Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/jul/30/democrats-and-the-troublesome-south-201/

OPINION
Democrats and the troublesome South
By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | July 30, 2017

With President Trump’s approval ratings at historically low levels, Democrats have high hopes of taking back the U.S. House in 2018. But those hopes are tempered by a giant geographic obstacle standing in their way–namely, the South.

To reclaim the House, Democrats need to flip 24 seats, shifting about 10 percent of the seats that Republicans now hold. And nearly half of the GOP caucus–114 seats–hails from the South, where there are three Republican House members for every Democrat.

A 10 percent shift in the South would require winning 11 seats, in a region where Democrats took away just two seats in 2016 (both in Florida and neither yet safe.) If Democrats fall short of that total, they will need to shift an even higher percentage of seats throughout the rest of the country–as much as 19 percent if they come up empty in the South.

And as Democrats plot and plan to add to their meager total of 40 Southern House seats, two special elections for open seats back in June offer decidedly mixed omens on their chances for overturning the GOP’s hegemony.

In South Carolina’s 5th District, the swing away from Trump’s 2016 numbers was nearly 20 percent–not enough for Democrat Archie Parnell to win but a much bigger scare than Republicans had expected. If that 20-point swing could be replicated across the South in 2018, 42 GOP-held seats could potentially be in play, more than Democrats would need to return Nancy Pelosi to the speaker’s chair.

But the results in the other race, in Georgia’s 6th District, pour substantial caution on such irrational exuberance. Republican Karen Handel kept the seat by running slightly ahead of Trump, in a race where Democrats spent a whopping $30 million and still came up short.

And this district in the northern Atlanta suburbs is exactly the kind of place where Democrats will need to compete to claw away at Republican dominance in the South next year–increasingly diverse, maturing suburbs whose upscale, educated voters, though conservative by inclination, are somewhat wary of Trump’s stewardship of the GOP brand.

If Democrats couldn’t win this race for an open seat in a low-turnout special election with a highly energized base and a president with historically low approval ratings, flipping these seats in 2018 will be a tall order, particularly given Trump’s solid base of support in the South.

So where can Democrats start? Their first targets will be three majority Latino districts in metro Miami, all of which have large numbers of Cuban American voters. Trump lost two of these districts and only narrowly won the third.

Veteran GOP U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is retiring, and Republicans will be hard pressed to keep her seat in a district Trump lost by 20 points. But in the other two districts, Democrats will have to unseat incumbents Carlos Curbelo, who has gone out of this way to distance himself from Trump, and Mario Diaz-Balart, who has been winning congressional elections with relative ease since 2002.

Democrats are also likely to target four other Southern districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump last year, which include three seats in Texas and one in Virginia. The GOP, however, has held three of these districts, in varying configurations, for decades.

The Virginia seat, in the Washington D.C. suburbs, is held by Barbara Comstock, who first won it in 2014 and was narrowly re-elected in 2016. Even at this early date, she has already drawn six Democratic challengers in a district that, like the rest of Virginia, has become more hospitable to Democrats over the last decade.

In Texas, the climb for Democrats will be steeper. Clinton won the 32nd District in suburban Dallas, but that seat is held by Pete Sessions, a GOP titan who won by 52 points in 2016. She also won the 7th District in suburban Houston, where John Culberson ran well ahead of Trump to win by 12 points.

While Democrats appear eager to try to unseat both (Culberson already has seven challengers and Sessions nine), these districts have long Republican pedigrees reminiscent of Georgia’s 6th District, which was once represented by Newt Gingrich. Former President George H.W. Bush began his political career in Culberson’s district in 1967; former President George W. Bush’s Dallas home is in Sessions’ district.

Democrats may have more luck in Texas’s 23rd District, which stretches from the suburbs of San Antonio across rural West Texas. This district is part of an ongoing legal fight over the state’s 2013 redistricting map, and a panel of federal judges is considering changes that could make it more difficult for Republican Will Hurd to hang on for a third term.

