How Kentucky Could Elect a President

LEXINGTON, Ky — Kentucky is better known for breeding fillies than presidents. Yet the winner of the governor’s race here Tuesday could very well be on the national ticket in a future election.

With the two presidential primaries dominated by a current and former president, and much of the next-generation talent in both parties sitting out the race, the future may be more easily glimpsed from the bluegrass than the cornfields this fall.

If Gov. Andy Beshear prevails, he may become one of only two Democratic governors left in the South next year. A former state attorney general and the son of a governor, Beshear, 45, is also the only independently elected statewide Democrat left in Kentucky.

Should Attorney General Daniel Cameron win, he’d be the first Black Republican governor since Reconstruction. At only 37, Cameron would immediately become a national player and, with ties to both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former President Donald Trump, could help navigate whatever the GOP becomes after both party avatars leave the scene.

Beshear is the favorite at the betting window. He has defied his state’s sharp turn right to emerge as the frontrunner by exuding competence in the face of Covid and a series of almost biblical natural disasters whose impact has tested the state like nothing else this side of the University of Kentucky Wildcats’ nearly-decade-long drought from the Final Four.

It's also exceedingly difficult to turn out an incumbent governor who’s not mired in scandal or besieged by external events: only a single governor lost last year. And Beshear has wisely shunned national Democrats while attempting to localize the election.

“This race is about us,” he told me, twice, when I caught up with him at a pre-canvassing rally late last month, noting that he hadn’t brought in “anybody from anywhere” to stump for him.

Beshear won’t condemn Biden and doesn't break from the national party line on most issues, which could ensure his viability for president or vice president in the future. Yet, in that way that governors do, he will gently chide the president for not doing more to claim credit for his accomplishments.

“In DC they get mixed up thinking the Rose Garden ceremony is the reality,” he said. “It’s not. It’s the ribbon-cutting on that new factory that’s going to employ 400 people at almost $40 an hour in Henderson.”

If Beshear sounds disciplined, on-message and focused entirely on his state, well, you’re onto something.

When I saw him over the summer — before the annual Fancy Farm picnic and political bacchanalia in Western Kentucky — he sounded many of the same notes.

Ford is building auto battery plants in Kentucky, the ancient Brent Spence Bridge that spans the Ohio from Cincinnati to Kentucky is being rebuilt without tolls and did he mention broadband? Then, as now, the one area where he will break from national Democrats is over what he believes as its overzealous environmental regulations, a view partly borne out of Kentucky being an energy-producing state.

The one locally divisive issue he will address is the fate of John Calipari, the UK men’s basketball coach who fans here are eager to see lead the team back to the Final Four. “Cal is a good guy,” Beshear told me, predicting “a great team this year.”

What Beshear does not want to discuss are his ambitions. Yet when I pressed him this summer about his interest in being on a ticket, he notably did not deny the possibility he could wind up on the national ticket. That could easily happen if a woman or candidate of color sees a white-male governor as a logical partner given the party’s struggles with white men.

The furthest he’d go is to say he’s not sure what would be next after a second term that would wrap up at the start of 2028.

“I’ve always known what’s next in my life, I don’t now,” said Beshear. “But I’m okay with that because the present is that important.”

Seeking a lifeline from the one-game-at-a-time platitudes, I turned to the governor’s wife, Britainy, who was sitting by his side in Mayfield, which was devastated by the 2021 tornadoes that tore through Western Kentucky.

She was no help – but also didn’t offer anything close to a hell no. “I am interested in helping Andy,” said Kentucky’s first lady.

Watching the race closely, and more forthcoming, is the Democratic smart set — a class of people who recognize the difficulty the party will have forging electoral college majorities as educational realignment continues apace.

“If Beshear wins, he instantly will become part of the '28 discussion,” David Axelrod, the mastermind of Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, told me. “A young, charismatic Democrat who won twice in a deep red state? There will be a great deal of chatter.”

While deserving credit for the job he’s done, the truth is Beshear is governor today mostly because of his predecessor.

In 2019, he beat a GOP governor, Matt Bevin, who managed to make himself that rare incumbent governor susceptible to defeat. Bevin did it by alienating an array of constituencies in particularly creative ways, whether it was floating tolls to cross that old bridge across the Ohio River to anger Northern Kentucky suburbanites or lambasting striking teachers as accessories to child molestation. He still only lost by about 5,000 votes.

As McConnell summarized it for a room full of Republican donors in Washington this summer: “The previous Republican governor, honestly, was a jerk. I mean he literally talked his way out of office.”

