Five debates have been held and millions of dollars in advertising have saturated the airwaves. On the evening before Election Day, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and his Republican challenger, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, traversed the state making last-second pleas to voters in a race that once saw Mr. Beshear with a comfortable lead but now is in a dead heat.
The Kentucky governor’s race is one of the nation’s most closely watched elections this year and could provide hints of what will happen in presidential and congressional campaigns in 2024.
Including spending by the two campaigns and outside groups, $65 million was poured into courting voters.
While Mr. Beshear wrapped up his Election Day Eve statewide tour in Louisville promising residents more economic prosperity if he is reelected, President Donald Trump held a tele-rally for Mr. Cameron and called Mr. Beshear “a Joe Biden stooge.”
Mr. Beshear vetoed a bill introduced by Mr. Cameron’s running mate, state Sen. Robby Mills, to ban biological males from participating in women’s sports. The governor’s veto was overridden by Kentucky’s GOP-controlled Legislature.
During the 10-minute call, President Trump said that Mr. Beshear wanted “big, strong hulking men to bruise and brutalize Kentucky female athletes on the playing field while stealing all of their trophies for themselves.”
Beshear and Cameron Tied in Polls
Mr. Beshear was asked by reporters about President Trump’s tele-rally for Mr. Cameron and said that Kentucky’s governor’s election “isn’t about who’s in the White House. It’s about what’s going on in the home of our Kentucky families.”The son of former two-term Democrat Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, Mr. Beshear was elected by a slim margin in 2019 when he defeated incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin by about 5,000 votes.
Kentucky has a Republican supermajority in the state Legislature, and President Trump won the state by 26 percentage points in 2020, but Mr. Beshear was rated the nation’s most popular Democrat governor in a July poll conducted by Morning Consult.
In early October, a survey from Emerson College Polling showed Mr. Beshear with a 16-point lead over Mr. Cameron.
On Nov. 3, Emerson College released a poll indicating that Mr. Beshear and Mr. Cameron were tied at 47 percent, with 4 percent of the respondents reporting that they’re undecided and 2 percent saying they’re voting for someone else.
The survey gives Mr. Cameron a 49 percent to 48 percent advantage over Mr. Beshear when undecided voters were asked whom they were leaning toward.
Mr. Beshear appeared at rallies in Prestonsburg, Pikeville, Morehead, Lexington, and Louisville on Nov. 6.
In a race against Mr. Cameron that has drawn too close to call according to the most recent poll, Mr. Beshear implored supporters to remain active in the campaign on Election Day.
Cameron Critical of Beshear’s Vetoes
During a campaign stop at Morehead State University, Mr. Beshear incorporated football analogies in a speech that encouraged voters to keep him in office.“We are on a winning streak the likes of which we have never seen this football season and for the first time in Kentucky, you can bet on it if you want to. Well, what we know is when you are on a record win streak, you don’t fire the coach. You don’t sub out the quarterback right?” Mr. Beshear said.
Mr. Beshear reiterated his campaign platform centered on touting what he deems a robust economy in Kentucky, and healthy unemployment numbers.
“We’re coming off the two best years for economic development in the history of the Commonwealth. We set records on our unemployment rate, our lowest monthly unemployment rate and our longest period of low unemployment,” Mr. Beshear said.
“We’ve done our three largest budget surpluses ever which means we have plenty of money to give our public school educators,” he added.
Mr. Cameron has tied Mr. Beshear to President Joe Biden and widely criticized the governor for his COVID-19 pandemic restrictions affecting businesses, inflation, and virus-related school closures, which he says resulted in learning loss among students.
Mr. Cameron has repeatedly chastised Mr. Beshear for vetoing transgender-related bills, including the measure that President Trump referenced, and another that would have banned gender reassignment treatments for minors. The vetoes were overridden by Kentucky’s Republican-controlled Legislature.
Values and Beliefs
Mr. Cameron has drawn criticism from Democrats for defending Kentucky’s near total abortion ban in court. Opponents have chastised Mr. Cameron because the law does not have exceptions for incest and rape, but the attorney general has said he would sign a bill with those exceptions if it landed on his desk as governor.On Election Day Eve, Mr. Cameron made campaign appearances in Fort Wright, Lexington, and Louisville before ending the day at a rally in his hometown of Elizabethtown and then joining President Trump for the tele-rally.
“We know in 2024 we want to remove Joe Biden from the White House,” Mr. Cameron said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, before we do that, we’ve got to remove his biggest enabler here in Kentucky, and that is Andy Beshear,” Mr. Cameron added.
“The message is clear. This [race] isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats. It’s about crazy versus normal. We need leadership in the state that fights back against Joe Biden as opposed to endorsing Joe Biden, which is what we’ve seen from Andy Beshear.”
In Elizabethtown, Mr. Cameron talked about his Christian faith and told supporters he wants to preserve “ideals that have propelled this nation forward.”
“Those ideals being faith, family, and community. That is what is at stake tomorrow,” Mr. Cameron said.
“This race is about making sure that at the end of tomorrow night, we are in a position for decades to come to say that this commonwealth is a shining city on a hill, a model and an example for the rest of the nation to follow,” he added.
Mr. Beshear encouraged unity among Kentuckians and accused Mr. Cameron of running a campaign focused on the opposite message.
“I believe that our job is not to move the state to the right or the left but to move it forward for all of our people, to lift up every single family, to provide more opportunity for the next generation than we ever thought was possible,” Mr. Beshear said, adding that unity and abiding by “the Golden Rule” is “not what you’re hearing from the other side.”
“What you’re seeing is fear and anger and even encouragement for one Kentucky to violate that Golden Rule and hate one another. If there’s one message we can send to the rest of the country, it’s anger politics should end right here, right now.”
Polls close in Kentucky at 6 p.m. but the race might not be decided after results are tabulated on Nov. 7.
An election reform package passed in the state in 2021 mandates a recount if the final result is closer than 0.5 percentage points. If the guideline was in place in 2019, Mr. Beshear would have faced a recount when he defeated Mr. Bevin by about 5,000 votes.
