Excluding the switch of Mr. Butler, there are 8 House seats won by the KY Dems by less than 10% and including Mr. Denny, there was a whopping 25 seats held by the Dems that went uncontested.
It’s shocking that KY Dems have managed to last as long as they have holding the House. The Senate flipped to the GOP way back in 1999 and it was expected the House would follow suit (by 2004) in the election after Dr. Fletcher became Governor. They reached a high of 43 (out of 100) in the ‘04 elections, but when the Dems $hithammered Fletcher and concocted those charges (he dared to hire GOP gov’t workers in an all-Dem regime !) and ran him out of office, that by 2010, the GOP plummeted to just 34 seats (just 1/3rd of the body).
The Dems and Gov. Beshear also attempted to cull the GOP Senate majority to that the Dems came within 2 seats of getting back control at the same time. It’s since increased from 20R-17D-1I up to 27R-11D as of a special election this year. Of the 11 seats the Dems hold, 7 (Dists. 4, 7, 10, 18, 29, 31 & 37) either voted GOP at the Presidential level or had recent GOP occupants. Meaning that like TN, only 4 out of 38 seats should be Dem held: 13 (Urban Lexington) 19, 33 & 35 (Louisville).
As it stands, the GOP should probably hold at least 70 out of the 100 House seats in the state (once they get control of redistricting) and all that will be left of the Dem caucus will be a rump of urban White leftists from the “trendy/hipster” districts and the adjacent poor Black ghettoes with the remaining White Union Coal Country members (many with very socially Conservative constituents that have handily voted against the national Dems in the past 2 decades) will drift back to the GOP (which many were prior to unionization in the 1920s/30s).
Precisely what has happened here in TN (minus the Coal Country aspect), where Nashville and Memphis make up 100% of the entire Democrat Senate caucus and 18 out of the 26 remaining House members (and of those 26, 9 of those should be GOP-held).
dems as long as they did in the south thru clever gerrymandering. this allowed the dems to develop a farm team. thanks to the wave years of ‘14 and ‘1Θ, we defeated their rising stars. the yellow dog machine is busted in the south. moral of the story: win as many seats in a wave year.