As I watched Cameron address a café in Taylorsville, a fast-growing Louisville exurb, I couldn’t help but think about how carefully he was attempting to avoid Bevin’s mistakes.

An engaging former University of Louisville football player who also got his law degree there, Cameron is able to distinguish himself from Bevin in part by simply being his affable self. (When I was in Kentucky in the final days of the 2019 race, Bevin mocked my assumption it was a close race and predicted he’d win by six to ten percent.)

Yet it was also no accident that Cameron used his stump speech to make common cause with public educators. They’re not only a group Bevin angered but also one of the last pillars of Democratic political strength in every Kentucky county.

“I stand here before you as the Republican nominee for governor telling you we have to stand up for our teachers,” said Cameron. “I say that in part because I’m married to one.” (He’s put the same message on the air.)

When I sat down with Cameron, he made sure to underscore his ties to educators, pointing out that his mother and sister-in-law also did stints as teachers. And while he has received criticism for his support of school vouchers, Cameron appears more frustrated that Beshear has acquired something of a political halo from Covid.

“Andy Beshear shut the schools down for two years and our kids have significant learning loss because of it,” he said.

Cameron has bobbled the abortion issue — post-Dobbs, Kentucky has one of the strictest abortion laws in the country — but he knows Beshear’s strength stems mostly from the perception that the governor is capable and decent.

“He was out there, he showed compassion to people, which everybody appreciated,” James Tipton, a Republican state lawmaker, said of Beshear during Covid and the natural disasters.

Many national Republicans have given up on Kentucky. Beshear and his allies have significantly outspent Cameron on television advertising.

Were it not for a fear that abandoning the race would only prompt their Democratic counterparts pour more money into the Mississippi governor’s race, the other outstanding gubernatorial contest this year, the Republican Governor’s Association may have stopped spending there entirely.

This is, however, Kentucky, and few partisans in either party believe it will be anything but a competitive race on Tuesday. As Cameron reminded me, there was a Libertarian on the ballot in 2019 who took over 28,000 votes. “It’s a binary choice this year,” he said.

Kentucky has never elected a Black candidate in his or her own right. (Bevin’s lieutenant governor was Black.) And while the state may have removed its Jefferson Davis statue from the state capitol, the Confederate flags that dot the occasional front porch testify to Cameron’s challenge.

Should he ride late momentum to victory, though, Cameron will become one of the most prominent African-American Republicans in America.

Few are more enthused about that prospect than McConnell. The longtime Senate GOP leader has known Cameron since the attorney general was a teenager. Cameron attended the University of Louisville as a McConnell Scholar, one of 10 Kentuckians each year who attend the school tuition-free. Cameron later served as an aide to McConnell.

At that same donor gathering at which McConnell called Bevin “a jerk,” the senator urged the contributors to consider helping Cameron by emphasizing what he’d mean to the party and the country, according to a source in the room.

“He is an all-star,” McConnell said of Cameron, “Interestingly enough, an African-American Republican. This is the kind of guy, just like Tim Scott, that would drive Barack Obama crazy because he doesn’t talk about everything that’s going wrong in America. He talks about all the opportunities there are in America. And he’s a good example of it.”

Cameron is more careful discussing McConnell, in part because the senator has detractors in both parties these days.

“Leader McConnell’s been very helpful,” Cameron said, before quickly noting the same about the other, more Trump-friendly members of the Kentucky congressional delegation.

Cameron won the gubernatorial nomination this spring in part because he enjoyed Trump’s support. They became friendly during Trump’s presidency and Cameron spoke at the 2020 Republican convention.

Yet busy with his own campaign, trials and tee times, the former president has not come to Kentucky to rally support for Cameron this fall. Trump doesn’t like betting on potential losers and he no doubt recalls appearing in Lexington for Bevin in 2019 the night before the governor lost.

As for well-known surrogates, the one Beshear will be seen with happens to share his last name.

Steve Beshear was a two-term governor, from 2007 to 2015, a job he likely never would have claimed had he beaten McConnell for the Senate in 1996. Neither has forgotten that race and this contest has become something of a proxy between the two old pols. (In his Fancy Farm remarks this summer, McConnell said he knew something about beating Beshears, as Andy sat steps away.)

But when I spoke to Steve Beshear in Lexington in October shortly before he introduced his son, I don’t think the twinkle in his eye was only about his son’s prospects for re-election.

“He’s Andy,” said Steve Beshear. “He’s not ‘Governor Beshear’ — he’s Andy to the vast majority of people. And you’re not going to change how they think of him.”

Benjamin Johansen contributed to this report.