Kentucky Fried Trump

Donald Trump went to Kentucky to stump for incumbent Republican governor Matt Bevin and told Kentucky voters that he would be personally humiliated if Bevin lost to his Democratic opponent, Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear (below). Kentuckians accepted the risk and elected Beshear by a narrow margin, disgusted with Bevin's attitude toward teachers and his efforts to stick it to Medicaid recipients with unrealistic work requirements.

Bevin is trying to contest the election and get the results overturned in his favor, but no one in the state Republican organization rally has the stomach for such a quixotic fight.  Beshear, son of former Democratic governor Steve Beshear, is preparing for his inauguration on December 10.

Beshear's victory provides an opportunity for Democrats . . . and a warning.  Beshear is a moderate who will be going into his new job having to work with a Republican legislature in Frankfort. He won because he's expected to provide effective, pragmatic governance - he doesn't have a mandate to purse a progressive agenda that would include, among other things, Medicare For All.  And in much of the rest of America, as in Kentucky, the only people who advocate Medicare For All are supporters of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, either of whom could get "the full McGovern" (after George McGovern, the Democratic senator from South Dakota who mistakenly equated disgust with Nixon in 1972 with an endorsement for an ultra-liberal agenda) as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.  More proof that, despite an unequal economy and overwhelming support for things like gun control and teachers' unions, we're not ready for another Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson.  Part of the reason for that is because Trump was elected to make sweeping changes, and the changes he's made have set us so far back from where we were in 2016 that Americans can't stomach another massive change in either ideological direction. We were ready for a progressive President in 2016.  Not now.  Not any more.  We have to get back to where we were before Trump took office.  Democrats will do better in presidential and down-ballot elections in 2020 if they nominate left-of center candidates, but not if they nominate left-of-center candidates with the "center" part.

Don't believe me?  Consider what just happened in heavily Democratic New Jersey, where we have a very liberal governor.  Democrats kept their majority in the Assembly, the lower house of the state legislature, but still lost three seats, while the Republicans won a Democratic state Senate seat in a special election.   And the new GOP senator-elect said that his victory "shows that good can triumph over evil."

Wonder if Governor Murphy will get the, umm, message?