Politicians and political buffs love few things more than poring over recent election results. They study them the way fortune-tellers examine tea leaves. And for the same reason — they’re looking for signs indicating how the next presidential election will go.
With gubernatorial contests in only three states this year, the pickings were slim. Yet surprisingly, many students of politics overlooked what may be a new bellwether: Kentucky. The Bluegrass State picks its governor in the off-year immediately preceding a presidential election. And in the four previous cycles before 2019, the party that won the governor’s mansion there went on to win the White House twelve months later. Consider the evidence.
In 2003, Republican Ernie Fletcher was elected governor. The following year, President George W. Bush was reelected.
In 2007, Democrat Steve Beshear won. In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama also won the presidency.
In 2011, Beshear was reelected. In 2012, Obama was, too.
In 2015, Republican Matt Bevin emerged victorious. In 2016, Republican President Trump did as well.
Which brings us to the Nov. 5, 2019 election.
For those of you who don’t follow politics with the intensity most people reserve for college football, incumbent Bevin was denied a second term in a squeaker. Democrat Andy Beshear (son of former governor Steve) was chosen instead.
Based on that, we can expect a Democrat to win the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. next year, right? Not so fast. Because the usual political rules don’t count in the age of Trump.
The Nov. 5 election was not so much a vote for Beshear as a repudiation of Bevin. His “my way or the highway” executive style rubbed many Kentuckians the wrong way, earning him the unenviable spot as the most unpopular governor in America. That ill-will caught up with him at the ballot box. Beshear inched across the finish line with an edge of 5,136 votes over Bevin, out of 1.4 million cast.
But although the candidate at the top of the GOP ticket didn’t fare well, the rest did. In fact, Republicans won every single partisan constitutional office up for grabs, including attorney general, secretary of state (beating a former Miss America), auditor, state treasurer, and agriculture commissioner, plus two state representative special elections to boot.
Kentuckians didn’t reject the party of Trump. They rejected Bevin and Bevin alone. Ouch!
It took nine days, but Bevin eventually conceded after a statewide recanvas of voting machines found no irregularities. That made further challenge of the results futile.
Maybe Bevin took the prudent course. When Kentucky had a similarly close gubernatorial election in 1899, the ending was unpleasant.
In that election, Republican William Taylor got 48.4% to Democrat William Goebel’s 47.8%. There were nasty allegations of voter fraud and widespread ill will. The whole ugly mess was eventually dumped into the state legislature’s lap. Democrats controlled the General Assembly, and they picked fellow Democrat Goebel. But it didn’t end there.
On the morning of January 30, 1900, a gunshot rang out of a government office window. The governor-elect was gravely injured. He was carried across the street to a hotel, took the oath of office on his deathbed on Jan. 31, and died three days later. (There are two versions of his last words. One account says they were, “Tell my friends to be brave, fearless, and loyal to the common people.” The other says it was, “Doc, that was a damned bad oyster.”)
With Kentucky now spared the likelihood of Beshear-Bevin bloodshed, will the election’s outcome be a harbinger for 2020’s presidential results?
The short answer: Who knows?
Still, it does reaffirm that famous line from a popular poem written long ago that says, “and politics [are] the damndest—in Kentucky.” Though folks in Louisiana and Cook County, Illinois, will likely disagree.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He’s VP of communications at Ivory Tusk Consulting, a South Carolina-based agency. A former broadcast journalist and government communicator, his “Holy Cow! History” column is available at jmarkpowell.com.