After those Clinton-won districts, the next set of seats Democrats might logically target are those where Trump’s winning margin was less than 10 points and where it would take less than a 10-point swing from the 2016 congressional results to put the seat in Democratic hands. But that list contains a scant eight seats–four in Texas, two in North Carolina and one each in Florida and Virginia. None of them are open at this point.

After that, the pickings get even slimmer–places like Arkansas’ 2nd District, where a Democrat can carry Little Rock only to get swamped by the Republican vote in the suburbs, and Florida’s 3rd District, where liberal-leaning Gainesville is subsumed in a sea of more traditional, conservative Southern voters. To be competitive in these districts, Democrats would have to commit to putting resources into races where chances of victory would appear, at the moment, to be rather remote.

If Democrats can’t move the playing field into these second and third tiers, they have a reasonable shot at just seven Republican-held Southern seats, five of which have been in GOP hands for decades and all but one of which is likely to have an incumbent. And any anti-Trump tide that helps them in other parts of the country will likely not crest as high in the South.

With a lot of angry voters and a lot of luck, Democrats may swing enough seats in 2018 to win control of the House. But as Republicans try to stop them, their ace in the hole is their dominance across the South, which should give them plenty of reason for confidence.

Rich Shumate is founder and editor of ChickenFriedPolitics.com, a website covering Southern politics, where this article first appeared.

Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/nov/17/election-carnage-20161117/

OPINION
Election carnage: Vote grim for South’s Democrats
By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | November 17, 2016

Prior to the Nov. 8 election, Democrats were publicly hopeful that they might finally be turning back Republican hegemony in the South to the degree that pro-Hillary Clinton ads were running not only in the battleground states of Florida and North Carolina but also in reliably Republican Georgia and Texas.

Election results show that thinking was not just wishful, it was magical.

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In fact, Clinton did comparatively worse in the South than Barack Obama did four years ago (which, oddly, seems to undercut the notion that the South’s resistance to Obama was based on his race). A look at regional and state-by-state figures in the presidential race shows just how grim election night was for Southerners with a D attached to their name.

Donald Trump carried 53.3 percent of the vote and 13 out of 14 Southern states. That performance was not as good as Mitt Romney’s in 2012, when he came in with 54.4 percent (although Romney only carried 12 states). However, the performance gap between Trump and Clinton was actually larger than the gap between Romney and Obama because Clinton’s underperformance was even worse.

She took just 42.5 percent of the Southern vote; Obama won 44.3 percent. Some of that was due to a larger third-party vote which, at 4.2 percent, was about 3 points more than it was in 2012. However, the gap between the Republican and Democratic share of the vote went up everywhere except Texas and Georgia and the lone Southern state Clinton carried, Virginia.

A look at raw vote totals shows the degree to which Clinton hemorrhaged Obama supporters.

In Mississippi, Clinton’s raw vote total was nearly 101,000 less than Obama’s in 2012, a huge shift in a state where fewer than 1.2 million votes were cast. Given that African Americans play an outsized role in the state’s Democratic base, Clinton’s numbers are a clear sign that black voters did not turn out for her as they did for Obama.

But if Mississippi was bad for Clinton, Appalachia was even worse–down 51,000 votes in Kentucky, 92,000 in Tennessee, and 52,000 votes in West Virginia, where Trump’s percentage of the vote soared 15 points above Romney’s number. Those three states together have 270 counties; she carried exactly five.

In Arkansas, where Clinton was first lady and her husband governor for 10 years, she lost 16,000 votes and managed just 33.7 percent of the vote, 3.2 points lower than Obama’s vote in 2012. At the same time, Trump’s vote went up 34,000 over Romney’s, a net difference of nearly 50,000 votes.

Even in Virginia, which Clinton won, her vote total was 11,000 less than what Obama put up in 2016. She won because in Virginia Trump’s total came in less than Romney’s by about 59,000 votes.

