Hopes dashed, Kentucky Democrats ponder next moves after election thrashing

Gov. Andy Beshear's victory in the 2019 election gave Kentucky Democrats a glimmer of hope going into Tuesday's contest.

But Republicans thoroughly snuffed it out as they dominated up and down the ballot to solidify Kentucky’s status as a deeply red state.

Not only did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell breeze to a larger-than-expected 20-point victory over Democrat Amy McGrath, but Republicans also are on pace to win a historic 75-seat supermajority in the state House.

Kentuckians have been voting for Republicans in federal elections for decades, but Democrats often split their tickets by voting for state and local officials down the ballot.

On Tuesday, that was no longer the case, as President Donald Trump again led the way at the top of the ticket, winning by more than 25 points.

Related: Kentucky voter turnout for 2020 marks highest since 2008 as votes continue to be counted

While some Democratic incumbents in the state legislature hung onto their seats in 2016 despite Trump dominating their districts — even managing to pick up a couple seats in 2018 — 2020 turned into a landslide all the way down the ballot, as Republicans took back 13 Democrat-held seats in the House, while not losing a single seat.

In the state Senate, with very few contested races, Republicans took two more seats from Democrats and easily defended an incumbent in a suburban, Northern Kentucky district that went for Beshear the previous year.

All of this points to a painful reckoning for the party that once dominated the Bluegrass State and raises questions of how it can claw its way back to relevance.

McConnell, Kentucky House Speaker David Osborne and Senate President Robert Stivers took a bow in a Friday press conference to highlight the party’s sweep, with Osborne noting every legislative candidate featured in a Beshear endorsement video lost Tuesday.

Stivers said Beshear had little choice but to come to the table with Republicans and support their agenda, as “the state wants to go into the direction that we want to move.”

Democrats’ only semblance of political power in Frankfort remains in the governor’s office, which in hindsight appears like a lucky anomaly attributable to Beshear facing the uniquely unpopular former Gov. Matt Bevin, who lost by just more than 5,000 votes while every Republican statewide candidate down the ballot won easily.

In the wake of Tuesday’s electoral reckoning, Democrats in Kentucky are now left debating — and most likely fighting — over how this came about and what direction the party needs to rebuild its political relevance.

More: Counties with worst coronavirus surges overwhelmingly voted Trump

Ben Self, the chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party for the last three years, said Democrats “obviously got beat badly” and the party shares some of that blame, though “at the end of the day, Trump being on the top of the ballot was a huge headwind to overcome.”

Noting he informed Beshear several months ago he would step down from the position soon after the election, he said he thinks when Trump is no longer on the ballot, “Democrats will absolutely fare better in Kentucky.”

U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville, the only Democrat in Kentucky’s federal delegation over the past eight years, called Tuesday a “disaster” for the state party “and we shouldn't try to sugarcoat that.”

But the path forward in Kentucky all depends on the perception of how Democrats got here, and those opinions are both diverse and plentiful.

The fall

Democrats held their majority in the state House for nearly 100 years until the 2016 election, when they lost a net total of 17 seats to Republicans, who gained a 64-seat majority.

After a setback in the 2018 election when Trump was not on the ballot, Republicans are now expected to have 75 seats in next year’s session of the Kentucky General Assembly, the largest majority since Democrats held 77 seats in the early 1980s.

In those days, Democrats had a 3-to-1 voter registration advantage over Republicans in Kentucky and held both U.S. Senate seats and four of seven U.S. House seats.

Starting with McConnell’s first win in 1984, Republicans have been gaining steadily on Democrats.

By the mid-1990s, Democrats were down to a 2-to-1 registration edge over Republicans, with the GOP soon picking up all but one seat in Kentucky’s congressional delegation and voting Republican by a wide margin in every presidential race since 2000, when they also took back a majority in the state Senate.

By the 2016 election — after a decade of “war on coal” messaging turned the traditionally Democratic-voting coal county of Eastern Kentucky from blue to red — Democrats still held a 53% to 39% voting registration lead over Republicans and a slight majority in the state House due to ticket-splitting Democrats.

Also:Trump, McConnell promised to bring back coal. But Kentucky lost 2,700 jobs on their watch

However, from Election Day 2016 through Tuesday, the number of registered Republican voters grew by more than 230,000, while Democrats’ total fell by more than 21,000. Republicans now trail Democrats in registration by just 3 points and are on pace to outnumber them next year.

Republicans grew their rate of registered voters faster than Democrats in all counties but Jefferson and Fayette, which is now reflected in their membership in both chambers: Democrats will have only six of their 25 House members and one of their eight Senate members representing districts fully outside of Louisville and Lexington.

'The Scarlet D'

The GOP blitz of seats long held by the Democratic Party has been most pronounced in rural districts, where Republican campaigns painted their opponents as cogs in the national party of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who advocated late-term abortion, gun confiscations and defunding the police — despite the Democratic candidates pleas that they were anti-abortion, pro-gun and fully backed law enforcement.

Jimmy Cauley — a Kentucky political consultant who ran the U.S. Senate campaign of Barack Obama and the first campaign of former Gov. Steve Beshear — noted most of these Democrat candidates lost by roughly 40 points, as voters tuned out issues and interests like education and affordable health care.

"He's pro-Second Amendment and anti-abortion, everything they needed to do, but they painted him with the R vs. D brush," Cauley said. "And I don't know how you get the Scarlet D off your forehead. Honestly, that's going to take some soul searching."

He said the party will be out of power “for a generation” if it does not start talking about things that matter to Kentuckians outside of urban centers. He's worried “the party could be taken over by the left-leaning urban Democrats that are left” — citing state Rep. Charles Booker, the west Louisville Democrat who nearly upset McGrath in the primary, and “Bernie bros.”

