Kentucky 2023 gubernatorial election megathread

[Alcibiades]

Except for case, where Republicans nominate their own "Roy Moore", i am reasonably sure in their victory. Not overwhelming, but - solid... Beshear and JBE are "the last of mohicans" for Democrats, just as Hogan, Baker, and Scott - for Republicans. Soon - 95+% of partisan elections in US will be, essentially, useless - utterly predictable from very beginning.. May be - even 98+....

There’s not a single statewide elected Democrat or Democrat in Congress right now who’s genuinely moderate or who will ever actually stand up to their own party. Maybe that has something to do with this so-called 'polarization' that people somehow can’t seem to grasp.

What reason is there for a Republican-leaning voter to even support a Democrat nowadays? Even the ones who brand themselves as 'conservatives' are clearly always reliable votes for their party in the end &, in the case of the governors, prioritize Democratic legislation being implemented or veto power being exercised more than anything else. Elections might become more predictable (not that optimistic, but hope you’re right) because the politicians have become very predictable.

I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious that Republican officials have been responsible for driving the bulk of polarisation:



Source: https://legacy.voteview.com/political_polarization_2015.htm

[Alcibiades]

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.