Meanwhile, as Clinton’s vote was fading, Trump’s was surging, beating 2012 GOP totals in every state except Virginia and Mississippi.

In Florida, where a growing Latino population was supposed to lead Clinton to victory, Trump added 442,000 votes to Romney’s tally, while Clinton added just 245,000 to Obama’s. In North Carolina, he added 69,000; she lost 16,000 in a battleground state she visited repeatedly.

In total across the South, Trump added more than 1 million votes to Romney’s haul; Clinton managed to add 448,000 by offsetting her losses in 11 states with gains in Texas, Florida and Georgia.

This led to some remarkable net vote changes between the two parties–128,000 in Alabama, 166,000 in Kentucky, 150,000 in Tennessee and 118,000 in West Virginia.

The only glimmer of light at the end of this dark tunnel for Democrats was their improved performance in both Georgia and Texas.

In the presidential race, Democrats closed the gap with Republicans from 8 to 5 points in Georgia and 16 points to 9 points in Texas. Clinton also carried two big suburban counties in Atlanta, Cobb and Gwinnett, that had not gone Democratic in 40 years, along with Fort Bend County in suburban Houston, normally a no-man’s-land for a Democrat.

So perhaps Democratic wistfulness for those two states may not have been entirely misplaced, although that’s cold comfort when Trump is carrying Florida and North Carolina on his way to the White House.

And if the presidential results were grim, the U.S. Senate races were just as bad. Republicans went eight-for-eight, with a race in Louisiana heading for a Dec. 10 runoff in which Republican State Treasurer John Kennedy is favored to keep the seat in GOP hands.

Democrats didn’t even bother contesting Alabama, Oklahoma or South Carolina; they did recruit credible candidates in the rest of the races, such as Conner Eldridge in Arkansas, Jim Barksdale in Georgia and Jim Gray in Kentucky. But all lost by double-digit margins.

The Democrats’ best shots to pick up GOP-held seats were thought to be in Florida, where U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy was challenging Marco Rubio, and in North Carolina, where Deborah Ross was challenging Richard Burr. Murphy lost by 8 points; Ross by 7. Both actually underperformed Clinton in their states.

The only good news for Democrats came in races for governor in West Virginia, where Jim Justice kept the office in Democratic hands despite Trump’s 41-point win, and in North Carolina, where Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper appears to have ousted Republican Governor Pat McCrory, although that race may be headed for a recount.

Rich Shumate is the founder and editor of Chicken Fried Politics.com, which covers politics across 14 Southern states and is where this article first appeared.

Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/sep/16/in-the-soft-south-20160916/

OPINION
In the soft South: Minorities could hold electoral key

By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | September 16, 2016

When it comes to wondering which way Southern states might fall in this year’s presidential election, conventional wisdom holds that, outside of a few states along the Atlantic seaboard, Donald Trump doesn’t have a thing to worry about.

A paucity of public polling in most of the South also means that we don’t have any way to judge whether this conventional wisdom is wise. But now, the Washington Post and Survey Monkey have come along with an unusual poll of all 50 states that offers some incredible results for a number of places in the South.

Should these results be borne out in November, incredible won’t be a sufficiently strong adjective.

In eight of the 14 Southern states, the poll found that Trump’s lead over Hillary Clinton was only in the single digits–not just in battleground states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, but in some rock-ribbed GOP states such as Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas.

In Arkansas, which Mitt Romney carried by 23 points in 2012, Trump led Clinton by just 9 points in the poll; in South Carolina, by just 7. And in Mississippi–a state that hasn’t gone Democratic since 1980–Trump’s lead over Clinton was a mere 3 points. No, that was not a misprint–3 points in Mississippi.

In perhaps the biggest shock of all, the poll found that Texas, with its bounty of 38 electoral votes, was a flat-out tie, with both candidates at 40 percent in a state a Democrat hasn’t carried since 1976. (How long ago was that? Donald Trump was still a year away from marrying wife No. 1, Ivana.)

