CAMPBELLSVILLE, Ky. — Bradley Taylor is worried about the moral direction the country and hishome state of Kentucky are taking these days.
The 47-year-old factory worker is a self-described Christian conservative. He cites an erosion of Biblical values and the debate over transgender Americans participating in athletics − which he called “outrageous” and “immoral”− as one of the reasons he’s supporting Republican Daniel Cameron for Kentucky governor.
“It blows my mind,” he said. “I never thought I would ever see a day like this.”
Taylor listened intently as Cameron − flanked by Arkansas Gov. Sara Huckabee Sanders and Riley Gaines, an outspoken anti-trans conservative activist − ripped into Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear at a campaign event days before the Nov. 7 election.
“The reason we’re gonna win is because I keep talking about the things that Kentuckians care about,” Cameron, the Bluegrass State’s attorney general, told USA TODAY, before boarding his campaign bus.
But even Taylor, a native of the small central Kentucky town of Campbellsville, thinks it will be hard to turn Beshear into a boogeyman for Republican voters.
“I never hear anything negative about him,” Taylor said. “I turn on the news, anytime on the radio there’s nothing negative said about him. Nothing’s ever called controversial. Every time you hear his name, it’s always positive.”
Even Cameron walks a tightrope when prosecuting the case against his one-time law firm colleague. In his final TV ad ahead of Election Day, the attorney general admits: “Beshear is a nice enough guy.”
Republicans rule Kentucky politically, yet its liberal-leaning governor remains one of the country’s most popular figures, even as the Democratic brand takes a nosedive in the state.
A poll released by Morning Consult, for instance, shows 68% of Kentuckians disapprove of the job President Joe Biden is doing. The same survey finds 60% of voters approve of Beshear’s performance.
“I’d like to think that it’s about doing a good job, working as hard as you can every day and caring about people because we’ve been through a ton,” Beshear told USA TODAY in an interview when asked about his first-term high marks.
“People need to know that while the governor doesn’t always have all the answers and all the solutions that he deeply cares about the people of Kentucky, and I deeply care.”
Beshear, Cameron tied in campaign’s final days
Experts say Beshear’s charm coupled with incumbency is the irresistible force that gives him an edge going into Tuesday. Those same observers, however, believe Kentucky’s conservatism is the immovable object that gives Cameron a chance to score an upset.
“One reason this race is so hard to predict is a whole lot of these Kentucky voters who have been riding the elephant election after election, still don’t think of themselves as Republicans,” said University of Kentucky political science professor Stephen Voss.
“Kentucky voters might tilt in a conservative direction,” he added, “but they’re not ideological like the state legislature on issues like abortion, and changes in sexuality.”
Kentucky’s last gubernatorial contest, which Beshear won, was decided by roughly 5,000 votes. And as many predicted, the 2023 race has tightened in its final stretch.
A new poll from Emerson College Polling, released Friday, shows Cameron, who has trailed in every public survey thus far, crawling to a tie with Beshear at 47% each, with 4% of voters undecided and 2% supporting someone else.
When voters still on the fence were pushed on which candidate they lean toward, Cameron gained the edge with a 49% to 48% lead over Beshear.
Though the state’s demographics and political makeup don’t mirror the U.S. as a whole, this race has taken a larger meaning ahead of the 2024 battle for the White House.
That’s because Kentucky’s gubernatorial races have been a consistent bellwether for the presidential election the following year since 2003, and the stateprovides clues for political strategists in both parties about how their campaigns should respond to the mood of voters nationally.
Beshear is running heavily on abortion rights, jobs and infrastructure whereas Cameron is leaning into the debate surrounding rights for transgender people, strains on an average American’s wallets and Biden’s approval rating.
Will Andy Beshear be a blueprint for Democrats?
Since 2020, Beshear has waged a kind-of aw shucks offensive that vexes conservative foes. If he wins, many liberals see him as a contender for the U.S. Senate or vice presidency.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, chairman of the Democratic Governor’s Association, which has poured $13.1 million into the race, said the party has a “deep bench” of governors ready for the national stage, but Beshear stands out in many people’s view.
“In baseball they’ve got this phrase, and Andy is it—a five tool athlete,” Murphy said. “He can do it all, including building consensus, reach across the aisle, cut out the national noise, and just put his head down and lead almost like anybody I know.”
Some elements of Beshear’s popularity can’t be replicated for other Democrats across the country.The son of former Gov. Steve Beshear, who first ran for public office in the late 1970s, Andy Beshear has benefited largely from being a familiar name and the face of government relief efforts, according to experts, voters and foes.
At the outset of the pandemic, Beshear had a statewide audience to himself for months when he provided updates on the health crisis. He also responded with a similar compassionate tone during widespread flooding and devastating tornadoes on opposite sides of the state.
“Kentucky’s misfortune has been Beshear’s political good fortune because it put him in the position of doing things we want leaders to do. You know, helping,” Voss said.
Evelyn Todd Watson, of Louisville, said that went a long way with voters like her. She said a governor showing that level of personal connection with average people goes beyond politics.
“He’s a humble man, and he’s caring, and when we had the pandemic he was for us,” Watson said. “A lot of governors, they’re not worried about us. He seems like he’s worried about our wellbeing as well as the community that we live in.”
Other Democratic voters told USA TODAY Beshear’s personal touch with people supplements his positions, such as supporting unions, expanding health care and raising the minimum wage.
