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The news in Louisiana is too depressing to discuss just yet, so let’s check in on the Kentucky governor’s race, where just a month before the election, incumbent Democrat Andy Beshear, who we mentioned is a Democrat, has apparently built a substantial lead over Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is definitely a Republican.
Last week, Emerson College Polling and Fox 56 Lexington released a poll showing Beshear up 16 points over Cameron, 49 to 33 percent. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.6 percentage points, which is still worth a hearty derisive laugh at Cameron.
Emerson is admittedly new to polling Kentucky and significantly underestimated Cameron’s performance in the Republican primary. However, several other polls released over the summer showed Beshear with leads ranging from four to 10 percentage points. Even the conservative Club for Growth, a pro-Cameron PAC, released a poll from the last week of September that had their candidate behind by six points.
Wow, Cameron went to all this trouble to formally change his address to the Sunken Place and now he’s getting his ass whooped like he’s campaigning in a dashiki while styling a large Afro.
Cameron predictably leaned into “socially divisive issues” during his campaign, taking cheap shots at Beshear’s more liberal inclusiveness. The governor posed for a harmless photo with the Kentucky Chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of drag queens, and Cameron grossly declared that the governor “literally stands with anti-Christian hate groups.”
He keeps repeating this particular line on the campaign trail, as if the material’s gold: “Most people in Kentucky think that boys shouldn’t play girls’ sports, be in girls’ bathrooms, or that children shouldn’t undergo sex change surgery before they turn 18.”
Beshear recently vetoed a far-right bill restricting health care for trans people (it was swiftly overridden), and Cameron’s seemingly convinced that Beshear’s normal human response to trans issues will “alienate swing voters.”
“Kentuckians are fed up with left-wing nonsense,” he’s said. “I’ll bring back common-sense values.”
Some Kentucky Republicans aren’t so sure about this strategy. They enjoy bullying vulnerable trans kids as much as any other heartless ghoul, but they’d prefer Cameron focus on, you know, real issues.
Although Republican state Rep. Stephanie Dietz of Edgewood believes “there is an audience that wants to hear” Cameron’s bigoted drivel, she thinks the majority of her northern Kentucky district wants to hear: “What’s the plan to get our kids back on track with their education, what we’re going to do to increase our workforce, what are we going to do about affordable daycare?”
But whoops, Kentucky voters rate the governor highly on these points. He’s currently the highest-rated Democratic governor in the nation and the fifth most popular from both parties.
Some key takeaways that I hope Cameron will read before crawling under his bed and weeping:
Along with receiving solid marks from Kentucky Democrats and independents, Gov. Andy Beshear wins approval from roughly half of the state’s Republicans, making him the country’s most popular Democratic governor with the other party’s voters.
Despite President Joe Biden’s unpopularity in the Bluegrass State, half of Kentucky voters who disapprove of his job performance approve of Beshear’s. And despite Donald Trump’s double-digit 2020 victory there, those who voted for the former president are nearly as likely to approve of Beshear as they are to disapprove.
Going negative against an opponent works best when they either aren’t yet clearly defined in voters’ minds or are already somewhat unpopular. Cameron is running against an exceptionally popular governor people trust, so rather than trying to paint Beshear as a “woke” commie radical, he should’ve perhaps worked more on improving his own image.
But that’s not as easy as it sounds: Cameron isn’t just a far-right partisan hack; he’s also pretty scuzzy. The Daily Beast recently reported about his “bizarre psychedelic drug crusade.” Cameron is directing $42 million to study the possibly deadly plant-based treatment ibogaine. The grant money will come out of the huge $842 million settlement that Kentucky won last year from opioid manufacturers.
According to a source:
“Cameron came out of the blue with this, and it caught everybody off-guard that’s close to the issue,” this person told The Daily Beast. “And the individuals running recovery facilities are behind the scenes very opposed to taking those funds away from the facilities.”
“It’s blood money, and those funds were intended and committed for those people working every day in the recovery field. There was never any talk of the money being used for corporate R&D,” the source continued. “That money, we understood, was for groups working every day to help people recover.”
Cameron can’t exactly count on the support of his former colleagues, either. The Daily Beast reported last month that in “the three-plus years since Cameron was elected, the criminal appeals division has lost more than half of its career attorneys — also known as “merit” attorneys, or, formerly, assistant attorneys general. Most of them either quit or retired early due to the work environment, the sources said.”
Complaints have been filed against his office alleging “hostile,” “cruel,” “threatening,” and “demeaning” treatment from senior officials in Cameron’s staff — “including allegations that one unit director took ‘zoomed in’ photos of a detective’s breast.”
He’s a horrible boss and would make an even worse governor. Fortunately, it looks like Andy Beshear will keep Cameron’s political career from advancing any further.
[The Daily Beast / Herald-Ledger]
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