Of course, one must greet the results of any poll showing Trump in possible trouble in Mississippi, Texas and Arkansas with a considerable dollop of skepticism. Casting more doubt on these findings is the fact that this was an online survey conducted on Survey Monkey’s platform that did not employ a random sample and, thus, a margin of error can’t be calculated.

However, despite those shortcomings, what makes this poll noteworthy is its extremely large sample size–74,000 registered voters, about 70 times the size of a typical poll–which could compensate for some of the measurement and sampling issues posed by a non-random sample.

Also, battleground-state results in this poll are consistent with other public polling in those states. (In Florida, for example, the poll showed Clinton with a 2-point lead, which is close to what the other polls have found.) And there is no reason to believe this methodology is inherently more inaccurate in non-battleground states.

So what might explain these wacky results that so assault our conventional wisdom? The answer could lie in Trump’s pronounced unpopularity with minority voters.

In Mississippi, for instance, the black voting-age population is about 35 percent, and blacks register and vote at rates comparable to whites. So if Clinton is taking almost all of the black vote, she would need to capture just 25 percent of the white vote to win. True, President Barack Obama couldn’t pull that off four years ago, but, then again, the GOP was much more united behind Romney than it is behind Trump.

And in Texas, blacks and Latinos make up an even larger percentage of the voting-age population, 44 percent. If Clinton can galvanize those minority voters in large numbers, as little as 20 percent of the Lone Star State’s white, non-Latino vote could be enough to win (a conservative estimate taking into account that Latino voters lag black and white voters in registration and participation rates.)

Florida, where Clinton led in the poll, has a minority voting-age population of 31 percent, and, unlike in Texas, Latino voters in the Sunshine State register and turn out at rates comparable to white voters. So with just 30 percent of the white, non-Latino vote, she could win.

A look at poll results in those Southern states where Trump is doing well also supports the premise that minority antipathy may be what’s bedeviling him in the region. He was winning by more than 20 points in Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma and West Virginia, all states with relatively small minority populations. But in three of the five states where the black voting-age population is more than 25 percent, his lead was in single digits.

The only states where the correlation between high minority population and a reduction of Trump’s level of support didn’t hold up were Alabama (where Trump led by 26 points) and Louisiana (where he led by 16.)

Arkansas–where the black voting-age population is only 15 percent and he was only ahead by 9 points–stands out as an anomaly against the premise that a paucity of minority voters leads to wide margins for Trump. Then again, Hillary did live in Arkansas for nearly 20 years before decamping for New York, and her husband was elected governor of the Natural State five times. Perhaps they have more residual political roots than Republicans are anticipating.

So should we all put some money down on a Clinton victory in Arkansas, Mississippi or Texas? Despite the intriguing results from this poll, the odds of that happening would still have to be considered rather long. But this has been a political year where the only thing we’ve been able to expect is the unexpected. It is not inconceivable that, if Clinton can galvanize the region’s minority vote and Trump runs behind Romney, election night might turn out more interesting than usual across the South.

Rich Shumate is the founder and editor of Chickenfriedpolitics.com, covering politics across 14 Southern states, which is where this article first appeared.

Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/jun/02/their-dream-ticket-20160602/

OPINION
Their dream ticket: But do Libertarians stand chance?

By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | June 2, 2016

The Libertarian Party met over Memorial Day weekend in Orlando, deciding to invest its fortunes with two former Republican governors, Gary Johnson of New Mexico and William Weld of Massachusetts.

For a third party in America, that’s an unusually high-powered pedigree. And given the deep unpopularity of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Libertarians left Florida with high hopes of a breakthrough in 2016, particularly if their ticket can get into the fall debates.

But the height of the hurdle that Johnson and Weld face became apparent during the party’s presidential debate, when the candidates were asked if states should be able to issue driver’s licenses.

