Michael Adams: Republican message is wrong; tripping up GOP

Moderate Republicanism is not exactly trendy in Kentucky politics.

But Secretary of State Michael Adams, the highest vote-getter on November’s ballot, thinks it should be.

Adams’ biggest takeaway from the 2023 election results: Republicans have a messaging problem.

“Republicans like me thought in 2019 that we had the right message and the wrong messenger. That was wrong,” Adams said in a wide-ranging interview with the Herald-Leader.

Where many see consistent Republican gains – majorities continue to grow in the legislature, non-gubernatorial statewide officeholders widen their margins and more Kentucky voters register Republican – Adams sees a “red herring” for gubernatorial success.

Gov. Andy Beshear was the lone Democratic winner, holding onto the governor’s office against Attorney General Daniel Cameron. Despite Republicans’ dominance in Kentucky politics since 2016, they’ve been unable to snuff out high-profile Democrats like Beshear from statewide offices.

Concentration on social issues and riling up the conservative base was a misjudgment this year, Adams said. Attempts at nationalizing the race and putting transgender issues at the forefront, much of it fueled by outside spending groups, became “sideshow attractions”

“We want to grow and improve our quality of living, and I think we do a lot of harm to that mission when we become a place people don’t want to move to,” Adams said.

In his interview with the Herald-Leader, Adams touched on this, his aims for administering the 2024 election, his continuing outside legal work, and other topics.

Being the only term-limited Republican statewide officer, Adams has not played coy about his ambitions for higher office. The 47-year-old politician offered a candid assessment of where he might go from here (“I think I have a better chance running for governor than I do running for Congress”) and how Republicans’ “deep bench” of politicians could reshuffle.

Answers have been edited for space and clarity.

Herald-Leader: Now that the dust has settled on Election Day, what are the biggest takeaways for you as a politician?

Adams: I think the clear takeaway is that when Republicans like me thought in, in 2019, that we had the right message and the wrong messenger, that was wrong. I think what Daniel showed us is he ran one of the best campaigns I’ve ever seen in terms of being out there being everywhere, very hard work, very appealing candidate, very articulate, very inspiring, but you’ve seen now the (lowest-performing candidate) vote share for the Republican Party decline repeatedly in the gubernatorial election year. I think that’s a warning sign. I think that the Republican registration growth is a red herring. It’s a misleading indicator.

The Republican Party has got to figure out what we did wrong, and my personal view of what we did wrong is we’re not talking about the issues that actually matter. We’re talking about sideshow attractions. I understand that you want to try to make your electorate on an off-year look more like a presidential electorate, which means you appeal to low-propensity voters who may be more moved by nationalized elections and campaigns, but it hasn’t worked. I think it’s no accident that I was the top vote-getter because I intentionally leaned in the direction to be more inclusive and transcend politics and be less binary than some of the people that performed lower. I think we (Republicans) start with a generic advantage, but it’s not enough by itself. I think we have to do better.

H-L: What do you mean by ‘sideshow attraction?’ What’s an example of that?

Adams: In terms of the sideshow attractions, I think Daniel was overly blamed on the tone of the campaign. He ran primarily positive advertising. I think the negative advertising that people tied to him and thought was his brand was really coming from the outside groups that he had no control over. So I’m not criticizing him, but I do think the tone was terrible. I think they were really focused on trying to destroy Andy Beshear despite his solid approval ratings, including half of Republicans in some of these polls. I just don’t think that there was ever the ability to swing him from 60% approval down to below 50% just based on negative advertising.

I think running on the trans stuff, running on stuff that doesn’t impact people’s daily lives as much to the point almost of obsession, I think that was a mistake. That wasn’t what I chose to do, and it’s not really something that Daniel chose to do. It was really more a tone set by the outside groups. But I hope that we’ve learned our lesson.

H-L: What’s been your biggest takeaway as an election administrator?

