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2015 Election Analysis: How Bevin Won in Kentucky
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Kentucky's 2015 elections Governor • Lt. Gov • Attorney General • Secretary of State • Other executive offices • Candidate ballot access |
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November 4, 2015
By Jim Barnes
Republican Matt Bevin, a tea party favorite, scored an unexpectedly easy victory on November 3 over Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway to become Kentucky’s next governor.
The pre-election polling and punditry had forecast a tight race with Conway leading to replace outgoing two-term Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear, who was term-limited. But Bevin won by almost 9 percentage points, 52.5 percent to Conway’s 43.8 percent, based on complete but unofficial returns.
While Kentucky, like other Southern and border states, has long cast off its Democratic heritage and supported Republican candidates in presidential and congressional races, the state has clung to its tradition of electing Democratic governors. Up until Tuesday, since 1971, only one Republican had been elected governor, Ernie Fletcher in 2003. And Fletcher’s victory came after Democratic Gov. Paul Patton and his administration had been enmeshed in three separate scandals. Four years later, Kentuckians turned out Fletcher—whose own administration was marred by a patronage scandal—and elected veteran Democratic pol Beshear.
Bevin, a successful investment manager, seemed like an unlikely prospect to replace Beshear. He was drubbed in the 2014 Republican Senate primary when he challenged incumbent Mitch McConnell, and he only prevailed in this year’s GOP gubernatorial primary by 83 votes. While McConnell had stumped for Bevin this year after he captured the nomination, some establishment Republicans in the state remained estranged from their gubernatorial standard bearer.
Bevin also hailed from Louisville, the state’s largest metro, which hadn’t sent a governor to Frankfort in 100 years. Conway avoided a competitive primary, a rarity for Democrats with an open governorship at stake. The two-term attorney general was seen as his party’s best prospect for holding onto the governor’s mansion.
So how did Bevin beat Conway by such a relatively comfortable margin?
Bevin’s victory was sweeping. He carried 106 of the state’s 120 counties. (In their 2011 re-election bids, Democrat Beshear won 92 counties, while Conway carried 75.) Bevin’s statewide percentage was roughly 17.2 percentage points higher than the statewide tally of the 2011 GOP nominee, David Williams. In half of Kentucky’s counties, Bevin outperformed Williams’ showing by 20 percentage points or more. Overall, those counties accounted for almost one-third of the total 2015 general election vote. Most of those were rural counties or counties that were on the outer fringe of major metropolitan areas.
Beshear carried many of these rural counties easily when he ran for re-election in 2011, and Conway won them as well when he was re-elected attorney general that year. For instance, in McLean—a small, rural county in Western Kentucky with a declining population where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one—Bevin won with approximately 57 percent. In 2011 Beshear carried that county with more than 66 percent of the vote, and Conway won it with more than 58 percent. Another Democratic bastion that flipped was Webster, a rural county in the Western Kentucky coal region, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans almost four to one; Bevin won 56 percent of the vote compared to Beshear’s 69 percent and Conway’s 58 percent in 2011. In Morgan, a declining rural Eastern Kentucky county where Democrats outnumber Republicans almost eight to one, Bevin carried 55 percent of the vote compared to Beshear’s 58 percent and Conway’s 66 percent in 2011.
But Bevin’s strength extended far beyond the state’s struggling rural terrain. Bevin won in Scott, Shelby and Woodford—fast-growing, job-producing counties around the Louisville and Lexington-Frankfort metropolitan cores that Beshear and Conway had both carried in 2011. In Anderson, a slower-growing county outside Frankfort where Democrats hold a registration advantage of more than 20 percentage points, Bevin won with 55 percent of the vote. In 2011, Conway carried this county with 57 percent of the vote. In Kenton and Campbell, Republican-leaning suburban and exurban counties that are just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Bevin prevailed with 57 percent and 54 percent, respectively. Beshear won both in 2011.
Even in the Democratic bastion of Jefferson County, where Louisville is located, Bevin managed to win 30,000 more votes than 2011 GOP gubernatorial nominee Williams, while Conway managed less than 5,000 votes more than Beshear. (Overall, turnout was higher in the 2015 Kentucky governor’s race than in the 2011 contest.)
Without an exit poll, it’s harder to answer the question of why Bevin won. While Bevin was an inexperienced candidate, Conway was more wonkish than charismatic. Although Conway carried normally Democratic Rowan County, where county clerk Kim Davis caused a storm over her refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, it’s possible that in many rural portions of the state, the controversy helped turn out socially conservative voters to cast ballots for Bevin. At the same time, Kentucky’s expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act—which Bevin opposed—is still seen in polls as a popular move by Beshear. Less popular has been the Environmental Protection Agency’s tighter regulation of mining and coal-fueled electric plants; while Beshear and Conway both carried nearly all of the Eastern Kentucky coal counties in 2011, Bevin swept that territory this year.
Democratic State Auditor Adam Edelen, who was once seen as a promising potential challenger to GOP Sen. Rand Paul in 2016, but narrowly lost his re-election bid to little-known Republican state Rep. Mike Harmon, told the Associated Press: “The degree to which the national [Democratic] party is out of step with mainstream Kentuckians has created an environment where it’s extraordinarily difficult for a Democrat to win statewide.”[1]
James A. Barnes is a senior writer at Ballotpedia and co-author of the 2016 Almanac of American Politics.
Footnotes
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