One after another, the candidates emphatically said no–except Johnson, who pointed out that it might not be such a bad idea for the government to make sure that people roaming around on the roadways have been vetted for basic competency.

Johnson was booed.

Here are some other statements made during the debate: Crystal meth should be as legal as tomatoes. Public education should be abolished. The Pentagon should be funded with bake sales. The second-place finisher in the presidential race, Austin Peterson, even opined that, in the future, he hoped that gay people will not only be able to marry but to defend their marijuana fields with assault rifles.

As the vice presidential votes were being tabulated, a candidate for the party chairmanship took the stage, turned on some music and stripped down to his skivvies. That’s probably something we won’t see this summer in Philadelphia or Cleveland.

It was all rather entertaining, and, unlike in the Democratic and Republican contests, there was a marked absence of personal attacks between the candidates. Good for them. The question, however, is whether these positions can advance a run for the White House. Or is rigid ideological consistency the hobgoblin of electoral success?

The key to victory for any political party is to cobble together enough broad constituency groups to reach critical mass. But the Libertarians’ mishmash of unusual positions is likely to subtract from their coalition, not add to it.

For instance, religious conservatives, particularly in the South, aren’t going to cotton to their support for legalizing drugs or the fact that Johnson quit his job as head of a cannabis company to run for president. National security conservatives are going to find it difficult to get behind a militantly non-interventionist foreign policy and a drastically downsized military.

Likewise, Bernie Sanders supporters turned off by Clinton will be wary of a party that wants to eliminate virtually all social programs, turning instead to voluntary charity to take care of the old, the sick and the poor. They’re also going to have problems with a party that is as zealous in defending gun rights as the NRA.

Johnson and Weld, with their political pedigrees, may be able to transcend some of this baggage. Indeed, during the debate, Johnson often seemed to be the voice of reason, as when he said he would have signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (for which he was also booed).

Certainly, Johnson can’t be held responsible for all the wild things Libertarians say, just as Republicans can’t all be held responsible for some of Trump’s more incendiary utterances. But if he and Weld distance themselves from some of the more outlandish positions of their party, they are going to draw ire from their own partisans, who proved in Orlando that they take a rather dim view of apostasy.

The Libertarians’ fondest hope is that Johnson can get to 15 percent in the polls, getting him into the debates. Then, the American public will see him as a viable alternative to Trump and Clinton, and he will catch fire, propelling Libertarians, if not to the White House, then at least to major-party status.

But this presupposes that voters’ dislike of the major party nominees will be strong enough to overshadow what it is that the Libertarian Party actually believes. And Johnson has another hurdle–convincing voters he can run the country without a single member of his party in Congress. He would be forced to make an unending series of compromises with Republicans and Democrats, and compromise is something to which his party seems particularly allergic.

Of course, we have come to expect the unexpected during this topsy-turvy 2016 campaign, in which a socialist and a reality-TV star are two of the last three major party candidates standing. So maybe, just maybe, Johnson and Weld can pull of the miracle.

But if they do, it will be in spite of the Libertarians’ colorful positions, rather than because of them.

Rich Shumate is the founder and editor of Chicken Fried Politics.com, where this column first appeared.

Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/dec/10/left-in-a-hole-20181210/

OPINION
Left in a hole: Too ‘progressive’ for the South

By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | December 10, 2018

Heading into the midterm elections, there was a great deal of chatter around the thesis that Democrats had found a new way to win statewide races in the South—by nominating liberals who fashion themselves as “progressives” and could rally base and minority voters.

Give Southerners liberalism unvarnished, and they would come.

But, alas for Democrats, this proved rather impotent. Beto O’Rourke won’t be a U.S. senator from Texas. Andrew Gillum won’t be governor of Florida, nor Stacey Abrams governor of Georgia.

As Democrats look ahead to 2020, the results in the South in 2018 illustrate why the strategy of tacking to the left, both regionally and nationally, may play right into the hands of the two men they most love to hate, Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

In November, Democrats made major pushes in the five largest Southern states—Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia—targeting federal and statewide races. The only place that strategy worked well was in Virginia, already reliably in the Democratic column.