Adams: So the biggest takeaway is to not take away too much from this election, because we’re going to have a totally different electorate in November of 2024. (Next year) is going to be doable, but very, very tough because we’re going to have, I think, a turnout model that’s like the one that we had three years ago, but I don’t have any magic wand this time. I don’t have emergency powers to add voting days or expand absentee voting or any of that. One thing I’ve considered is maybe we should add some more days, but I think even if we do that, I’m not totally convinced people will use them.

H-L: What are your key legislative priorities leading into this session?

Adams: There are two big things I want. What I’ve been successful at here, I think, is pairing access and security.

The access angle is getting more funding for elections, and specifically for the county clerks. I do think we should raise what they’re getting. There’s a statute that says they get 25 cents per registered voter. That statute was enacted in 1984 and has not been adjusted for inflation. So if all we did was just keep that funding flat and adjusted to inflation, it would triple and it would be really welcome. So I think we should increase the base funding… We (also) have got to stop paying the clerks to close the polls. I think that we should boost their base funding, but I also think that, if they reduce access, they shouldn’t be rewarded.

H-L: Polls close on election night in Kentucky at 6pm. You’ve said that you’d support lengthening that, but the issue is finding workers for that extra hour. With Kentucky having the earliest poll closing time in the nation, tied only with Indiana, why is that true of essentially just this state?

Adams: Well, to put this in context, we’ve quadrupled access to the polls. I understand that’s an hour on one day and people would love to have it, but we also gave them eight hours on three other days, including a Saturday when most people aren’t working.

I’m speculating the answer to your question is our population of poll workers is more elderly than maybe in some other states. I just don’t think that I would be able to get the poll workers. I need to keep the polls open for the hours we have. It would make it harder to be a poll worker. So I certainly welcome an extension to seven o’clock, but I don’t think there are the votes for it.

H-L: Open primaries: You support those. Is there any chance that the legislature actually moves on that idea or is it DOA?

Adams: I think it’s DOA in this session, but I do think the politics could align for this to happen. To be really blunt about it, I think it would take a pretty bad night in Republican primaries for the legislature, where incumbents get beat – specifically, more moderate to center-right Republican incumbents get beat like what you saw in 2022. I think over time, maybe not much time at all, you’re going to begin to see the caucus in each chamber get a little more fringe-y. That can make things uncomfortable for leadership and the incumbents.

I don’t think the legislature will ever open primaries because I ask them to. I think they might open it up for their own political benefit at some point – if you start to see more factionalism in the caucuses and more difficulty for leadership to keep people together on the same page.

H-L: It appears as though you’re still working for Nikki Haley and her Republican presidential primary campaign. Do you intend to keep working for that campaign and do you see a potential conflict if she does make the ballot in Kentucky in May?

Adams: Number one, I don’t intend to cease working on anything I’ve done with her. I think she’d be a great president. Number two, I don’t foresee a situation where I would need, legally, to recuse myself because I don’t decide who runs for president. If people bring in their petitions and they are within the law, they meet all the criteria, they go on the ballot. I don’t have any discretion over who gets to run for president or secretary of state or governor or anything else. What I will do is, to the degree any candidate of either party has questions or if they want their petition reviewed, I’m not going to be reviewing any of those.

I was asked my first year in office to be on President Trump and Sen. McConnell’s campaigns, the honorific title as co-chair or whatever. I turned them both down. I don’t think it’s appropriate for the chief election official to have an honorific like that while you’re also head of the office, so I take that stuff and the optics really seriously. I’m not advising Nikki Haley on how to run for president in Kentucky so there’s no actual conflict, but to avoid any perspective that I could have a conflict I just won’t be involved in the processing of those petitions.

H-L: Your post-election victory speech included a lot of much-dissected details on subjects like education and quality of life. It sparked speculation about ambition for higher office. I’m wondering, are there any specific higher offices that you’re interested in – say governor or U.S. Senate – or any that you’ll rule out?

