From the city to the sprawl

From the block to the burbs

Since 2019, there have been 16 major statewide elections in Kentucky: the 2020 presidential election, the 2020 and 2022 U.S. Senate races, the 2019 and 2023 elections for Kentucky’s six main statewide offices and last year’s ballot measure that would have declared there is no right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. 

The Democratic side has won just three of those 16: Gov. Andy Beshear’s election in 2019, his reelection this week and the rejection of the abortion measure. 

The political geography of those three wins is very similar: 

1. Huge margins of victory by Democrats in Louisville-area Jefferson County and Lexington-area Fayette County (more than 30 percentage points) 

2. More narrow victories in the counties around Lexington (Franklin, Madison, Scott, Woodford.) 

3. More narrow victories in the suburban counties outside of Cincinnati (Campbell, Kenton). 

4. Getting 30-40 percent of the vote in most of the other counties in the state 

Tens of thousands of Kentucky voters who don’t live in the Cincinnati, Louisville or Lexington areas vote Democratic. There are thousands of Democrats even in the state’s most conservative areas. But the Democrats’ margin of victory is increasingly concentrated in urban and suburban areas. 

In 2011, then-Gov. Steve Beshear won 92 of Kentucky’s counties, while losing 28. (He won 56% of the overall statewide vote.) This year was a complete reversal. His son Andy won just 28 counties, while losing 92. But Andy Beshear won about 53% of the statewide vote with those 28 counties. 

In this era, all Democratic candidates in Kentucky do better in urban and suburban areas compared to rural ones. But Beshear won about 70% of the vote in the high-population Louisville and Lexington areas, while other Kentucky Democratic candidates received only about 60 percent. He won suburban/exurban counties around Lexington and Cincinnati that other Democrats didn’t. 

In his 2020 U.S. Senate campaign, Democrat Charles Booker used the slogan “from the hood to the holler,” implying he could create a coalition of middle and lower-income voters that stretched from urban, heavily-black parts of Louisville to rural, heavily-white parts of the state hours away. 

But at least right now, what’s winning for Democrats in Kentucky is similar to Democrats in other states: big margins in urban and suburban areas around cities. It’s from the block to the burbs, the city to the sprawl. 

Kentucky is shifting just like the rest of the country—urban and suburban areas are becoming more Democratic, rural areas more Republican. So while the rest of Kentucky has moved to the right, eastern Jefferson County, Lexington and the Cincinnati suburbs have moved left. Barack Obama won Lexington-area Fayette County by 1 percentage point in 2012, while Joe Biden carried it by 21 percentage points in 2020. 

It was still in many ways a bad night for Kentucky. 

I’m relieved Beshear won. The governor of Kentucky has a lot of power, particularly in implementing laws when the legislature is out of session. Daniel Cameron had pledged to follow the model of ultra-conservative GOP governors such as Ron DeSantis of Florida. That would have been terrible. 

That said, Democrats lost the other five statewide offices—and the races were not particularly close. The strongest Democratic performance besides Beshear was Treasurer candidate Michael Bowman, who received 43% of the vote and lost by 14 percentage points. And remember the other 13 losses by Democrats that I mentioned above. It’s bad. 

And this is not just an electoral problem. The newly-elected Republican attorney general of Kentucky has essentially promised to align with the police at all times. 

If Democrats can only win when they are running a candidate whose last name is Beshear or Republicans are trying to ban abortion, they (and therefore the state) are in trouble. 

Beshear can’t run in 2027 because of term limits. At least right now, it’s hard to imagine a Democratic candidate four years from now being elected governor—or to any other statewide office. 

Beshear had no coattails—in some ways intentionally. 

While Beshear never said this explicitly, his campaign message was essentially, “You can be a stalwart Republican and still vote for me, because I’m less a Democrat than the independent entity that is Andy Beshear.” He didn’t really run as a joint slate with the other Democratic candidates. 

That was a smart approach for Beshear’s own campaign. But it invited more moderate Republican voters to back Beshear and then oppose every other Democrat on the ticket. And that appears to be what they did. As I noted before, even in Democratic-leaning Louisville Beshear did much better than the other Democratic candidates. 

How Beshear won 

We don’t have exit polls for this race. But the polling firm Data for Progress released a survey just before the election that showed Beshear winning 50-48, similar to his final margin (52.5-47.5) According to that poll, only 2% of Democratic-leaning voters planned to vote for Republican Daniel Cameron, while about 20% of Republican voters were backing Beshear. 

We only get formal election results by geography. But I suspect the key to Beshear’s victory was winning more moderate Republicans across the state, in rural, urban and suburban areas. He did better than the typical Democrat everywhere. 

He probably didn’t win because of abortion—but his abortion approach is notable and important. 

Beshear was the favorite in this race before any of his pro-abortion rights commercials ever aired. Incumbent governors across the country tend to be popular, and Beshear was among the most popular governors. That said, it was great to see a Democratic candidate in Kentucky go on the offensive on abortion—and correctly cast the conservative Republican position on the issue as extreme and radical.

