Why Deep-Red Kentucky Reelected Its Democratic Governor

Updated at 8:58 p.m. ET on November 7, 2023

The GOP controls nearly everything in Kentucky, a state that Donald Trump carried by 26 points in 2020. Republicans hold both U.S. Senate seats and five of Kentucky’s six House seats; they dominate both chambers of the state legislature.

What Republicans don’t occupy—and won’t for the next four years—is Kentucky’s most powerful post. The state’s governor is Andy Beshear, a Democrat elected in 2019 who won a second term tonight. Beshear defeated Daniel Cameron, the state’s 37-year-old Republican attorney general, allowing Democrats to maintain one of their most surprising footholds in southern politics.

Beshear, 45, owes his success in a deep-red state to a combination of competent governance, political good fortune, and family lineage. His father, Steve, was a popular two-term governor who governed as a moderate and won the admiration of fellow Democrats for leadership during the coronavirus pandemic and then later in his tenure during a series of natural catastrophes—, , and . The crises have made the governor a near-constant presence on local news in the state, where allies and opponents alike usually refer to him by his first name. “I joke that Andy Beshear has 150 percent name ID” in Kentucky, Representative Morgan McGarvey, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, told me. “It’s because everybody knows who he is. And they actually know him.”