Kentucky's swing voters
Kentucky’s swing voters
A sizable bloc of Kentuckians voted for
1. Donald Trump in 2020;
2. Mitch McConnell in 2020;
3. Rand Paul in 2022;
but also
4. Andy Beshear in 2019; and
5. The pro-abortion rights side in last year’s ballot initiative.
The overwhelming number of voters took either the Democratic/pro-abortion rights or the Republican/anti-abortion rights side in all five instances. But it appears that 10-15% of Kentucky voters backed Trump, McConnell and Paul but also Beshear and voted against the anti-abortion amendment. So these are stalwart Republicans (they voted for Rand Paul and Donald Trump after all) but perhaps wary of the GOP going too far (banning abortion, Matt Bevin as governor.)
It’s hard for Democrats to win elections in Kentucky. The state’s voters are about 60% Republican, 40% Democratic. So a Democratic statewide candidate has to get actual Republican voters to back them, not just moderates, independents or swing voters. (Joe Biden won the presidential election in 2020 with very little support from Republicans because the national electorate is much more liberal than Kentucky’s.) Beshear will probably need some Trump voters to back him again in order to win reelection.
The flip side is that it’s pretty easy for a Republican to win. For the Republicans running to replace Beshear, they just need to get the McConnell/Trump/Paul voters to stick with the Republican team this time in the governor’s race.
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In praise of Gov. Beshear
If you are progressive, liberal, black and/or LBGT in particular, you don’t have much political choice—the Democratic Party represents your interests much more than the Republicans. Democratic politicians know that too of course. So they often cast aside the interests and values of stalwart Democrats in favor of swing voters. The basic idea is, “You have to vote for us no matter what, so we can ignore you.”
Perhaps Beshear would be more popular with conservative voters if he had signed the terrible anti-trans bill that the legislature was pushing this session. I am quite sure all the people who really wanted him to veto the provision are going to vote for him in November regardless. And the bill was going to be adopted no matter what the governor did, since the legislature has more than enough votes to override Beshear’s vetoes.
To his credit, Beshear vetoed the bill anyway. I don’t want to give Beshear too much credit for doing the humane, moral thing. This was not a hard decision, on the merits.
I do think he deserves credit for not reflexively putting political strategy above morals and values. Too often, Democrats politicians, including President Biden, do the opposite. These Democratic politicians often end up losing political fights AND making terrible policy choices that hurt their allies along the way. Then-President Obama increased the deportation of undocumented immigrants on the theory that harsher enforcement of immigration laws would make Republican voters and lawmakers more open to creating a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants who remained.
He ended up with lots of deportations and no path to citizenship.
Beshear might lose reelection. But that was true no matter what he did on the transgender legislation. This is a Republican state. There is no certainty in elections.
What is certain is that the transgender bill is a mean, hateful piece of legislation. And it’s symbolically good and reassuring that the governor of the state opposed it.
A GOP gubernatorial primary about nothing
Democrats and even some Republicans have mocked GOP gubernatorial candidate Kelly Craft for her lackluster campaign, which has featured terrible ads and repeated references to her protecting Kentucky’s border from illegal immigration. But there is a structural reason why Craft and the other Republican gubernatorial hopefuls aren’t running sharp or bold campaigns.
Politicians generally run for office for some combination of these five reasons:
They always imagined themselves in Office X. (Both Biden and Trump were either running or positioning themselves for presidential runs for much of the period between 1988 and 2020. Andy Beshear probably was always going to run for governor at some point.)
They think the person in office is terrible and that they are uniquely qualified to defeat them. (Biden in 2020, Beshear in 2019.)
They have a set of policy goals that are somewhat unique to them and wouldn’t be advanced without them running. (Warren and Sanders in 2020)
They enjoy the power/prestige of being in elective office. (Basically all politicians.)
They can easily win a given office and it’s a more interesting job than the one they currently have. (The wealthy businessmen who are now Republican U.S. senators in particular.)
They have been a “high achiever” (class president, straight-A student, lawyer, doctor) and being a politician is high achievement for adults. (Basically all Democratic Party politicians.)
I don’t see much evidence Craft, Daniel Cameron or the other Republican gubernatorial candidates have unique, deeply-held policy goals. So let’s rule out No. 3 as their rationale for running for governor.
They are all basically claiming No. 2—Beshear is terrible. But in reality, Beshear is both fairly moderate and largely powerless. The GOP-controlled legislature writes the laws, overrides his vetoes and dominates the state politically. “I am running for governor to stop Andy Beshear from imposing his vision on the state” is something they are all implying. But the legislature is pretty well stopping Andy Beshear.
I think we have lots of Republican gubernatorial candidates for reasons 1, 4, and 5. Being governor is interesting and prestigious and because this is a Republican-leaning state, anyone who wins the Republican primary has a great shot of being elected governor. And once you are elected governor, other desirable jobs are more open to you in the future: member of Congress, president, president of a major university, presidential cabinet member, high-paid lobbyist.
“I am running for governor because a Republican is likely to be governor of this state and it might as well be me” is of course not something any of these candidates can say out loud.
So that creates what we have now—a Republican primary with lots of candidates, few differences between them in terms of policy and almost no innovative policy ideas. A primary about nothing.
There is one other problem for these candidates. The Republican legislature is already adopting lots of conservative policies. There are not many leftover right-wing policies to propose.
Craft or Cameron could promise as governor to create an interstate pact with Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and West Virginia to make it as hard as possible for anyone who lives in those states to reach a state where abortions are allowed. (These states have largely banned abortion within their borders.)
That’s something that the legislature is not likely to do on its own. (I obviously oppose this. But it’s the logical extension of the Republican Party’s ever-increasing restrictions on abortion.)
Such a promise would also of course be controversial and a boost to Beshear’s reelection efforts.
Why the DOJ report may not result in improved policing in Louisville
“The history of DOJ consent decrees against police departments is at best ineffective and at worst catastrophic. This is by design. The DOJ's approach typically results in significantly more resources going to police departments as part of a cycle in which police bureaucracies somehow use their own violence as justification for more money,” says Alec Karakatsanis, a civil rights lawyer who runs the D.C.-based Civil Rights Corp.
He added, “The typical consent decree presumes that police departments will suddenly become better with more technology, more officers, more consultants, more rules, more forms, bureaucratic procedures, and more money spent on scandalously ineffective "training."
“This fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the systemic problems plaguing the police bureaucracy: it's far too bloated, focused almost exclusively on crimes committed by the poor and rarely on crimes by the wealthy, wildly ineffective at crime reduction compared to social investments, and entirely unaccountably violent precisely because the solution to its violence is always to get it more money.”