New poll shows Beshear up 6, the NRA makes its pick, infrastructure & more | Trail to ’23

This is part of an occasional Herald-Leader series, Trail to ‘23, to catch readers up on all the latest from this year’s Kentucky elections, most notably the governor’s race. There are fewer than five weeks until the Nov. 7 general election in which Kentuckians will decide the commonwealth’s next governor: incumbent Democrat Andy Beshear or Republican challenger Daniel Cameron. Past installments can be read online.

A new poll released by a pro-Daniel Cameron group showed Gov. Andy Beshear with a six-point lead, but with Cameron closing in over the course of the month of September.

At the start of the month, Beshear was up 48% to Cameron’s 40% with 12% undecided. Near the end, it was 48% to 42%, with 10% undecided.

The poll was conducted by WPA Intelligence, a firm with a “B/C” rating from elections analysis site fivethirtyeight.com. The group that paid for the survey, Club For Growth, is an influential conservative organization whose primary funders – billionaires Jeff Yass and Richard Uihlein – are also backing pro-Cameron PACs.

Democrats have taken heart that a poll put out by a Cameron-friendly group still shows the governor with a decent lead. That’s a sentiment shared by some nationally prominent elections observers, including fiverthirtyeight.com senior editor Nathaniel Rakich.

“If a Club (for Growth) poll still has Beshear leading by 6, he is probably in very good shape,” Rakich posted to X, the website formerly known as Twitter.

However, Republicans are quick to point out that Beshear has not regularly reached 50% in publicly available polls, and Cameron has more room to grow in terms of name I.D. than the sitting governor.

Meanwhile, another independent poll was released early Friday by Fox 56 and Emerson College showing Beshear up on Cameron by a wide 49 to 33 margin.

Cameron gets NRA endorsement

The National Rifle Association gave its official endorsement to Cameron.

“The 2nd Amendment is under attack from Biden Democrats across the nation. I’ve fought them. Andy Beshear? Silent,” Cameron posted to X when touting the endorsement.

The gun rights group regularly backs Republicans against Democrats. The NRA also recently endorsed Republican candidate for attorney general Russell Coleman in his tilt against Democratic state representative Pam Stevenson.

The legislature recently passed a bill to make the state a “Second Amendment Sanctuary.” The bill prohibits state and local law enforcement from enforcing a federal firearms ban.

Beshear neither signed nor vetoed the bill. He let it become law without his signature.

A down-ballot candidate on TV

After a deluge of television ads from gubernatorial hopefuls since January — with a couple winning ads featuring cow farts and hardline immigration stances from commissioner of agriculture and treasurer candidates sprinkled in during the primary — we have the first down-ticket candidate airing ads on television.

In an ad titled “Lawman,” GOP nominee for attorney general Russell Coleman flexes his law & order credentials and opens with a shot of Coleman shooting a pistol. Coleman was previously an FBI agent and U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky. He’s also worked as counsel to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, and made partner at the politically influential Louisville law firm Frost Brown Todd.

It comes as little surprise that Coleman is the first of several down-ballot candidates to air television ads. His fundraising effort has paced all other candidates for non-gubernatorial statewide office, raising well over a million dollars total and boasting $916,000 on hand as of mid-September.

Beshear crime data issues pt. II

Weeks after the Herald-Leader reported on discrepancies between homicide data produced by Kentucky State Police and touted by Beshear’s administration and the data from Louisville Metro Police Department – which led to a state undercount of around 100 homicides – Louisville news station WDRB found that there’s more.

A records manager for LMPD, in an email obtained by the station, said that “none of the numbers KSP published in the Crime in KY book for 2022 is correct.”

The numbers provided by LMPD in those exchanges showed that 17,292 more serious offenses were recorded in Jefferson County than the KSP report showed. That would mean serious crime increased in Louisville by 12%, not declined by 19% as previously shown.

Beshear emphasized to WDRB that the report is a “living document,” and that regardless of the details serious crime still went down on the whole.

“What we absolutely know is, even with the update, that serious crime decreased last year,” Beshear said.

Weekly ad spending snapshot

Beshear is still outpacing Cameron when it comes to television advertisements.

According to the latest data compiled by ad firm Medium Buying, Beshear and a pro-Beshear PAC — the only one on TV being the Democratic Governors Association-aligned Defending Bluegrass Values — are spending three times as much as Cameron and pro-Cameron PACs on advertising.

During the week of Oct. 3-9, pro-Beshear groups are spending $1.8 million to the pro-Cameron groups’ $601,000.

Comparing the campaigns themselves, Beshear is spending about four times as much as Cameron on television advertisements. On cable television, Beshear is spending ten times more this week.