“Those are the folks that are going to push bills and push an agenda that obviously doesn't speak to the rest of the state,” Cauley said. “If they go left in the new leadership? Lord, you've really blown it, then."

More: 4 states legalized marijuana on Election Day. Will Kentucky join them?

The exact opposite opinion was expressed by Jefferson County School Board member Chris Kolb in a Courier Journal op-ed this week, saying the visionless party in Kentucky had lost its soul and “should simply disband” unless it embraces New Deal-esque programs a la Sen. Bernie Sanders and follows in-state leaders on the left like Booker and state Rep. Attica Scott, D-Louisville.

Scott endorsed Kolb’s op-ed and said the party needs a dramatic overhaul in its structure and mission, noting many Democrats in the state had concerns about McGrath from the moment she launched her campaign last year.

"I believe that when we give the people something different, that's what they vote for, that's what they support,” Scott said. “But if we're running candidates who are basically conservatives who don't believe in equity, freedom or justice, then it doesn't really energize people."

Scott said she wants to see the party build foundational power across the state, but said it was not about going left or right but “believing in people's humanity.”

"The issue for me is not that they need to become more left or liberal,” Scott said. “It's stop running away from racial justice, stop running away from immigrant justice, stop turning your back on addressing environmental racism. Those, to me, are the issues we need to be talking about."

On Kentucky Politics newsletter: A Republican landslide in Kentucky

McConnell and Republicans statewide thrust the “defund the police” movement to the forefront of their campaigns, criticizing scenes of riots and racial justice protests in campaign ads as something their opponents supported. That message was emphasized by Republicans in House races in the East Louisville suburbs, adding the specter of violent crimes creeping into their neighborhoods.

Scott said those ads might have been effective only because Democrats never strongly countered that message anywhere in the state, believing “racism won on Tuesday.”

“They were all running the same game plan, and I feel like we just are so caught up in fake nice that we allowed it to pass without some real challenge and pushback,” Scott said.

Left? Right? Which path forward?

Yarmuth, who has represented the 3rd Congressional District in Louisville since 2006 and was reelected by a wide margin Tuesday, said Democrats were primarily done in by the “extraordinary amount of straight-party voting in this election,” both in Kentucky and other regions of the country where their candidates underperformed.

"People have become so identified with one party or another that issues don't matter, individuals don't matter,” Yarmuth said. "In Kentucky, if voters think of themselves as Republicans the way they think of themselves as UK or U of L fans, then I'm not sure how you can blame anybody or can come up with a strategy that combats that."

Believing that polling shows Kentuckians agree with Democrats on most issues outside of abortion and possibly immigration reform, Yarmuth says the party needs to find a way to viscerally connect with voters, but that doesn’t necessarily mean taking a hard left or right turn ideologically.

“As much as I love and respect Attica and Charles Booker, is taking their position on things, is that going to make any difference?” Yarmuth asked. “I don't think so. Is being a more moderate Democrat going change that equation? I don't think so either.”

Related: Just a year after Bevin's loss, Trump dominates Kentucky in Republican sweep

For Jeff Noble, the turn the party needs to take is one of diversity — particularly when it comes to age and regions.

Noble, a political consultant from Louisville who has worked on all of Yarmuth’s campaigns, resigned from his 16-year position this week on the Kentucky State Democratic Central Executive Committee, partly out of continuing frustration with party leadership, and partly because he wants younger people from Eastern and Western Kentucky to also have a seat at the table.

Agreeing it would take a long time for the party to dig itself out of the hole, Noble said Democrats must follow the grassroots model McConnell laid 35 years ago and decentralize its power.

“McConnell has built this statewide, county-based organization that never shuts down,” Noble said. “And that's why I said the organization can't be centered in headquarters in Frankfort. It has to be centered in many individual county parties, and they have to have the respect from Frankfort.”

After the election Rep. Joni Jenkins, the Democratic leader of the state House from Shively, said the party requires “some rebuilding and rebranding,” but stood by its campaign messaging and thinks it will resonate when Trump is off the ballot in two years.

“I think the message that our candidates were using — protecting working families, affordable health care and public education — are still valuable messages, but when you're up against the wave that we saw with a nationalization of the campaigns, those messages may get lost in all that.”

State dominance: Republicans expand dominant supermajority in Kentucky state House races

Senate Minority Leader Morgan McGarvey of Louisville said the Trump wave may subside somewhat in two years and present a less challenging path for Democratic candidates, “but it's going to take hard work, it's going to take listening and it's going to take some time.

"The Democratic Party has to listen to the priorities of Kentucky voters across the state, both urban and rural, and find better ways to present our message of being for better jobs, affordable health care, better schools, and a better environment, providing justice and equity for everyone."

For Scott, the entire party needs some restructuring, which will “make some people uncomfortable who are used to just being either darlings of the party or being able to run the party from behind the scenes.”

“Those days are over. And if they don't want to wake up and figure that out, then we're going to keep losing.”

Under party rules, the main figure who gets to determine the direction of the party and the new chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party is Beshear.

The governor was not made available for an interview about the election results and state of the party, with his spokeswoman Crystal Staley issuing a statement that Beshear “has long said his focus during this pandemic is not on politics, but on defeating the coronavirus and protecting the lives of Kentuckians.”

“The Governor is also focused on preparing Kentucky to run — not walk — out of this pandemic by creating more, good-paying jobs, putting education first, protecting access to quality health care, making sure our retirement systems are healthy and building a better, brighter Kentucky where we treat each other with dignity and respect.”

Previously: Big blue 'burbs? Kentucky Democrats hope for anti-Trump wave in suburbs

Reach reporter Joe Sonka at jsonka@courierjournal.com and follow him on Twitter at @joesonka. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today at the top of this page.