Kentucky's Real Lesson for Conservatives

American Thinker.com ^ | November 7, 2019 | Sally Zelikokovsky

[Kaslin]

The lesson Republicans and conservatives should take from the Kentucky gubernatorial race is not whether Trump showing up is a net positive or negative or whether the GOP put enough money or effort into the race or whether Bevin should have been the candidate in the first place or whether he was likable. The true lesson lies in the overwhelming success of Kentucky's down-ballot election results for attorney general, agriculture commissioner, auditor, secretary of state, and treasurer, where Republican candidates demolished Democrat candidates by margins of 221,125; 276,319; 204,960; 64,562; and 300,935 votes, respectively. (With the exception of the gubernatorial race, where the Libertarian candidate took 2% of the vote, the Libertarian candidates did not make a difference.)

If Bevin is certified the loser, it will come down to the fact that tens or hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians, who had no problem voting for other Republicans this year and Bevin four years ago, decided to stay home or cast their votes for Democrat Andy Beshear or the Libertarian candidate, John Hicks (who garnered 28,442 votes).

They, not Matt Bevin, are the Kentuckians to blame for the election of Andy Beshear. He hasn't changed. He is the same rough-around-the-edges, somewhat obnoxious carpetbagger he was when he ran four years ago and remained during his tenure as governor of Kentucky and when he was put on the ballot to be re-elected. He made enemies trying to fix the things he was elected to fix — things Republicans and conservatives find important like budgets and unfunded liabilities. Like him or not, he was their guy.

[gogeo]

The true lesson is that the author's candidate deserved to win the race for the office that he was entitled to hold, but then he lost, and now the author is mad at the voters because it's all their fault.

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.

[Republican Wildcat]

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.”

[Republican Wildcat]

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.