8/4/19
FANCY FARM, Ky. — President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is still a year away, but Kentucky is going to get a preview this fall. Gov. Matt Bevin is clinging as tightly as he can to Trump — even borrowing some of his tactics — as he attempts to overcome rock-bottom approval ratings in a bid for a second term. The unpopular governor is counting on Trump’s appeal here — the president won Kentucky by 30 percentage points in 2016 — and conservative cultural positions to knock off his chief political rival, state Attorney General Andy Beshear, the son of Bevin’s predecessor. Like Trump, Bevin is a first-term Republican incumbent whose abrasive political style has chafed large swaths of voters. Last year, he apologized after suggesting that children in Kentucky were being sexually assaulted at home because of teachers’ protests that had shut down a number of schools. Then, this spring, Bevin appeared to blame a teacher sick-out for the accidental shooting of seven-year-old girl in Louisville.
“Republicans are trying to make it all about Trump because they don’t want it to be about Bevin,” said Al Cross, a veteran Kentucky journalist who is now the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. “Which side are you on?” Bevin repeatedly asked attendees, with one half of the crowd booing and the other cheering. “Do you stand with Donald Trump as the president of America? Or do you stand with ‘The Squad,’ or whatever they call themselves these days?” Both parties were well-represented at the picnic, a parish fundraiser that drew upwards of a thousand people for bingo, political speeches and barbecue pork and mutton. There were more Andy Beshear signs, and the Democratic partisans booed Bevin and chanted “Moscow Mitch!” at McConnell. Bevin told POLITICO on Saturday he expects Trump to travel to Kentucky more than once before Election Day. “He’ll come probably a couple times. I would bet in the next few weeks you’ll see both him and the vice president here, and then again later in the fall,” said Bevin. “They’ll be here. They’re good friends.”