Adams: Well, I wouldn’t rule anything out or in at this point.

I probably have, I think, a better chance running for governor than I do running for Congress. Unfortunately, I don’t think my style translates as well to a Congressional race because they’re really more ‘us versus them.’ You’re running to be someone who is against someone else from some other state or some other party – those are more binary type elections.

The other factor is, I think you’ll have members of the U.S. House that will want to run for higher office, and in campaign finance law, whatever money they’ve got held over in their accounts they can just turn that into a Senate campaign. They can’t roll that into a gubernatorial campaign.

I can certainly be wrong, but my gut is that you’ll have a lot of transitions over the next five years. No one should feel from me a sense of ‘it’s time to leave.’ I think all of our officers do great, but I do expect there to be some transition. My guess is you’ll have one, maybe even two, Senate seats open. I think you’ll see a clearing of the benches on the House running for those, and then you’ll have options for Congress as well. We have a good bench, and we all kind of talk to each other and figure out who’s going to do what. I get along really well with Russell (Coleman), Andy Barr and James Comer and everybody else. We’re all friends, and so we have to sort all that out.

H-L: When you say I would maybe have a better shot running for governor than Congress, you mean DC in general, including Senate and a congressional district seat?

Adams: I think if Congressman Comer retired from his seat to run for the Senate, or if he got elected governor, and that seat opened up, I think that’s a little more doable than a Senate race. I’m from Paducah and did really, really well there.

I also think Donald Trump is a potential factor. I’ve never gotten crossways with him so far, but I also know that I probably wouldn’t be his preferred choice in one of those situations. And that endorsement probably would count for a lot. He’d be a lot more likely to get involved in a Senate or Congressional campaign compared to a gubernatorial.

H-L: You mentioned the ‘deep bench’ of Republican politicians kind of talking it out. How much of that actually occurs?

Adams: We talk. It’s a little more orderly than you might think from watching from the outside. We send signals to each other directly and indirectly about our intentions, but I also think there’s probably some of us that are a little more in one clique and some people more another clique. I think the other clique aren’t going to be as deferential. So I don’t know what, say, Congressman (Thomas) Massie’s plans are, Rep. (Savannah) Maddox’s plans are, and I don’t think they’ll necessarily want to communicate those.

H-L: Going back to your speech where you talked about a broad range of issues, I’m wondering what your estimation is of how the legislature has handled those topics. Is there anywhere where you diverge from what it seems like a majority of that body is going towards?

Adams: I don’t have a point by point criticism of this bill or that bill, but I do think that the vision that they have, and I agree with, is that we should be a place that people want to move to, we want to grow. That’s part of why we’re cutting taxes.

We want to grow and improve our quality of living, and I think we do a lot of harm to that mission when we become a place people don’t want to move to. I think the more we harp about excluding people and making people uncomfortable and making them feel like we’re bigots, we undo all that progress. The more that our state, and our party especially, harps on these things about what we’re against, and ‘you’ve got to be like this’ – when we’re not inclusive, it actually undercuts what we say we’re for in terms of making our job environment better, our regulatory environment better. If you take that pro-freedom message and you tie it to an exclusionary message, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot. Number one, it hurts you winning voters, and number two, it then undoes the potential progress you’re making towards your primary goal.

H-L: Your campaign used a five-second clip of Beshear in an ad. That was a choice. Can you walk me through your decision-making there, and then how did your Republican colleagues respond to that?

Adams: I was pleasantly surprised. Every time someone doesn’t like something I do, I hear all about it. I didn’t get a single call, text, email. Nothing from the general public, nothing from a legislator, nothing from the party, nothing from the Cameron campaign. Anyone that didn’t like it, they kept it to themselves.

It was a choice. Eventually I decided that I wanted to go for broke and try to be the top vote-getter, which I thought would be helpful to me going forward. Number two, I was also worried about having a problem with the Republican base and having some people skip my race.