“Andy’s faith drew me in the first place. He came to our church. He spoke and when I saw his faith, I was going to give him a chance. He proved to me that he was everything I thought he was during the COVID years,” said Richard Price, a city worker in Louisville.
Republicans try to tie ‘TV Andy’ to Biden
Republican officials who’ve tussled with the Beshear administration paint a much different portrait.
“I think popularity is a mile wide and an inch thick for him,” Republican Damon Thayer, the GOP floor leader in the state Senate, told USA TODAY.
“He’s a fraud. He is a legacy candidate who would be nowhere without the last name.”
Thayer and other GOP officials in the state gripe Beshear often takes credit for popular agenda items passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, such as a bill cutting the individual income tax rate from 4.5% to 4%.
“There’s TV Andy and then there’s Frankfort Andy, and they’re not the same person,” said Republican Jon Park, a Shelby County official who served in former Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration.
Across the state, Cameron has tried to convey this sentiment to voters by turning Beshear’s assets into liabilities and seeking to tie him to national debates.
He argues, for instance, the pandemic restrictions that the governor used to protect people from COVID-19 ultimately hurt small businesses, targeted places of worship and led to significant learning loss for Kentucky students when schools went virtual.
The strategy appears to be working with the help of conservative PACs, which have spent a combined $22.4 million against Beshear since the May primary.
Polling by Morning Consult released in October shows Beshear’s net job approval with GOP voters − who make up a plurality of Kentucky’s electorate − declined by 11% when compared to the previous three months.
Those close to Cameron, who is a protege of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., believe making this race a proxy battle for next year’s likely presidential election rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trumpis the better counterpunch to the governor’s popularity.
“What Cameron and the Republicans have done is said ‘no, no, no, no, this is a simple vote. You’re either with Beshear and Biden, or you’re with Cameron and Trump.’ And in Kentucky, strategically that’s a pretty fair bet,” said Republican consultant Scott Jennings, who worked on Cameron’s 2019 attorney general race.
Kentucky Democrats lean into abortion restrictions
If the Kentucky race provides a preview into what Democrats want the 2024 election to center around, the Beshear campaign’s aggressive advertisements on abortion rights send a clear signal.
In one 30-second spot, a young woman calls out Cameron for his support of a state law triggering a near-total ban that also blocks sexual assault and incest victims from having an abortion.
“I was raped by my stepfather after years of sexual abuse,” says the woman. “I was 12.”
Former Kentucky auditor Adam Edelen, who ran to the left of Beshear in the 2019 Democratic primary for governor, said this represents a major shift in southern politics.
“You have a Democratic candidate for governor who really didn’t even have a position on abortion until a couple of years ago, running ads now on protecting a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions,” he said.
Cameron, who has defended the state’s abortion ban in court, was put on his heels as a result, saying he would be OK with allowing some exceptions, if elected. That contradicted an earlier comment in April when he said would continue to defend the state’s abortion restrictions “as is” and would “not waiver.”
The Emerson poll shows 55% of Kentuckians oppose the current state law blocking abortion with no exception for rape or incest.
Edelen said it was surprising how poorly the Cameron campaign responded, given that he and other Republicans knew Kentuckians had rejected a ballot initiative last November to prohibit abortion in the state constitution.
“Daniel Cameron is an excellent communicator and he is charismatic,” he said. “But he’s flip flopped like a banked catfish on abortion.”
Black voters, groups resist Cameron’s historic bid
One feature of the election that has turned particularly nasty surrounds the issue of race, police accountability and Cameron’s bid to be the state’s first Black governor.
Progressive groups have invested heavily against Cameron over his role in the case of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was shot and killed by Louisville Metro Police officers serving a no-knock warrant at her apartment in 2020.
Civil rights leaders and other activists have for years slammed Cameron over his handling of the case as attorney general, after none of the three officers who fired at Taylor were charged in her death.
That has nationalized the race in the eyes of many African American voters and activists, who believe Cameron’s decision not to aggressively pursue charges was politically motivated.
Other groups say his views on race and diversity, such as opposing affirmative action, put him at odds with the majority of Black voters.
“Even if you don’t live in Kentucky, you still fight this election,” political commentator Marc Lamont Hill, host of The Grio, said.
Black Voters Matter, a progressive PAC that has been mobilizing voters in Kentucky, referred to the attorney general as, “uncle Daniel Cameron”, referencing the often-misused caricature of “Uncle Tom.”
Another ad from the group pictured half of Cameron’s face next to the character of “Stephen,” a Black enslaved character in the 2012 movie “Django Unchained.”
“All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk,” the ad said.
Ryan Grim, a lobbyist for the union Kentucky FOP, which endorsed Cameron this year, said Taylor’s death was a tragedy, but many of his members felt Beshear didn’t speak up for law enforcement during the protests in 2020.
He said Cameron’s work in the case was based on the law, but he admits rank-and-file officers and police union members in the state responded by flocking toward the attorney general, after supporting Beshear in 2019.
“I acknowledge it had a political dividend,” Grim said. “… I don’t believe that’s how the attorney general views things and I don’t think in that moment he looked at it from a political standpoint.”
The Emerson College survey shows race is a dividing line in the gubernatorial race. Among white voters, Cameron held a roughly four-point lead over Beshear, 49% to 45%.
For Black voters, Beshear held a massive lead over Cameron, 78% to 16%.
Reporter Lucas Aullbach contributed to this story.