The disparity between pro-Beshear ads and pro-Cameron ads persists in every media market.

One particularly interesting point of comparison is the “battleground” area of Northern Kentucky, where Beshear won both Kenton and Campbell counties in 2019 and deep red Boone county was a source of frustration for many Republicans due to low turnout. Beshear and pro-Beshear forces are spending around $310,000 in the Cincinnati, Ohio market, while Cameron and PACs supporting him are dropping around $28,000 – a more than 10 to 1 difference.

Also of note, the Beshear campaign’s ad featuring abortion survivor Hadley Duvall, who directly calls out Cameron’s support of the state’s trigger ban on abortion, was still up on the air as of this week. That could signal a belief that the Beshear team, with the pocketbooks to turn around new ads each week, thinks this line of messaging works quite well.

More anti-Biden & anti-Beshear messaging

Bluegrass Freedom Action, an outside group that’s been backing Cameron since the GOP primary, has a new ad out on television tying Beshear to Democratic President Joe Biden and contrasting the two gubernatorial candidate’s “big differences.”

The ad claims that Biden “helps bankroll Beshear’s agenda.”

The Biden Victory Fund - a joint fundraising committee between Biden, the Democratic National Committee and all state parties - has given the Kentucky Democratic Party a hefty chunk of change. The KDP, which is mostly focused on re-electing Gov. Beshear, got $250,000 from the committee.

“Beshear backs Biden, and we get Biden’s border crisis. Beshear even vetoed a major tax cut as Biden’s inflation crushed Kentucky families,” the ad’s narrator states.

New ads on education

A new ad from Defending Bluegrass Values features former Democratic state Senate candidate Susan Cintra – she’s a teacher in Madison County, which is seen by many as a bellwether in this year’s election – decrying Cameron’s record on education.

The Cameron campaign unveiled a couple new direct-to-camera ads – one that works as something of a retort to the Defending Bluegrass Values ad. Cameron’s wife Makenze speaks to the camera about her husband’s commitment to public education, revealing at the end that she was a public school teacher as evidence of her argument.

Another ad from Cameron represents a larger project of the campaign: tying Beshear to Democratic President Joe Biden. In the ad, Cameron boasts about the lawsuits against the Biden administration that he’s filed and joined.

“The Washington liberals want to change our country for the worse. As your governor, I will fight them every day. Andy Beshear – he never will,” Cameron says.

Treasurer, auditor candidates take part in forums

On a KET program this week, candidates for treasurer and auditor got to hash out some of the larger questions facing both of those offices.

Republican Treasurer and candidate for auditor Allison Ball advocated for a roughly half-million-dollar audit of Jefferson County Public Schools in the wake of its busing difficulties while Democratic auditor candidate Kim Reeder said that the crisis highlighted the need to reexamine the amount of funding the state provides to public schools.

Candidates on both sides of the aisle for state treasurer got to take a crack at making their case on the KET as well. The candidates, Republican Mark Metcalf and Democrat Michael Bowman, towed predictable lines on environmental, social and governance — often called just ‘ESG’ — investment practices and spending recommendations they would make to the GOP-dominated General Assembly.

Beshear rolls out infrastructure budget proposals

As part of a series of budget proposals well in advance of the 2024 legislative session — something unique to this year, a campaign season that’s taking place one year after the legislature bucked tradition by proposing their budget well in advance of the governor — Beshear rolled out his infrastructure plan this week.

The plan includes:

• $500 million for clean drinking water programs

• More commitment to funding broadband internet expansion, including distribution of a $1.1 billion federal grant that the state received

• $100 million for building and renovations to the state’s career and technical education centers

• $10 million from the General Fund over two years to the Housing Corporation’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund

• $200 million for economic development site preparation

• $15 million for a marketing and recruitment initiative to “build a globally competitive talent development system” in Kentucky.

Beshear’s official events have rankled many elected Republicans, who claim he’s using the governor’s podium to promote his re-election campaign.

Republicans in the legislature say his proposals have no chance of making it through both chambers, complaining of his administration’s lack of communication. Last budget cycle, Beshear’s big-ticket proposals were largely ignored.

“Once again — he throws out policy that he hasn’t talked to anyone about, will do nothing to try to pass it, only to take credit for the work that we ultimately do,” House Speaker David Osborne, R- Prospect, said in a statement. “However, as he should be aware, the legislature’s work on both the budget and the 2024 legislative agenda began several months ago and will continue after we convene the 2024 Regular Session in January.

“Kentuckians can expect their legislature to continue passing the same responsible, Kentucky-forward policies as we have since 2017 — regardless of who is in the Governor’s Mansion.”