In an interview this Tuesday on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear pointed listeners to the need for “empathy and compassion” in electoral politics. He recently launched a new political action committee, which will allow him to provide support to active candidates following his victory in 2023 in his campaign for another four-year term in his GOP-leaning state.
“I think we showed that if you stick to your principles, if you run on the things that you want to do, how you’re going to help people, and you don’t back down, you push back against that hate, you try to bring people together, that there is a path to victory even in tough states,” Beshear said. “Across the country, people need to see that there is a road to victory that’s run through empathy and compassion for our fellow human being.”
Beshear was challenged in the 2023 general election by Daniel Cameron, a Republican who then served as Kentucky’s Attorney General and received the endorsement of Donald Trump. The Democrat ultimately won by a margin larger than his lead in election results when he nabbed his first term.
Amid the campaign, Cameron, like other Republicans, turned to complaints about transgender individuals and Beshear’s support for those people — contravening GOP legislators. In turn, Beshear and his team challenged Cameron on issues including abortion and school funding, focusing in the latter area specifically on Cameron’s argued alignment with a push for school vouchers, meaning a program that uses money meant for public schooling to support individual students’ private school educations. Implementing school vouchers could significantly impact already struggling public school systems, imposing strain in areas where there aren’t even many private school options available allowing students to make a switch.
Beshear also highlighted Cameron’s support for abortion restrictions in Kentucky that didn’t even allow exceptions in covered periods for situations of rape and incest, effectively forcing victims to continue with a pregnancy unless they can, perhaps, get to another state.
