Kentucky’s Beshear Could Offer Democrats Path Back to the White House, If He Can Tame the Party’s ‘Groups’

FRANKFORT, Kentucky — The Republican Party was declared moribund after its 1964 presidential nominee, Senator Goldwater of Arizona, lost 44 states and 61 percent of the popular vote. Yet the party won five of the next six presidential elections, 1968-1988. Democrats interrupted their losing streak in 1976 by nominating a Southern governor, Jimmy Carter, and ended their losing ways in 1992 and 1996 by nominating a Southern governor, Arkansas’s Bill Clinton, whose running mate was a Southern senator, Al Gore. Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, might remind his party’s nominating electorate of this.He is agreeably uncoy about his interest in becoming president, soon. His electoral and governing achievements are impressive.He won statewide to become attorney general, then defeated a Republican incumbent governor whose sandpapery personality rubbed Kentuckians the wrong way and made them relish Mr. Beshear’s meliorative style that has earned him the title of Kentucky’s Mr. Rogers. He has twice won the governorship of a state that President Trump won three times by an average of 29 percentage points. Republicans hold all other statewide offices, and they control the legislature.This column favors a constitutional amendment: “No person shall be eligible to be president who is or ever has been a senator.” Governors administer things rather larger than a Senate office and are individually accountable for responding to large challenges. Mr. Beshear is much admired for his handling of some of the most serious floods and tornadoes in his state’s recorded history.His fluency in the political art of saying just enough to stop short of imprudent clarity might owe something to the fact that he is to the manner born: His father was a two-term governor. He is, however, specific in his denunciation of the Republican-controlled Congress’s enactment of Mr. Trump’s agenda in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”Attached to legislation, the phrase “big beautiful” is invariably oxymoronic: Such bills are jumbles of pork, and most members of Congress probably would flunk a quiz about what is in this one. If Mr. Beshear is right about its consequences, he is rightly incensed:One-third of Kentuckians and half of the state’s children, he says, are on Medicaid, which covers 40 percent of the state’s births and 70 percent of long-term elderly care. He says that under his administration, 600,000 are no longer uninsured. The legislation will reverse many gains and will mean a $1 billion hit to the state’s health care. He says Medicaid cuts put 35 rural hospitals at risk. In many small communities, the local hospital is second only to the school system in terms of the number of people it employs. A pregnant woman near her due date might have a three-hour drive to a hospital, and then perhaps the expense of a hotel stay.To compete for his party’s nomination, Mr. Beshear must, as all Democratic candidates must, run the gantlet of “the groups.” For three more years, Republicans will not have a similar problem, because they are members less of a party than of a personality cult. These factions are ideologically contentious and prone to be a disproportionate share of the vote in primaries. They often have agendas that strike many people outside the groups as cultural aggression.In 1992, Mr. Clinton underscored his credentials as a centrist by publicly rebuking a Black rapper, Sister Souljah, with a penchant for extreme racial rhetoric. In 2028, Democratic candidates might seek their Sister Souljah moments by conspicuously saying “no” to one or more items on the agendas of one or more of “the groups.”Consider an issue the political salience of which was missed by many Democratic candidates in 2024: biological men competing in women’s sports. Mr. Beshear, explaining his veto of a bill (a veto since overridden) that would have prevented this, says it was mean-spirited, and he doesn’t want government making the rules (in government schools?), and he wants local communities to decide these things. Such dusty answers will not get him through November 7, 2028.Kentucky’s transition from reliance on coal and tobacco has been facilitated by being a right-to-work state (no thanks to Democrats) and by diversification that, he says, includes $2.7 billion in Toyota investments producing 10,070 new jobs during Mr. Beshear’s governorship, and soon will include two large battery plants. There also is the Bourbon Trail: Tourists come from around the world to stroll, or perhaps stagger, through the many distilleries.Kentucky, which is contiguous to seven other states, is a laboratory for learning to speak Middle American, a skill that has atrophied in a Democratic Party with coastal obsessions. Mr. Beshear is the great-grandson and grandson of Baptist preachers. His cadences will be heard.The Washington Post

Kentucky’s Beshear Could Offer Democrats Path Back to the White House, If He Can Tame the Party’s ‘Groups’

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