Momentum shifts in Kentucky in the race everyone should be talking about
Salena Zito
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SHEPHERDSVILLE, Kentucky — Even before the new poll from Emerson College came out Friday morning, the ground was shifting in Daniel Cameron’s favor across the state in the Republican Kentucky attorney general’s race against incumbent Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) for the state’s highest office.
Much like Cameron’s successful run for Kentucky attorney general in 2019, where he made history as both the first black person from either party to win statewide office and the first Republican in 70 years to be the commonwealth’s top prosecutor, his candidacy has been largely ignored by the national press and vilified by the local press.
Cameron holds conservative core values that are attractive to Kentucky voters, but what makes his candidacy linger in the minds of voters who are “OK” with Beshear is his unwavering aspiration in whatever issue he is addressing.
A month ago, Emerson’s polling showed Beshear leading Cameron by a whopping 16 percentage points. Friday’s poll showed the men tied with both candidates at 47%, with 4% of voters undecided and 2% supporting someone else.
Emerson College Polling Executive Director Spencer Kimball said initially Beshear led because of his ability to separate himself from Biden. That has changed as the coalition of voters that make up the Republican Party have come home, thanks in large part to Cameron’s talent in appealing to all parts of that coalition that includes suburban college-educated Republicans who have strayed from the party, as well as evangelical voters, suburban parents concerned about their children’s education, and working-class voters who were once part of the Democratic New Deal coalition.
But if you follow Cameron’s “Fight for Kentucky Bus Tour” and talk to the voters who gathered outside the coffee shops, manufacturing shops, trade schools, parks, and diners he campaigned in earlier this week, the momentum toward him is obvious among voters who admitted that they might just stay home.
This race, in one way, is eerily similar to the 2015 gubernatorial race where, when nobody thought Matt Bevin was going to win against a quasi-incumbent, Jack Conway, a Democrat who drastically outspent Bevin in a year an unpopular Democrat was in the White House.
And just like that year, now a plethora of social conservative stuff is in the water that has all the social conservatives riled up. Yet there wasn’t a person in this country who thought Bevin was going to win, and at the end of the day, it wasn’t even that close.
Something happened that year that everybody missed, and there is this sense here that that same thing may be flowing in Kentucky with voters similar to the mood of 2015.
Voters who supported Beshear last cycle said they are moving away from him because of what is happening in their children’s schools. “Less than half of Kentucky’s kids can read at grade level,” said one frustrated mother of three, adding, “And [Beshear] never addresses it in a meaningful way. He has never apologized for placing our children in this position in reaction to COVID.”
The mother wasn’t wrong. On Tuesday, data released by Kentucky’s interim education commissioner showed that children are still struggling post-pandemic, with more than half unable to read or do math proficiently.
They are also not going to school. The rate of Kentucky students labeled chronically absent jumped to a whopping 30% in 2022, up from 18% the year before the pandemic.
It is an issue Cameron has passionately run on for the better part of a year, yet Beshear has chosen not to go the Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) route and admit mistakes were made. In fact, it is hard to find an instance of him apologizing for the impact.
What Beshear has run on, bringing battery plants to the state for electric vehicles, has hit a roadblock. Consumers don’t like or can’t afford EVs. And because the market for them is so flat, one of the two plants Ford Motor Co. was set to build here was canceled for the moment, with the company citing that demand for electric was not at the levels anticipated.
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There is a fairly decent chance Wednesday morning that much of the national press will wake up and ask once again, “What happened?” If so, they will have missed two things: first, that education does matter to parents, in particular ones who now see the effects poor education has had on the college-educated students of today who are out in the public square viciously attacking Jewish students, clearly never having been taught much about history.
But they have also missed the potential and talent of Cameron, who is on the cusp of something powerful within the conservative movement.