Can Trump ensure a Republican governor in Kentucky?
We are heading into the final stretch of the 2023 elections. The only big race hanging in the balance is for Kentucky governor.
With a huge campaign war chest built over four years, the Democrat, Andy Beshear sprinted out to an early lead. His own campaign raised over $25 million so far, five times that of his challenger, Attorney General Daniel Cameron. He also has millions more in Democrat dark money.
Cameron, though, has closed the gap in the latest polling. Cameron is the better speaker and showed it in recent debates. Beshear, by contrast, has a sad-sack personality and uses an early Jimmy Carter speaking cadence, to show he is some sort of good old boy, which he is not. He is the scion of a very wealthy and corrupt political family.
Establishment media has largely protected him from his poor performance in office. He did little more than raise money and play golf the last four years.
Meanwhile, the state government had several serious administrative meltdowns as he did nothing. In 2020, the unemployment insurance system was shut down in the middle of COVID. Thousands laid off had to wait months to collect anything. Then the transfer of the state’s driver’s license offices from local to state control created another mess that is only now being remedied.
Beshear and the Democrats concentrated their fire on Cameron for the current state abortion law, which does not have a rape/incest exception. Left unsaid: That will be decided by the Republican Legislature and the courts. Kentucky governors don’t have much say in this matter.
They also attacked Cameron for wanting to reform Medicaid. Again, that may not be a real issue. Previous governor Matt Bevin lost in federal courts over the same thing, and the Biden administration would stop such an effort anyway.
Cameron has found traction on the crime issue, over a Beshear veto (easily overridden) of a transgender exclusion law for girls’ sports, and generally with Beshear’s connections to the Biden administration, deeply unpopular in Kentucky.
The question now is, where is Donald Trump? It was Trump who propelled Cameron to his primary victory , and his massive popularity in the state makes him a likely game-winner in any close election.

Trump has been holding rallies across America these last weeks, just not in Kentucky. State GOP leaders are clamoring for Trump to show up and push Cameron across the finish line. The state’s most respected political commentator also thinks a Trump appearance would be critical. So far, though, no public appearance announced, or even a new TV ad from The Donald.
Time is running out.
Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Ad Free / Commenting Login
FOLLOW US ON
Recent Articles
- Trump-O-Phobia Drives Some Americans to Questionable Greener Pastures Overseas
- A Businessman and a Brilliant Strategist
- A Remarkable Headline for a Fascinating Story
- Democrats Unmask Themselves
- How Mexico Became China’s Trojan Horse in U.S. Trade
- Covid Redux: The Bird Flu Scare
- A Taste of the Swamp
- Do We Have 677 Unelected Presidents?
- Global Relations beyond the Prime Directive
- The Democrat Party: The Enemy Within?
Blog Posts
- Speaker Mike Johnson reveals why the Autopen scandal is a big deal
- The CDC website really needs to update its COVID protocols
- Hands in your back pocket
- Birthright citizenship: The facts
- ‘She’s my little Musk coupe’
- The Biden White House mixed it up with not one but two autopens
- The Shakespeare National Trust determines that Shakespeare is ‘not to be’
- Carville tells Democrats to quit making asses of themselves
- About that Texas congressman who called the transgender member of Congress 'Mister' ...
- A federal district court judge erases Trump’s ability to rid the country of enemy aliens
- In the UK, rape gangs are OK, pictures of women sans hijabs not so much
- Bacha Bazi still being practiced in Afghanistan; young boys sexually abused
- UN judge convicted of forcing a woman into indentured servitude
- What are capital gains, really?