Yesterday, Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear vetoed a bill “that would ban transgender athletes from participating on girls’ school sports teams from sixth grade through college,” Zachary Evans reports. “The bill stipulates that a student’s ‘biological sex’ on their birth certificate determines whether the student may participate in women’s or men’s sports. The Kentucky Senate passed the bill 26-9 on March 24, while the state House approved the bill 70-23 in a vote earlier that month.”
Kentucky is a red state — one of the reddest in the nation, in fact. Its Cook Partisan Voting Index (PVI) currently sits at R+15. In November 2019, Governor Beshear unseated his scandal-plagued incumbent Republican predecessor, Matt Bevin — then the most unpopular governor in the country — by 0.37 percentage points. Notably, Bevin had also been weakened by a bruiser of a primary battle, where he squeaked by with just 52 percent of the vote.
Beshear is up for reelection in 2023. And he just handed his prospective opponents a major political win. There isn’t state-level polling on the issue in Kentucky, but recent history in other red states suggests that Republican voters are overwhelmingly in favor of limiting athletic participation based on biological sex. Other red-state governors who have found themselves on the wrong side of this issue have been the subject of harsh political backlash. Utah’s Spencer Cox was overridden by the state legislature in a matter of days when he vetoed a ban on biological males in girls’ sports, and Indiana Republicans have vowed to do the same to their governor’s recent veto of analogous legislation. Additionally, a recent poll of Indiana — which holds a Cook PVI of R+9 — shows that state voters support a ban at the K–12 level by 38 points, and at the collegiate level by a margin of 41.
Kentucky Republicans should be paying close attention. If they hope to take back the governorship in 19 months, this would be as good a place as any to start.