For all the success Democrats have had recently, winning in Kentucky, known for electing the likes of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul by landslide margins, isn’t easy for most candidates. However, one Kentucky Democrat accomplished this in 2019, and is likely to do it again this year on November 7: incumbent Governor Andy Beshear. Why is he favored? The explanation is pretty simple: Beshear is popular, he’s favored in the polls, and his opponent, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, espouses a brand of radical right-wing politics that most Kentuckians find toxic. 

Andy Beshear is something of a unicorn in modern American politics. Before 2010 or so, a Democrat representing rural Mississippi and a Republican representing the San Francisco Bay Area was not an uncommon sight. However, years of growing partisanship and “wave years” (election years, particularly midterm years, where one party does significantly better than the other) have caused many of these politicians to be “flushed out” by angry voters no longer willing to split their tickets. Today, Beshear joins the likes of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Governor Phil Scott (R-VT) as a relic of a bygone era where voters saw a difference between state and federal politics. 

The Beshear family is not new to politics. Andy Beshear’s father, Steve Beshear, served as Kentucky Attorney General from 1979 to 1983, and later served as the state’s Governor from 2007 to 2015. Clearly, political success runs in the family. 

The younger Beshear began his political career in 2013, when he announced his intention to run for Attorney General of Kentucky in 2015. When the election came, Beshear prevailed by the skin of his teeth, garnering 50.1 percent of the vote to his opponent’s 49.9 percent. 

Having been elected Attorney General, Beshear’s ambitions soon shot higher. Luckily for him, when he decided to run for the governorship in 2019, a perfect storm was brewing for Kentucky Democrats. The incumbent Republican Governor, Matt Bevin, was the least popular governor in the country. His threats to remove roughly 400,000 people’s health insurance with Medicaid cuts, pushes to slash teachers’ pensions, and offensive comments about teachers had lost him much goodwill with the conventionally  strong Republican voter base. After a hard-fought race in which then-President Donald Trump stepped in to stump for Bevin, Beshear yet again prevailed, with a razor-thin margin of 5,000 votes (in an ominous reminder of things to come, Bevin refused to concede after losing). 

When Beshear took office, he faced an uneasy set of circumstances. While  Kentucky voters were happy to vote a Democrat into the Governor’s Mansion, they were reluctant to do the same for the state legislature, meaning Beshear had to deal with a veto-proof Republican supermajority of 29-9 in the Senate and 61-37 in the House. This is actually quite abnormal in the Bluegrass State. As recently as 2016, Democrats held majorities in the Kentucky State House. However, in Kentucky, legislative elections are held in even years alongside presidential and midterm elections. In these years, the vast majority of media attention goes to statewide and national races, with little attention given to more minor statewide races. For example, in 2020, when there was almost nonstop news coverage of the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and comparatively little coverage of legislative races, it makes sense that voters would have a harder time separating other Democrats on the ballot from the party they would support in the presidential race. Thankfully for Beshear, the governor’s race is the highest-ranking 2023 race, so all eyes will be on him. 

Beshear attempted to curb what he saw as the worst excesses of the legislature, such as when he vetoed a ban on surgical procedures and hormone treatments for transgender youth. However, most of these efforts were ineffective, with the legislature overriding 27 vetoes in a single 2021 session. In spite of this, Beshear was able to eke out some notable accomplishments, such as an executive order restoring voting rights to over 100,000 former felons and a collaboration with President Biden in response to catastrophic flooding during the summer of last year. 

Enough about Beshear, though. What about his opponent? Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s first African-American Attorney General (and Beshear’s successor), is gearing up to oust Beshear from office and create a Republican trifecta. And while Beshear cultivated a formidable record as Governor, Cameron is considered a rising star within the GOP. The 37-year-old “protege of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell” even garnered a spot on Donald Trump’s 20-person list to fill a Supreme Court seat if another spot opened up in a hypothetical second term. 

Taking into account the partisan lean of the state and the qualifications of the two candidates, it seems safe to say this race will be a nail-biter. Looking a little deeper, though, Beshear comes off much stronger. 

The most obvious place to take a look at first is polling. The most recent poll gives Beshear a 9-point lead over Cameron, up from the previous poll. Another recent poll shows an 8-point lead for the incumbent Governor. I will concede that both of the previous polls are sponsored by Democratic-aligned groups, and so probably show a rosier picture of the race for Beshear than what might be happening in reality… Or do they? The two most recent Republican-sponsored polls of the race both show clear leads for Beshear: One Republican State Leadership poll shows Beshear 4 points up over Cameron, while another GOP-sponsored poll gives him a whopping 10-point advantage. While the first poll does claim that the race has “narrowed,” it’s a common tactic to release a poll that seems bad for the candidate you support to make it look like they’re gaining ground later. In fact, the only poll so far that shows Beshear in anything close to a deficit against Cameron is a Republican-funded poll from four months ago showing the two candidates tied. 