And while Beshear didn’t lean into his pro-transgender rights views, he also vetoed the terrible anti-trans bill that the legislature passed earlier this year, fully aware Republicans would attack him for that stance on the campaign trail. In 2019, his governorship and this campaign, Beshear has largely rejected the view that Democrats need to move right on “cultural issues,” which usually means abandoning the interests of people who aren’t straight white men. He took the morally-right approach–and won with it. I applaud him. 

In contrast, President Biden tries to appease conservative white voters with shows of cultural conservatism, such as his “fund the police, fund them” remarks in 2022 and recent comments implying that progressive Democrats look down upon everyday people but Biden himself does not. Being lectured about being out of touch with regular people by a man who has been either a senator, vice-president or president since before I was born is frustrating—and maybe politicians with 40% approval ratings should be more humble about bragging about their connection to average voters. 

Beshear wins moderate and conservative voters while not punching at the activists, progressives and minorities who are a core part of his coalition. That is a lesson I hope other politicians heed. 

Land doesn’t vote, people do. 

Those are the maps of this week’s gubernatorial race in Kentucky and the state Supreme Court contest in Pennsylvania, which Democrats also won. Look at how much red is on those maps. Both states, just looking at those maps, appear to be about 75 percent Republican. 

I worry maps like these obscure how politics actually works. They encourage us to focus on how many counties and really how much land area supports each party. But more people in West Louisville and on the campus at the University of Kentucky voted for Beshear than in some entire counties in the state. Votes in rural areas don’t count extra. Winning densely-populated areas is hugely valuable for a candidate. 

It’s not just rural vs. suburban/urban. 

The maps correctly show that rural areas overall back Republicans, while more urban and suburban ones are more Democratic. But areas are not people. Republican candidates tend to win at least 30 percent of the vote in urban areas, same for Democratic candidates in rural ones. And while there is increased focus on education levels (people with four-year degrees are more likely to vote for Democrats,) that’s not quite it either. Evangelical Christians with degrees are overwhelmingly Republican-leaning, Black voters without degrees are overwhelmingly Democratic. 

It’s useful to think about the parties as a Republican Party that has 1. plenty of non-evangelicals but is more evangelical than the country overall 2. plenty of urban/suburban voters but is more rural than the country overall 3. a small block of non-white voters but is much whiter than the country overall and a Democratic Party that 1. plenty of Christians but is less Christian than the county overall 2. some rural voters but less rural than the country overall 3. a similar racial/ethnic composition to the country overall (about 60% white/40% people of color) 

Beshear 2024? 

From a national perspective, Democrats had a great election week, with victories by Beshear, Virginia statehouse Democrats and a pro-abortion rights ballot measure in Ohio. At the same time, polls conducted by CNN and the New York Times showed Biden with terrible numbers, trailing Donald Trump nationally and in key swing states and doing worse-than-expected with younger voters and voters of color. 

There are two ways to think about these numbers. One is that when voters are ultimately pressed to make a choice between Republicans and Democrats, they are often choosing Democrats. That’s what happened in many key races in 2022 and 2023. In this view, Biden is in a decent position for next year’s election. Younger voters, voters of color and others who backed Biden in 2020 will ultimately vote for him next year because they strongly oppose today’s GOP, even if they are lukewarm about the president. 

But Biden was not on the ballot this year or last year. The other view is that Democratic candidates are fairly strong and popular—except for Biden. So there may be some voters who would back virtually any Democrat for president except for the president, who they consider too old and/or ineffective. The Data for Progress poll, for example, showed Beshear with a 53 percent favorability rating among voters in Kentucky, compared to 33 percent for Biden. 

If you accept this view, the Democratic Party should be pushing for Biden not to run for a second term and trying to draft someone else, particularly a candidate who has recently won in a purple or red state, such as Beshear, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia. (Kamala Harris was also a stronger candidate than Biden in the recent Times polls.) 

I think both views have merit and I am not sure which one is most correct. 

Beshear 2028? 

I have no idea who will seem like a strong presidential candidate five years from now—and neither does anyone else. 

Andy’s not the star. You are. 

Since Trump won in 2016, Democratic-leaning voters have become more active than ever before. They give tons of money, even to candidates far away and in races they probably hadn’t thought much about before (Wisconsin state supreme court.) They canvass. They stay incredibly attuned to politics. And they vote. 2020 was the highest turnout for a presidential election in recent memory, 2018 and 2022 among the highest turnout midterms. Democrats did very well in 2018 and 2020 and had the best midterm for a party who controlled the White House in a while. 

Beshear is a uniquely strong candidate who won over significant numbers of Republican voters. But both in 2019 and 2013, a huge part of his wins was the intense activism and voting of Democratic-leaning Kentuckians. And it’s not as if he is going to deliver much for them, since the state legislature is dominated by Republicans. 

Beshear, Pelosi, Biden, Whitmer and other party leaders and candidates get a lot of credit for Democratic successes, since they are on the ballot and on tv representing the party. But the common factor from 2018 to 2020 to 2023, from Kentucky to Georgia to Michigan, is not the particular candidates or leaders but a very energized and very anti-Trumpism Democratic base.