Rate Kentucky

[Fuzzy Bear]

Surprisingly, I'd say Lean Beshear.

The Beshear name is good.  Bevin only won his primary by 52-39-9; not a convincing showing. 

Incumbent Governors have won reelection in these circumstances.  I was an active Democratic Partisan in Democrat Hugh Carey's reelection campaign for Governor in 1978, and Carey won the primary by almost the identical numbers Bevin won by.  Carey was an excellent Governor, but he was a guy whose persona was often prickly, and he alienated his Lt. Governor (Mary Anne Krupsak, an upstate Democrat) and picked up an enemy in State Sen. Jeremiah Bloom (D-Brooklyn), who was passed over for the State Senate Democratic Leadership when Carey was elected, and he never forgot that.  (Bloom did not endorse Carey for re-election.)  NY was nowhere near as Democratic back then as it is now; it was a Lean D state at the Presidential level, but it had strong Republican local governments outside of NYC, and some of the upstate cities (Syracuse, Rochester, Troy, Schenectady) were lean R at a minimum.  It would be fair to say that the overall environment was as favorable to Carey then as it is to Bevin now.

What happened to Carey was twofold:  One, was that he unified the Democratic Party after the primary.  He got upstate Democratic legislators to support him strongly, even though they supported the Death Penalty's reestablishment.  (Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo single-handedly kept the death penalty from being reinstated in NY for 20 years; it was only George Pataki that signed it back into law.)  The other was that Assembly Minority Leader Perry Duryea (R-Montauk), who led for most of the campaign, lost ground toward the end due to some self-inflicted wounds.  (Some of Duryea's anti-NYC statements came back to haunt him, and that swung certain areas of the city that were heavily Democratic, but heavily Catholic in outlook, to come back to Carey. 

So Bevin can certainly win.  The GOP trend in KY is stronger than the Democratic trend was in NY in 1978.  Beshear could well suffer from self-inflicted wounds.  Perry Duryea, on the other hand, wasn't the kind of guy to challenge Nelson Rockefeller (or his hand-picked successor Malcolm Wilson) in a primary in the manner that Bevin once challenged McConnell.  I suppose we'll see.

[Fuzzy Bear]

These debates "ain't gonna matter".

When Bevin lies as much as he does, it matters.

Do you think Kentuckians care about that? After all, Kentucky gave 63% of the vote to Donald Trump, who is a notorious liar. Many Kentucky voters are more concerned about the "caravan" and "keeping out Muslim extremists", than they are about economic issues, at least in the context of this election.

At the state and local level, Kentucky is more Democratic than many Trump states.  There are still many Trump counties that have voted Republican in Federal elections that still have Democratic local officeholders, and these officeholders will support a Democratic candidate for Governor.

The Democratic "turnoff" for Kentuckians will be, somewhat. the far-left focus of the national party's candidates, and the fact that we've got them on display so prominently this early doesn't help.  The impeachment issue doesn't help here, either.  But Bevin has his liabilities, and he's a guy that ordinary Kentuckians might not vote for, simply because they don't like him, and because they self-identify (still) as Democrats, even though they have been far from the national party for years now.

[Fuzzy Bear]

These are the folks the Democratic Party has worked overtime to run off.  Once upon a time, not too long ago, they helped Kentucky to a 5-2 Democratic delegaton