Given that he has a clear lead in all but one of the polls of the race so far, Beshear gets a point in this department. When looking at his personal favorability, the picture only gets better for him. Beshear is indisputably one of the most popular governors in the country. In fact, a recent Morning Consult Poll found that an impressive 64% of Kentuckians approve of Beshear’s performance, while 32% disapprove. Considering less popular governors have won reelection in the past, it seems extremely doubtful that a figure as popular as Beshear could be voted out by an electorate where almost half of Republicans approve of his job performance. Why, then, is Beshear so popular? It comes down to a combination of name recognition from his popular father, an ability to distinguish himself from the perception of a run-of-the-mill Democrat in the state, and the view of him as a “check” on the worst excesses of Republican government, if only symbolically. A parallel might be seen in former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who, while a Republican, managed to maintain sky-high approval ratings throughout his two terms, with his “winning personality” and mostly-ineffective vetoes on legislation from the Democratic supermajority trumping his surprisingly mainstream Republican views, which he tamped down for electoral purposes. 

These bipartisan approval ratings are all in spite of the fact that Beshear is, for all intents and purposes, a run-of-the-mill Democrat. As noted before, he hasn’t been shy to openly show his support for LGBTQ+ rights, and has even gone on the offensive against Cameron on the issue of abortion, attacking him for supporting Kentucky’s strict abortion law, which does not provide exceptions for cases of rape and incest. Shockingly, Kentuckians seem to agree with Beshear on this. In 2022, they rejected a ballot measure that would have explicitly rejected abortion as a constitutional right. The rejection did nothing to change the actual policy, but was a clear rebuke of the rhetoric and legislation Kentucky Republicans such as Daniel Cameron, whose official website repeatedly states his support for abortion restrictions, have been pushing. 

Abortion is not the only baggage Cameron is carrying. Perhaps one of the most damning controversies of his career occurred when he was put to the task of handling the killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020. His decision not to prosecute the two officers who shot Taylor caused significant controversy, with the Louisville NAACP even calling for his resignation. Additionally, Cameron recently appealed a judge’s ruling which blocked the aforementioned ban on hormone and surgical treatments for transgender youth. While Kentucky is certainly conservative on these sorts of issues, Cameron is wading into dangerous territory. It might do him some good to learn from North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, who lost reelection in 2016 is part because of his vehement support of a so-called “bathroom bill” relating to usage of bathrooms by transgender people. Beshear may be powerless to stop the legislature from passing these restrictions and Cameron from enforcing them, but voters aren’t powerless to express their discontent with perceived Republican overreach. 

In short, while Beshear has high approval, incumbency, name recognition, a flawed opponent, and strong leads in the polls, Cameron has little more than the blanket statement “Kentucky is pretty Republican.” It would serve Democrats well to not become arrogant. If Democrats want to ensure victory, the national party and its local branches must make sure to extensively fundraise Beshear. Thankfully, Beshear has been far outpacing Cameron at the moment. 

For an off-year, 2023 is full of important elections. Besides Kentucky, my own state of Virginia is holding competitive legislative elections that may decide how much power Governor Glenn Youngkin will have to enact his agenda. While Democrats would benefit from pouring funding into Virginia, the unfortunate reality for them is that elections in other states, such as governor’s races in Mississippi and Louisiana, are lost causes for them. 

In Deep South states, intense racial polarization in voting makes peeling off enough white voters from the Republican party to form a Democratic majority extremely difficult. And while some of these deeply Republican states may be more progressive on issues like abortion than is popularly perceived, most voters there are conservative on enough other issues that they often won’t budge. The only thing that could convince these voters to split their tickets is someone with a similar appeal to Andy Beshear. Here’s the issue: not every state has an Andy Beshear.

For Republicans, the best bet is to stay light on the culture war issues and hope Democratic turnout is low enough that Cameron slips by on Republican motivation alone. Considering their inability to do this a year back, it will take the Kentucky GOP a sizable effort to put itself back on track. 

The 2023 Kentucky Governor’s race is a microcosm for all the issues relevant to this country today. Will the combination of concerns over abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and democracy promoted by Democrats triumph over the economic and culture war-related issues pushed by Republicans, as they generally did in the 2022 midterms? It remains to be seen. Still, I think it’s not hard to pick favorites. And while 2024 is a while away, we might end up seeing a few parallels with this obscure off-year local election when looking back, depending on how things go.