Why a Democrat Is Likely to Get Elected Governor of a Very Red State—Again

In two weeks, a Democrat stands a decent chance of being elected to a second term in the Republican stronghold of Kentucky. Gov. Andy Beshear, who squeaked in four years ago by just over 5,000 votes out of 1.4 million ballots cast, might beat the odds again in a state that Donald Trump carried by almost 26 points. Although nonpartisan polling of this race has been sparse, Beshear has led GOP state Attorney General Daniel Cameron in nine publicly released polls since June by an average of 7.8 points.

While you could dismiss his popularity as a quirk of his last name (his father was also a popular Democratic governor) or the way Kentucky’s veto-proof GOP majority in the state Legislature sets the legislative agenda, Beshear’s embrace of Democratic Party priorities and refusal to prop himself up with Joe Manchin–style triangulation makes him, if not a potential national figure for the party, at least a role model for how to hold the line in hostile territory.

The Democratic Party’s collapse in states like Kentucky, which Bill Clinton carried twice, has put the party in an increasingly difficult position in the Electoral College and the Senate. No Democrat has won a U.S. Senate election there since 1992, and no Democratic presidential candidate has come closer than 15 points to victory this century. Kentucky combines nearly every conceivable weakness for the modern party: It’s the seventh-whitest state, and it ranks 45^th in the percentage of the population with at least a college degree. It is 33^rd in the share of residents between 25 and 34 years old (a demographic that tends to heavily lean blue). If Democrats could make inroads in places like Kentucky, it would do wonders for their national prospects. Has Beshear cracked this most difficult of codes?

Yes and no. The answer might be more structural than particular to Beshear. In a 2010 article, political scientist Adam Brown found that voters assign responsibility for economic outcomes in a partisan fashion, especially when the governor and president are from different parties. In a struggling economy, for example, Republican voters will blame their Democratic governor, rather than a Republican president, for their travails. But in Brown’s study, this effect disappeared when the president and governor were from the same party, as is the case in Kentucky today.

Since that study’s release, the explanatory value of partisanship has only grown, to the point that many voters won’t acknowledge a strong economy at all if a president from the opposing party is overseeing it. Prior to the 2016 election, 81 percent of Republicans, according to Gallup, said the economy was getting worse. A week after Trump was elected, that number had dropped to 44 percent, while the share of Democrats saying the economy was getting better plummeted 15 points. Gallup’s index of economic confidence showed huge gains for Republicans and huge losses for Democrats that correspond to the party changeover in the White House, unrelated to any meaningful change in underlying economic conditions.

How does this all play out in Kentucky, with a Democratic governor and a Democratic president and standard partisan divisions about how to evaluate the country’s economic performance? In a 2020 study, political scientists Jennifer Wolak and Srinivas Parinandi found that governors are popular when policy outcomes align with their ideological preferences, and that the unemployment rate is heavily correlated with a governor’s approval ratings. They push back on the idea that governors rise and fall solely with presidential popularity and argue that “voters may be better equipped to evaluate governors on substantive outcomes than has previously been suggested.”

The state’s voters are reluctant to credit Joe Biden with a robust economy, but objectively, Kentucky has done well since the pandemic. The unemployment rate is slightly lower than it was before COVID, and job growth has been strong. Inflation in the state has not been as bad as elsewhere. And the credit for that has to go somewhere—if not to Biden, then to the state executive, who continues to outpace his Republican opponent when voters are asked whom they trust on the economy.

Beshear’s inability to veto Republican legislation also means that a slew of Trump-era GOP priorities have become law under his watch. A trigger law went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, and Beshear was powerless to stop it (though the state’s voters did defeat a referendum to insert language into the Kentucky Constitution that would have explicitly removed abortion rights from the state’s legal framework). He vetoed but also ultimately could not stop a broad anti-trans law from taking effect, which, he said, “rips away the freedom of parents to make medical decisions for their children.” And the same thing happened with a boilerplate anti–“critical race theory” education bill that imposed speech restrictions on Kentucky teachers, now on the books despite the governor’s veto.

But even as he’s been unable to block the Republicans’ agenda, Beshear has used his power strategically, signing legislation passed in Frankfort when it has merit and accepting that his ability to ward off conservative priorities is extremely limited. Last year, for example, he endorsed laws to help recruit health care workers to rural Kentucky and to divert some people with mental health problems from prison to supervised release under certain circumstances. He has focused his critique of the state’s abortion ban on its failure to provide exemptions for survivors of rape and incest. He touts investment in green jobs like electric-vehicle battery plants while still publicly toeing the state line on fossil fuels. And he has pursued important reforms pushed by Democrats, like returning the right to vote to formerly incarcerated people.

That means he’s neither a calculated maverick in the Manchin mold who runs away from Democratic priorities at every public opportunity nor some kind of mold-breaking figure who has figured out how to sell the Democratic agenda to reluctant Republicans. What he might be is a master of maximizing his limited powers, tiptoeing around the most divisive issues and taking credit for policies that are popular when they aren’t directly associated with the national party. That could be a blueprint for other red state liberals as well as a messaging strategy for national Democrats looking to win independents and peel off enough Republicans to stay in power next year.

But his popularity also suggests that members of the public are happier with the economy than they tell pollsters when asked about national conditions or Biden’s record. The president’s party has a pretty dim record of winning gubernatorial elections in modern American history. In 2018, with Trump in the White House, Democrats flipped control of the governor’s office in seven states, to the GOP’s one. Yet America’s governors are quite popular right now, and Kentucky’s is riding particularly high, especially given the hostility of his partisan terrain.

The fact that a significant number of Kentucky Republicans and independents give Beshear credit for a healthy economy—one that they keep insisting to national pollsters is a mess—suggests that voters are not mere automatons taking cues from party leaders. They are persuadable and capable of making an independent assessment under the right circumstances. That means that Biden and his allies need to redouble their efforts to identify those elements of his economic record that could have broad, cross-partisan appeal. And although Beshear could still lose to Cameron, a close look at his record isn’t the worst place to start that search.