Should the GOP Worry about Losing the Kentucky Governor’s Mansion?

T he Republican party is bracing itself for a possible upset in Kentucky, as incumbent GOP governor Matt Bevin faces a stronger-than-expected challenge from Democratic attorney general Andy Beshear.

Of the three gubernatorial races set to be decided next month, only the contest in the Bluegrass State features an incumbent Republican — Bevin, who won the office in 2015 by promising to govern as a conservative reformer, and cemented his reputation as a rising GOP star in the process. But despite largely keeping those promises, Bevin now finds himself in a dogfight with Beshear.

The most recent poll of the race, from Gravis in June, gave Bevin just a six-point advantage over Beshear, 48 percent to 42 percent, with 10 percent of voters still undecided. According to data from Morning Consult, he is now the least popular governor in the country. At last count, just 32 percent of registered voters in Kentucky approved of his job as governor, compared with 56 percent who disapproved. All of which raises the question: What caused his political stock to plummet from its peak at the time of his comfortable victory four years ago?

In part, the answer has to do with Bevin’s political brand. He ran in 2015 as an outsider willing to tackle politically thankless but necessary tasks, and that’s how he’s governed. He’s attempted unpopular pension, education, and entitlement reforms; pushed right-to-work legislation; and tirelessly touted his efforts to make the state more business-friendly. On his watch, Kentucky’s jobless rate has dropped to its lowest point in state history. He’s even floated the idea of entirely eliminating the state income tax.

Writing in a profile in National Review earlier this summer, John J. Miller pointed out that “his governorship has tested the viability of an agenda of labor-market and entitlement reforms.” And indeed, despite the macroeconomic indicators that Bevin points to as evidence of his success, Ashley Spalding, an analyst with the left-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, suggested to the Louisville-based Courier-Journal this summer that the benefits of his reforms haven’t necessarily been evenly distributed among the state’s residents. “Unemployment is certainly lower than it’s been in a long time, and the job market continues to tighten in parts of the state,” she said. “But Kentucky workers are not experiencing the kind of wage growth and improvement in standard of living that such an economy should afford.”

That said, policy may be only part of the political equation in Bevin’s case. His struggles could also be evidence that Republicans are still finding their footing in a state government that hasn’t always been solidly red. Until Bevin’s election in 2015, Democrats had held the gubernatorial mansion in Lexington for 16 of the previous 20 years, and the Democratic occupant just before Bevin’s 2015 victory was Steve Beshear, the father of Andy, Bevin’s challenger this time around. So while Andy Beshear was first elected to statewide office the same year as Bevin, in a race much closer than Bevin’s, he comes into this campaign with the advantage of a surname well-known to the state’s voters.

Since assuming their posts four years ago, Bevin and Beshear have waged an intense partisan war of which their race for governor looks set to be the culmination.

In 2017, Bevin signed an executive order modifying the structure of state education boards and creating a council for managing charter schools, which had just opened in Kentucky for the first time thanks to a law he’d signed earlier that year. Beshear then filed a lawsuit to block Bevin’s order, asserting that the reordering of education boards exceeded the governor’s authority. A judge ruled later that year that Bevin’s modifications had been legal.

This spring, Beshear again sued to block subpoenas issued by Bevin’s administration in an effort to obtain the attendance records of teachers who used sick days to protest legislation at the Kentucky statehouse, resulting, according to local reports, in some Kentucky public schools’ being closed on some days. In May, a federal judge refused Beshear’s request to block the subpoenas.

Bevin has also expressed support for a proposal from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that would offer federal tax credits for state-based education scholarships. A bill to create a state tax-credit-scholarship program in Kentucky has not yet passed the legislature, but the governor has said he would sign it if it did.

In addition to education reform, health-care policy is likely to be a big factor in the race’s outcome. A recent television ad backed by the Republican Governors Association slammed Beshear for his support of the Affordable Care Act and his opposition to Bevin’s efforts to impose work requirements on some Medicaid recipients.

One of Bevin’s chief policy accomplishments so far is ending individual enrollment in the state’s Obamacare exchange, a decision that was fairly popular at the time but might be becoming less so now. In a state with more than 1 million people enrolled in Medicaid, Bevin has staunchly opposed the ACA’s expansion of the program even as it has become more popular, instead insisting on work requirements that would save the state $300 million over five years.

Because governors have little to do with events in Washington, it isn’t clear how big a role President Trump will play in the results of this contest: His agenda has little relevance to the state-centric policy debates that have dominated the race. But Bevin would likely prefer to have Trump’s support nonetheless.

“You want your governor to have a good relationship with the president no matter your political affiliation,” Bevin said at a business summit over the summer. “It’s good for you, your business, and Kentucky.”

On the day of the GOP primary in May, Trump tweeted, “To the great people of Kentucky, please go out and vote for Matt Bevin today. Very important. He has done a fantastic job for you and America!” In mid-August, he attended a fundraiser for Bevin, and later that month, his son, Donald Trump Jr., headlined a rally for the governor. The president’s gloomy national approval ratings might make him seem like an unattractive campaign-trail partner at the moment, but he trounced Hillary Clinton in Kentucky in 2016, winning by 30 points and taking every county but two after claiming a narrow victory in the state’s Republican primary.

With or without Trump’s support, though, Bevin has the advantage of incumbency and of being a Republican in a state that seems to be at the culmination of slow, decades-long shift from blue to red. Observers in Washington might hope to use the race to forecast Trump’s 2020 fate, but if the governor can hang on to his seat in November, it will say much more about Kentucky’s internal dynamics than about the fate of the national GOP.