Kentucky 2023 gubernatorial election megathread

[President Johnson]

Likely R if Biden or another D is the incumbent, Lean D if Trump or another R is the incumbent.

Eh, Biden is going to be incumbent president in 2023 unless something happens, then it's Kamala.

Regardless, with 60% approval rating, Beshear has indeed a pretty good shot. Especially with a weak opponent.

[President Johnson]

Likely R if Biden or another D is the incumbent, Lean D if Trump or another R is the incumbent.

Eh, Biden is going to be incumbent president in 2023 unless something happens, then it's Kamala.

Regardless, with 60% approval rating, Beshear has indeed a pretty good shot. Especially with a weak opponent.

I can easily see McConnell rigging an impeachment trial once Republicans have the Senate and House after 2022 to remove Harris and Biden and install whoever the Speaker of the House is.

Lmao, he's not going to get 67 votes for conviction, maybe not even 50. There's no maneuver how you can rig that. I don't even think Mitch would waste any capital on this kind of stuff, as terrible as he is.

[President Johnson]

https://twitter.com/rkahne/status/1620582943520616448?t=T8t_L0-lwzXg5Mhu0ZmxjA&a...

That has to be comedy, right?

[President Johnson]

If the best line of attack that the KY GOP can come up with his "his father loves him", I'm feeling fairly confident about his chances this November...

https://twitter.com/KYGOP/status/1622710107707408384

I can never ever take anyone serious who unironically uses the font "Comic Sans MS". Never.

[President Johnson]

Cameron ended up being a terrible recruit; these tweets and videos are like parody.

I feel like several Republican recruitments in critical races up and down the ballot were a total failure over the last couple of years (see senate 2022, which even Mitch publically admitted and how 2024 is shaping up as well). They blew a ton of actually winnable races by nominating atrocious candidates. And even the ones they won, they were just bailed out by partisan lean and environment.

[President Johnson]

A big part of the reason why I think Beshear is strongly favoured to win is that incumbent governors very rarely lose re-election, and popular incumbent governors basically never lose re-election. Consider:

Incumbent governor losses in the last 10 years:
Nevada 2022: Lombardo beat Sisolak
Kentucky 2019: Beshear beat Bevin
Illinois 2018: Pritzker beat Rauner
Wisconsin 2018: Evers beat Walker
North Carolina 2016: Cooper beat McCrory
Alaska 2014: Walker beat Parnell
Illinois 2014: Rauner beat Quinn
Pennsylvania 2014: Wolf beat Corbett

All of the very small number of defeated incumbents (only eight in 10 years!) were either massively unpopular (Bevin, Rauner, Quinn, and Corbett), hugely divisive (Walker and McCrory), or, at best, enjoyed decisively lukewarm approvals (Sisolak and Parnell). None of these currently apply to Beshear, of course, who is one of the ten most popular governors in the country. Perhaps also worth noting is that only two of the above eight defeated incumbents were Democrats. Furthermore, the winning challengers in the list above were basically all particularly strong and/or moderate candidates, which is certainly not true of Cameron; he, as has been noted in this thread, is running an uninspired generic right-wing campaign which would probably allow him to autopilot his way to victory in, say, an open Senate race, but seems very unlikely to cut it against a popular incumbent governor.

I fully agree. Great post. I knew it were few that actually lost reelection, but I'm kind of surprised it's actually that few who were voted out.

[President Johnson]

Honestly I think this will be razor thin, possibly being the closest KY gubernatorial in history. I geninely don't even have a gut feeling at this point but gun to my head Beshear pulls it off by a few thousand votes tops.

Closer than the last one is already pretty hard.

My original 52-46% might be a little too optimistic, though I expect Beshear to win by a margin between two and four points.

[President Johnson]

Does turnout look bad for Cameron because he wasn't an inspiring candidate, the election itsself is not seen as important or these people are kind of resigned to Beshear, who hasn't enflamed much passion against him? I guess a combination of all of these. (However, not getting ahead of myself here, the election isn't over and Beshear isn't guaranteed to win yet).

[President Johnson]

Turnout slightly dropped from 2019 though? Beshear got a few thousand raw votes less than last time, although his vote share increased from 49.2% to 52.5%.

Also, my 52-46% prediction was relatively accurate.