Beware Reading Too Much Into Kentucky’s Election

Last night, supporters of the Democratic Party had plenty of reasons to celebrate. Although yesterday’s Election Night did not feature many contests compared to a presidential election year or even a midterm, there were a few contests that were greeted with glee by Democrats across the country as potential bellwethers for the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020. The most notable was the Kentucky gubernatorial election, where Matt Bevin, the incumbent Republican, went down to a narrow defeat to Democratic challenger Andy Beshear. This result was hailed as a bellwether in part because, over his four years in office, Bevin compiled a combative, quasi-Trumpian reputation as Governor, including unpopular Medicaid cuts. However, it would be premature to read too much into Kentucky’s gubernatorial result, or any of the other outcomes from last night. As promising as they may seem, the unfolding 2020 campaign could very easily show them to be a fleeting political mirage.

Donald Trump himself certainly went out of his way, unintentionally of course, to make it appear as if Matt Bevin’s defeat was about him. After all, Trump campaigned heavily for Bevin, exhorting Kentucky Republicans at a rally that “you can’t let [Bevin losing] happen to me!” Basking in the schadenfreude of yet another humiliation for Trump is certainly never not worthwhile, what both Trump and his detractors forget is that, in a way, something very similar already happened to Trump four years ago.

In late 2015, with Trump already leading in the polls for the Republican nomination, the GOP suffered a devastating result in that year’s elections. That would be the race for Louisiana governor, where Democrat John Bel Edwards won a resounding victory (by a much wider margin than Beshear’s victory over Bevin), defeating David Vitter by twelve percentage points. It was a disastrous result in a state that Mitt Romney had carried by seventeen points and Trump would go on to carry by twenty the next year.

This defeat, a huge outlier in terms of national politics, was due to the fact that the election was primarily influenced by local factors such as the crippling unpopularity of outgoing Republican governor Bobby Jindal. Furthermore, the Democrat Edwards was an outlier in terms of his own party, opposed to abortion and gun control. Politically, he represents the last of a dying breed, the Blue Dog Democrats, socially (and racially in the pre-Civil Rights era) conservative, sometimes economically populist, who dominated Southern politics at the state level from the end of Reconstruction up to the midterm elections of 1994.

Andy Beshear is not quite cut from the same Blue Dog cloth as John Bel Edwards; he is pro-choice, and as Kentucky’s Attorney General refused to defend the state’s anti-abortion laws in court, an issue that Bevin tried to make use of during the campaign. He did, however, fall into the longstanding political tradition of being part of a local dynasty- his father, Steve Beshear, was a forty-year fixture in Kentucky politics, serving as a state legislator, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and finally Governor himself for two terms, winning reelection at the height of the Tea Party movement in 2011.

But even more than Beshear’s famous name, what ultimately helped him more than anything was Bevin’s crippling unpopularity. In addition to the aforementioned Medicaid cuts, he attempted to push through cuts to retirement benefits in a state that is in the upper half of all U.S. states in median age. His cuts to education caused the state’s public school teachers to go on strike- such labor actions had been proven winners against conservative governments even in stats such as Oklahoma, politically an even deeper shade of red than Kentucky. As late as October, Bevin’s approval rating stood at a miserable 34 percent, with over 50 percent disapproval. And this in a state where Trump’s own approval ratings remain majority favorable. In such a deep hole politically, Bevin’s only move remaining was to raise as much rhetorical fire and brimstone as he could over Beshear’s pro-life stance, and even in conservative Kentucky, that proved to be thin gruel for voters.

The irony is that Trump’s foolish comments about the election belied the fact that his campaigning for Bevin actually did, in all likelihood, make the final result as close as it was rather than a blowout, such as the 2015 Louisiana election was. And the Republicans did perform very well in Kentucky’s other statewide elections, retaining supermajorities in the state legislature and retaking the offices of state Attorney General (vacated by Beshear as he ran for Governor) and Secretary of State, which had also previously been held by a Democrat. Trump should have no reason to worry about the state’s eight electoral votes next year, nor, unfortunately, should Mitch McConnell have to worry about his own prospects when his name appears on the ballot besides Trump.

It would be a mistake to entirely dismiss the potential bellwhether status of this year’s elections. After all, the trend across the map was positive for Democrats. The party succeeded in flipping control of the Virginia State Senate, which gives them control of all three branches of that state’s government. This development is particularly critical given that the coming 2020 Census will afford Democrats the opportunity to favorably redraw the state’s congressional districts, which were gerrymandered by a Republican-controlled legislature in 2010. Even in deep red Mississippi, Republican candidate Tate Reeves was strongly tested by his Democratic opponent Jim Hood, who held Reeves to the narrowest margin of victory by a Republican candidate since 2003.

In the case of Kentucky, contrasting the defeat by Bevin with the victories of Republicans elsewhere in the state would show that his defeat was primarily due to his own unpopularity. However, the same could have been said of the special election to the Alabama Senate election of 2017. Any other Republican candidate besides Roy Moore would have defeated Doug Jones, but if underlying conditions for the Republican Party had been stronger, perhaps even a candidate as tarnished as Moore would have won. Although those who hope to see Trump defeated nationwide in 2020 should hold off on popping champagne corks this year, overall this year’s elections do contain cause for optimism.