Posted on 11/07/2019 7:05:02 AM PST by Kaslin
The voters are the boss, and they get the final word. I suspect they chose poorly. They (and everyone who supported Bevin) get to live with the results.
I think it's empty virtue signaling from those who don't think very hard about their vote or government.
Bevin attacked those staging rallies as encouraging child molestation in one instance. A couple months later, he said they were responsible for a shooting death of a little girl. Then just days before the election, he came out in favor of adding tolls to bridges in northern Kentucky (and caused a 20 point swing in the election in those areas - instead of winning those points areas by ten points or more, he lost them by 10, more than enough to netted him 5000 votes to pull off a victory). That’s why he lost - not because of “teacher’s unions.”
That’s true - sort of like choosing a surgeon - an obnoxious jerk who is an excellent surgeon or a nice guy but is a butcher. But electoral politics can be as much - or more - about personalities rather than policies. Given that reality, Bevin also had an obligation to choose words more carefully out of respect for his own policies and what they represented in order to be able to get re-elected and continue that work instead of having it reversed. He doesn’t say those outrageous things, his personal popularity would not have tanked and he would have enjoyed a 55-60% margin of victory like all of the other candidates as it would have been solely about issues and not so much about personality - because on the issues, Beshear stank...that’s why the race was even close instead of Bevin losing by 15 or more points...a lot of people did in fact vote on issues, but personality simply overpowered that narrative.
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