What We Learned from the 2020 Elections in Kentucky
About 60 Percent of Kentuckians Are Republicans
The most obvious conclusion you can draw from the election results in Kentucky is simple: somewhere between 60 and 65 percent of Kentuckians lean towards the GOP, between 35 and 40 percent towards the Democrats. All the votes aren’t counted yet, but Joe Biden won around 36 percent of the state’s votes, Amy McGrath 38 percent. Donald Trump received about 62 percent, Mitch McConnell about 58 percent. That the McGrath-McConnell race and the Trump-Biden race had such similar margins suggests that the overwhelming number of Kentucky voters simply voted the party line in both races.
McGrath won three of the state’s 120 counties (Jefferson, Fayette, and Franklin, which includes Frankfort and therefore some number of people who work in state government). Biden may have won just Jefferson and Fayette.
The urban-rural divide is a big part of the story, but not the whole story. McGrath won about 60 percent of the votes in Jefferson, Fayette and Franklin counties, but McConnell won about 40 percent. McConnell won about 68 percent of the votes outside of those three counties, McGrath won about 32 percent. So there are plenty of Republicans in Kentucky’s most urban areas and plenty of Democrats outside of the major cities. Only about a quarter of Kentucky’s voters are in Louisville and Lexington --so the math works better if you are the candidate of the less urban areas.
Kentucky Republicans Will Have Much More Than 60 Percent of the Power In Government
The way state legislative and congressional districts are drawn doesn’t perfectly reflect the political dynamics of Kentucky (or really any other state.) So it looks like Kentucky Republicans will have control of 75 of the state’s 100 House seats, 30 of the 38 state Senate seats (79 percent), and 5 of the 6 U.S. House seats (83 percent.) A more representative system (reflecting the 40/60 split) might end up with Republicans holding 60 Kentucky House seats, 23 Kentucky Senate seats and four U.S. House seats. By the nature of the way U.S. Senate elections work, the 40 percent of Kentuckians who vote for Democrats are represented by two senators who have little incentive to represent their interests. (I could write the reverse of this article if I were writing about California, where the 30-40 percent of voters who are Republicans have little representation in government.)
Why Republicans Are Winning in Kentucky
That Biden and McGrath got basically the same number of votes in Kentucky should make you skeptical of candidate-centered explanations for Tuesday’s results. Charles Booker almost certainly would not have won either. Nor would Attica Scott, Andy Beshear, Steve Beshear, Rocky Adkins, Matt Jones or other prominent figures in Kentucky politics. If you look both in and outside of Kentucky, left-wing and moderate, black, white and Latino, experienced and non-experienced, charismatic and uncharismatic Democrats lost in Trump-friendly areas like Kentucky.
Looking back at the 2019 statewide elections in Kentucky, in four of the races (attorney general, state auditor, treasurer, agriculture commissioner), the Republican candidate won around 60 percent of the vote, the Democrat around 40 percent. So basically the same as in the 2020 races. The big outlier was Matt Bevin, who got less than 50 percent. Looking at the 2019 and 2020 results, it seems only a Republican as controversial as Matt Bevin can lose a statewide race in Kentucky---and perhaps even Bevin would have won if his election were in 2020, with Trump at the top of the ticket driving higher GOP turnout.
With so many absentee ballots coming in, we don’t yet have a full picture of the 2020 results across the country. But it looks like Biden won in Arizona and Georgia, even as he didn’t even really try to win states like Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee that were competitive in the 1990’s.
What’s going on? First of all, American politics is increasingly nationalized. People view the parties much more through the lens of AOC, Trump, Pelosi and Obama than their local state representative. So as long as the national Democratic brand is unpopular in Kentucky, it’s likely that local Democratic candidates will struggle, even if they take steps to separate themselves from the national party. (It’s likely in Kentucky that the story is more that people hate the Democrats than them loving the GOP--McConnell has fairly lackluster approval ratings.)
Secondly, American politics is increasingly about issues of culture and identity, as opposed to being about policy. Polls suggest that Democratic positions like raising the minimum wage and creating a public health insurance option are very popular with the public. Florida voters just voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, while also backing Trump, who opposes that. Two years ago, Florida voters backed a provision to restore the voting rights of people who had committed felonies, but the state’s voters also elected Republicans to control the state legislature and governor’s mansion. The GOP officials gutted the felon voting rights restoration.
Popular Democratic positions on policy, in my view, matter less because politics is viewed by millions of voters (and often covered by the press) as fights between “woke” vs. less woke people; those who respect “traditional” values vs. those who don’t; those who “hate America” vs. those who don’t; the red team vs. the blue team; the racists vs. the anti-racists; the Christians vs. the godless; the educated elite vs. the silent majority; California and New York vs. Kentucky and Alabama. Most of these tropes are not true (there are plenty of Christian Democrats, Republicans who aren’t evangelicals, etc.) So with politics dividing on these lines, Democrats are doing better in places with a lot of urban and suburban people who work in white collar jobs and talk about how much they value “diversity” (Atlanta, Phoenix) and struggling in places that are less urban and urbane (so 117 counties in Kentucky.)
The most important story, in my view, in terms of the national election results is how similar they were to 2016 and even 2000. Trump is much different than Mitt Romney and George Bush, but he is winning the same kinds of voters. Trump in 2020 is much different than Trump in 2016 (the economic populism of his first campaign was not really executed in office) but he won the same voters. His handling of the pandemic never really changed Trump’s approval or disapproval ratings. The largest protest movement in U.S. history by some measures, the protests of George Floyd’s death in June and July, really didn’t change the election much either.
It’s not easy to see these broader narratives and norms changing, at least in the short term. Fox News and conservative Facebook pages and talk radio work fairly hard to keep politics divided along these cultural lines. Some conservative voters are both wary of an America that includes Muslim members of Congress and transgender celebrities and also frustrated that having views that would have been acceptable a decade ago now lead to them being cast as bigots. More mainstream media also is at times more interested in covering elections than government, cultural fights rather than policy ones.
What These Results Portend for Future Elections
Running a left-but-not-that left white establishment-ish candidate isn’t working for Kentucky Democrats (Conway, Grimes, Gray, McGrath) unless his name is Beshear. Perhaps Booker would have lost by 25 or 30 points because of his liberal views, like supporting the Green New Deal, but McGrath’s 20-point defeat isn’t a great defense of Kentucky Democrats continuing to embrace this kind of candidate. So if Booker wants to take on Rand Paul in the 2022 Senate elections, the case that he is unelectable is fairly weak--what Democrat is electable in a statewide federal race in Kentucky? Shouldn’t Kentucky Democrats at least try to lose in a different way?
A sweeping Biden win and Democratic takeover of the U.S. House and Senate would have probably made the case stronger for a mayoral candidate in Louisville who is decidedly more progressive than Greg Fischer. But there wasn’t a Biden blowout. That said, I still think there is a real chance Louisville elects its first-ever female and/or person of color as mayor. But that person may end up being someone who is fairly cautious on say, reforming/changing the Louisville police department.
Attorney General Daniel Cameron is joining other GOP attorney generals in supporting Trump’s legal efforts to suggest something is wrong about the election results. Biden won ---these tactics are undemocratic and problematic. But if you are an aspiring GOP pol like Cameron, the results of the elections both here and nationally suggest that being aligned with the defeated Trump is still smart if you want to be a future Republican governor, senator or president.
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