broihier and Booker, McGrath’s most visible Democratic opponents, have had to run in a primary in which McGrath is essentially the assumed winner. 

But I don’t think McGrath’s candidacy (and likely victory in the primary) is totally about people outside of Kentucky. McGrath made herself a national figure and fundraising machine with a strong congressional run in 2017-2108. And I wonder if local and national Democrats would have coalesced around Jones if he had come out in say Feb 2019 and been very emphatic about taking on McConnell, as opposed to seeming like someone who wanted to keep teasing a candidacy but would never actually jump in? 

McGrath may not win the primary. It’s worth emphasizing that we have no public polling of the primary race, primaries often have low turnout and this primary is taking place amid a public health emergency, so it might have even lower turnout. I expect McGrath to win, but stranger things have happened. 

Speaking of Beshear, he seems to have announced a lot of benchmarks before he would open up parts of the state, then abandoned them, as Eleanor Klibanoff, Jacob Ryan and Jared Bennett explained in a recent Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting article. What happened? After all, a poll conducted in April found that 81 percent of Kentuckians approved of Beshear’s handling of COVID-19. Why would he feel pressure to change course? 

Here’s what I think happened: 

1. The very high rates of unemployment in the state, in part because of the stay-at-home measures, combined with no sign that the federal government would continue the recent increase in unemployment benefits amid the COVID-19 outbreak, were creating a situation where a lot of Kentuckians would have been in major financial stress (if they are not already) if businesses were not opened up. 

2. Kentucky’s number of deaths due to COVID never surged in the way that they did in some other states, so opponents of the stay-at-home policies weren’t having to argue for opening up businesses as a huge number of people died from the virus. 

3. Surrounding states were lifting some of their restrictions (and also abandoning some guidelines they had previously set.) 

4. President Trump was getting more vocal about ending the restrictions, creating a climate of skepticism around them. 

5. Beshear, despite the support from the public, was facing a lot of pressure from powerful forces in the state, particularly business owners and Republican elected officials, to end the restrictions. 

6. The lawsuits being filed to end the restrictions were not only a legal challenge for Beshear, but also a political one, since Attorney General Daniel Cameron was signaling this support for them. 

Speaking of Trump--He’s in a fairly weak position against Joe Biden, at least right now. 

Speaking of Biden---Hillary Clinton would have won Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with slightly higher black support, according to a comprehensive study of the 2016 election. This is why Biden should probably not dismiss the views of black people who want to hear an affirmative case for him, as opposed to just his case against Trump. 

Thanks for reading. This is the first edition of what will be an occasional newsletter focusing on government and elections but really power in Louisville and Kentucky, helping explore who has it, who is gaining it, who is losing it and why. (For example, Jefferson County Public Schools and Humana are very powerful forces in Louisville, even though they are not “political” institutions.) If you have been subscribed to this but don’t think you want to read it in the future, feel free to unsubscribe. If you have tips or suggestions for future stories, please email me at perrylbacon@gmail.com. The best stories often come from questions that readers have. Feel free to share this with friends or post online. I am also doing this without an editor, so please email me if you see typos and/or errors so that I can correct them.