In the Kentucky race for governor that culminated with Election Day this Tuesday, the Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear won in a county that went for Donald Trump by a staggering 59 percentage points in 2020! The county, as highlighted by the media and advocacy organization MeidasTouch, is Letcher County, which Beshear carried per early results by several percent.
This time around, Beshear got some 52 percent of the vote from the county, while GOP challenger Daniel Cameron got 48 percent. In 2020? Trump got 79.1 percent, while eventual national victor Joe Biden got 19.7 percent. And there were roughly similar electoral progressions elsewhere. Beshear won Breathitt County, which was hard hit by flooding in his first term, by 22 percent. And back in 2020, Trump won the same jurisdiction in his campaign for another term by over 50 percentage points.
Maybe Beshear should run for a higher office some day.
In the meantime, he has prevailed against a candidate endorsed by Trump who’d been criticized by the Beshear campaign for his stances on abortion and a school voucher program, which if enacted would take funds meant for public schools to support individual educations outside that system — potentially imposing serious, additional strain on Kentucky’s public schools. On the abortion question, Cameron expressed support for Kentucky’s current system of restrictions, which doesn’t include exceptions for rape or incest. (Kentucky’s legislature is GOP-dominated.) He suggested he’d back such exceptions if presented with such a plan by the legislature but resisted going further. And that clearly wasn’t a winning strategy.
Abortion rights keep winning, considering also on Tuesday voters in Ohio approved an amendment to their state Constitution putting protections for abortion in place. And in Virginia, Democrats took control of both chambers of the state legislature heading into next year, putting up a blockade to the anti-abortion agenda from the state’s Republican governor.
