Kentucky’s Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear retains governorship

Andy Beshear, the Democratic incumbent governor, won a second term in the Republican-leaning state of Kentucky on Tuesday.

Beshear’s hope that his support of abortion rights would persuade voters was realized even as skepticism of the national Democratic party grows in the state.

While much of Beshear’s first term was dominated by his response to a series of natural disasters and the pandemic, his re-election campaign was often focused on dire warnings about the future of abortion rights. He portrayed his Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron, as too extreme on the issue, pointing to his support for the state’s abortion ban, which lacks exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

Beshear’s gubernatorial tenure also included a high-profile mass shooting in Louisville that killed five people, including one of Beshear’s friends. In response, Beshear called on the Republican-led state legislature to enact a red flag law that would allow a judge to order someone’s firearms be removed if they posed a risk to themselves or someone else.

While Beshear has affirmed his belief in the second amendment, days after the 2023 shooting, he said: “I’d like to think Democrats and Republicans – red or blue, anybody on the ideology – can come together and say, ‘If we know somebody is right on that brink of going out and committing a horrendous action, don’t you think we should be able to take action?’”

The election pitted two former law firm colleagues against each other in one of this year’s most high-profile contests. Beshear’s win signals to Joe Biden and other Democrats that they should continue to focus on abortion rights in 2024, when control of Congress and the White House are at stake.

In 2019, Cameron became the first Black candidate to be elected as Kentucky’s attorney general, and he would have been the nation’s first Black Republican governor.

During his campaign, he was lambasted by the family of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman who was killed by three white Louisville police officers during a botched raid on her apartment in March 2020. As attorney general, Cameron oversaw the investigation into Taylor’s killing, and faced criticism for the lack of criminal charges in her death. (Cameron recommended that only one of the officers involved be indicted, and only for the wanton endangerment of Taylor’s neighbor.)

Cameron has affirmed his support for the current Kentucky abortion law, which bans all abortions except when carried out to save a pregnant woman’s life or to prevent a disabling injury.

Kayla Long cited abortion rights as an important issue for her as she cast her ballot for Beshear in Shelbyville, between Louisville and Frankfort, on a mild fall morning.

“I think it’s a woman’s right to choose,” she said. “And I don’t think politicians should be involved in that choice at all.”

Another Shelbyville voter, Kent Herold, backed Cameron and shared his candidate’s criticism of Biden for his handling of the economy amid surging inflation during his term.

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“Do you go grocery shopping? Do you buy gas? Let’s be real. I’m not sure he knows what he’s doing,” Herold said.

Beshear played up his stewardship of the state’s economy, pointing to record high economic development and historically low unemployment during his term, while promising the state is poised for more growth. And he pushed back against his challenger’s efforts to turn the election into a referendum on Biden, at one point dismissing party affiliation as a box to be checked off.

“This attorney general knows that if this race is about me versus him, that you know who I am and how I’ve led and how I’ve shown up every day,” Beshear said during another of their debates.

The election might also signal dwindling enthusiasm for the “parents’ rights” movements, which Republicans have increasingly touted. In a message tailored to the state’s legions of conservative voters, Cameron had criticized Beshear’s veto of a sweeping bill that banned gender-affirming care for young transgender people. The veto was overridden by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature. Beshear said the bill “rips away” the freedom of parents to make medical decisions for their children, adding that “all children are children of God”.

With this win, Beshear continues his family’s political winning streak in a state that has trended heavily toward Republicans. Beshear’s father, Steve Beshear, is a well-regarded former two-term governor. Andy Beshear was narrowly elected as attorney general in 2015 and as governor in 2019, when he ousted the Republican incumbent, Matt Bevin.