Beshear tied for most popular Democratic governor among Trump voters, survey finds

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is in “about as strong a position as he can expect to be,” with one week left before Election Day on Nov. 7, according to the findings of a new survey released Tuesday morning.

Morning Consult’s latest U.S. Leader Approval Outlook found that Beshear:

• Is tied with Hawaii Gov. Josh Green as the most popular Democratic governor among voters who also supported former president Donald Trump in 2020, with 41% approving of his job performance

• Is the most popular Democratic governor among 2020 voters who backed President Joe Biden, with 93% approval

• Has the highest net approval rating of any Democratic governor in a red state, with overall approval at 60% and 35% disapproval.

“I think the main concern, probably, for the Beshear campaign was that once the GOP primary ended and that side of the electorate was able to unify, you might see Beshear’s popularity start to decline as he faces more of an ad blitz over these final few months of the campaign,” Cameron Easley, Morning Consult’s lead U.S. politics analyst, said in an interview with the Herald-Leader. “But based on what we’re seeing, that’s really not happening.

“He’s really remaining strong among independents, among Democrats, and he’s only just barely dipped among Republican voters in terms of approval.”

Beshear’s bid for re-election against Republican challenger Attorney General Daniel Cameron is just one of two governor’s races remaining in the nation this year. The other is in Mississippi, where GOP incumbent Tate Reeves is facing an increasingly tight race. (Louisiana held a “jungle primary” election earlier this month from which Republican Jeff Landry came out on top with more than half of the votes, avoiding a runoff).

Polling has consistently shown Beshear ahead of Cameron, though Kentucky politicos across the aisle are skeptical of any pollster’s ability to accurately reflect the mood of Bluegrass voters.

If you’re Cameron and his campaign team, Easley said it’s “certainly not heartening to see, and it’s not what you would want to see.”

“All that you can really say from the Cameron campaign’s perspective is that Kentucky is still a very red state,” he said. “Andy Beshear pretty much has to run a flawless campaign, or a near flawless campaign, to get over the line. I certainly don’t think the Cameron campaign has been helped by the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade. We’ve seen that come up in the campaign, and Cameron has moderated his position on that, but that’s just another thing going against them.

“I think if this election is between Daniel Cameron and Andy Beshear in 2019, it may well be a different story,” Easley continued. “But with the added benefit of incumbency that Beshear is working with, I think that makes it an even more uphill climb for Cameron.”

The Biden and Trump factors

Among Republican voters, Beshear has a 43% approval rating and 53% disapproval rating.

Compared to January, Beshear’s approval rating among Republicans was 46%, and his overall approval was at 60%, where it still remains.

The latest Morning Consult survey also found Beshear holds a 58% approval rating among independents, which is notable because 10% of the electorate — more than 350,000 people — are registered as independents or with other political parties, and could not vote in the May primaries.

Throughout the general election campaign, Cameron and the political action committees supporting his bid have sought to paint Beshear as a liberal Democrat who operates in lockstep with Biden.

Beshear, meanwhile, has touted the number of bipartisan bills he’s signed and even featured a Trump voter in one of his ads who praised Beshear for signing an income tax cut passed by the veto-proof GOP General Assembly.

Morning Consult found that 68% of Kentucky voters disapprove of Biden’s job performance.

So how does Beshear remain so popular when the president he’s endorsed is not?

Easley said elections that have taken place during the Biden presidency have largely shown that it “really hasn’t been that easy to tie down-ballot Democratic candidates to Joe Biden.”

“Going into the midterms last year, Joe Biden’s approval ratings were as anemic as they are now,” he said. “But what we saw in our state-level tracking throughout the cycle and in the lead up into November last year was that vulnerable Democratic incumbents — senatorial and gubernatorial incumbents — essentially, they were able to maintain their popularity among voters even though Biden’s numbers were tanking in the state.

“So while it certainly makes sense that you would try to tie down-ballot Democrats to an unpopular Democratic president, I think the results so far have shown us that voters aren’t making the connection in the way that Republican operatives would like them to.”

Other states a bellwether for Kentucky?

The morning after Landry’s outright win of the governor’s mansion in Louisiana, where he will succeed a Democrat, the Republican Party of Kentucky released an upbeat statement declaring there’s only one more governor’s mansion to flip this year.

“A southern state with Republican legislative supermajorities elected a conservative, Trump-endorsed Attorney General who fights Joe Biden, challenged COVID mandates, protected kids from indoctrination and promised to address crime,” spokesman Sean Southard wrote. “Polls didn’t see it coming. Sound familiar? On Nov. 7, Kentucky voters will say ‘no’ to Joe Biden and Andy Beshear by electing Daniel Cameron as our next governor.”

Easley had a different view.

“Unfortunately for the Cameron campaign, they’re essentially running against their own (outgoing Louisiana governor) John Bel Edwards,” he said. “I don’t really see what happened in Louisiana a few weeks ago as any kind of a bellwether for what the other races are going to look like this year.”

And then there’s Kansas, where voters in August 2022 rejected an anti-abortion amendment, just as Kentuckians did a few months later.

In November, Kansans re-elected Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly over the state’s Republican attorney general, despite Trump having won the state in 2020. As NBC News described the race, Kelly “focused her campaign almost exclusively on the economy, tax cuts, education and her desire to work with Republicans” — an approach not all that dissimilar from Beshear’s messaging.

Easley said gubernatorial elections are, generally speaking, less partisan than senatorial races.

“States that are either governed decidedly in one direction, or have lurched in one direction very quickly in recent cycles, they’re much more likely to have time for someone for the other party,” he said. “They’re much more likely to want some kind of a check on that overall trend that we’re seeing a state move in.”

But Easley did have some words of encouragement for the Kentucky GOP.

“I think what Republicans can look forward to — if they can’t get the governor’s mansion back next week — they’ll obviously be in poll position to get back there whenever Beshear is no longer able to run.”