Kentucky’s bitter GOP governor primary comes to a head
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Kentucky’s contentious GOP gubernatorial primary is drawing to a finish Tuesday in a race that poses high stakes for the party looking to unseat Gov. Andy Beshear (D). State Attorney General Daniel Cameron, former U.N. ambassador Kelly Craft and Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles have regularly polled as the three main front-runners in the crowded Republican…
Kentucky’s contentious GOP gubernatorial primary is drawing to a finish Tuesday in a race that poses high stakes for the party looking to unseat Gov. Andy Beshear (D).
State Attorney General Daniel Cameron, former U.N. ambassador Kelly Craft and Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles have regularly polled as the three main front-runners in the crowded Republican primary field jockeying to take on Beshear this fall, with Cameron widely viewed as leading the field.
But Cameron and Craft have largely used their ammo on each other between the debate stage and millions of dollars in attack ads, leaving Republicans eager to move past the bruising primary and focus on the more challenging test ahead: taking down a popular red-state Democrat.
“I still think that Cameron’s in a really strong position. He’s just a very popular figure,” said Republican public affairs consultant Tyler Glick.
While he noted Craft’s attacks had “eaten into his numbers a bit,” Glick argued that didn’t mean voters were heading toward Craft instead. “I think he’s weathered the worst of it,” he said, pointing to the establishment of the super PAC supporting him and spending to be able to counter those attacks.
The stakes for Republicans are twofold: Republicans will need to effectively coalesce around one candidate if they have any hope of chipping away at the popular governor’s support in order to flip the governor’s mansion.
But there are national implications, too. Should Beshear walk away with another term, that could cause some anxiety at the national level for Republicans who will look at the gubernatorial race as a bellwether for 2024.
In a primary where its three top candidates have largely been aligned on key issues like abortion and gun rights, Cameron, Craft and Quarles have relied on endorsements, the airwaves and strategy to differentiate themselves from the pack.
“I think Craft is going to be, ‘I saw her ad and like her.’ I think Cameron is going to be, ‘I’m familiar with him. He’s got the Trump endorsement,'” said GOP strategist and former Quarles campaign manager Tres Watson.
“And Quarles is going to be more kind of, ‘I know that guy, he’s been elected twice statewide by very large margins, and he’s got the strongest grassroots network.'”
Cameron has needled Craft about not getting Trump’s endorsement during a recent debate hosted by the Kentucky Educational Television (KET) — an endorsement Kentucky-based GOP strategist Scott Jennings said is “probably enough to win.”
“Kelly, you spent six months telling folks that you were going to get the Donald Trump endorsement. You had him at the [Kentucky] Derby last year. And then I got the endorsement, and your team has been scrambling ever since,” Cameron said during the KET debate.
“In the final days of the primary, Kelly continues to crisscross the Commonwealth to meet Kentuckians who all want the same thing: removing woke ideologies from our schools, fighting the fentanyl crisis, and growing the economy,” Craft campaign spokesperson Weston Loyd said in a statement to The Hill.
“These are all issues that Kelly is familiar with, and her experience helping President Trump rip up NAFTA and standing up to the Chinese Communist Party enables her to hit the ground running as Governor on her first day in office,” he added.
“The only poll I’m worried about is the one on May 16 when this election concludes, but we’re focused on nobody’s race but my own,” Quarles told The Hill in an interview. “We have been able to stay out of the negativity of this race and just focus on ideas, and I think a lot of Republican primary voters will reward me for that.”
“The one thing you hear consistently is, ‘I’ll be glad when it’s over so we can all be on the same team again,’” Jennings said.
“I did not feel that way in ’19,” Jennings said. “There were bunches of Republicans who had no interest in supporting Matt Bevin … and ultimately did not. And I just don’t sense that this time.”
Still, Republicans believe they’ll have a strong case to make against Beshear no matter who the nominee is, with Republicans pointing to voters’ party affiliation in the state as one data point.
Beshear “won with 5,000 votes in 2019. We’ve increased voter registration by well over 100,000 Republicans since then,” said one GOP strategist in the state. “And so the fundamentals in this election could not be … better for whoever the Republican nominee is. Having the [GOP] nomination is one of the best attributes any candidate running for office in Kentucky can have.”
Dave Contarino, a Kentucky-based Democratic strategist who’s worked on gubernatorial campaigns around the country, said he thinks Beshear “has broad support among independents, and I think he has demonstrated with 61 percent approval rating that he’s got some percentage of Republicans actively supporting him.”
Colmon Elridge, chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party, likes the party’s odds, too.
“The notion that he cannot work in a bipartisan way is just fiction,” Elridge said, pointing to the funding secured for the Brent Spence Bridge Corridor Project that received bipartisan support. “What he has done and what he continues to stand up against is cruelty and overreach.”
Ultimately, Republicans say they’ll need to adequately make the case against Beshear while also offering their own vision for the governor’s mansion.
“We got to walk and chew gum at the same time,” the GOP strategist said. “We’ve got to make sure that we educate Kentuckians about the record of the governor, but we also need to make sure that we present a plan for how we would lead with a vision for a Republican governor, what a blueprint would be for a Republican governor [on] day one in office.”
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