In Florida, with Gillum and U.S. Senator Bill Nelson leading their ticket, Democrats took just two of the nine targeted House seats and lost both a Senate seat and the governor’s race–in fact, every statewide race except for agriculture commissioner.

In Texas, with O’Rourke leading the way by not beating Ted Cruz, Democrats took just two of eight targeted House seats, and all eight GOP incumbents running for re-election statewide won—Gov. Greg Abbott by more than 1 million votes.

In Georgia, Abrams’ candidacy helped the suburban doughnut around Atlanta to the Democratic column, costing Republicans one House seat. But she fell short against Brian Kemp, who lacked her polish or political skills.

In North Carolina, none of the House seats targeted by Democrats flipped, though they did manage to reduce the GOP’s previously veto-proof majority in the legislature.

The results for Democrats were even more grim in smaller Southern states. In Arkansas, where as recently as 2010 Democrats held the governorship and every statehouse post, they didn’t come within 20 points in any statewide race and lost every federal race for the third election in a row.

So why is this important in 2020? Because if Democrats can’t win statewide races in the South, they face daunting math in both the electoral college and the Senate. And the near-total failure of out-and-out “progressive” candidates to win in 2018 raises serious questions about the wisdom of nominating them two years from now.

If Trump sweeps the South outside Virginia, he’s at 167 electoral votes. Add to that the 36 votes of the reliably Republican states in the West and Great Plains, and he’s at 203. And in every presidential election but one since World War II, the same candidate that has carried Florida also carried Ohio, which puts him at 221.

Thus, Trump would need just 49 electoral votes from the remaining states; in 2016, he got 85. To deny him the presidency, a Democrat would have to take away Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, with no room for error.

Now consider how much easier it would be for a Democrat to beat Trump if he or she could pick off some states in the South, as both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did on their way to the White House. And consider how unlikely that will be if the Democratic ticket is headed by Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris or Cory Booker.

The Senate math is even more daunting. Of the 22 Republican-held seats up in 2020, 12 are in the South and six in those reliably Republican areas in the West. Democrats must also defend a seat in Alabama.
Democrats need to flip four seats to get to a majority. So if they are shut out in the South, including Alabama, the best they can hope for is a 50-50 tie, even if they run the table in the four remaining GOP-held states—Arizona, Iowa, Colorado and Maine.

Of course, proponents of the with-progressives-we-can-win strategy will point to the fact that O’Rourke, Gillum and Abrams came closer to victory than Democrats have in recent elections—and also closer than Phil Bredesen, the Democratic moderate in Tennessee’s Senate race.

That may be true, but given the political winds blowing in Democrats’ favor in 2018, might they have won those close races had they nominated candidates more willing to trim their progressive sails?

Long-term demographic trends, particularly more urban and minority voters and a shift toward Democrats in the suburbs of major cities, do threaten Republican hegemony in the South. But 2020 is not the long term.

The biggest short-term problem for Democrats in the South is that they are getting buried in small towns and rural areas outside of major cities with majority white populations, digging a hole so deep that there are not enough urban, suburban and minority voters to get them out of it.

Kemp took at least 70 percent of the vote in half of Georgia’s counties. In the 350 miles of Florida from Pensacola to Jacksonville, Gillum won just two counties. And if you drew a line across Texas from El Paso to Austin to Houston, O’Rourke’s only victories north of that line were in Dallas and Fort Worth.

If Democrats can’t fix their problem with rural voters, they are unlikely to win statewide in the South in 2020–and 2018 shows that throwing self-styled progressives against Republicans’ big red wall is certainly not the solution.

Rich Shumate, founder and editor of ChickenFriedPolitics.com, where this article first appeared, is a former Arkansas resident. He is a journalism professor at Western Kentucky University.

Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/dec/10/left-in-a-hole-20181210/

OPINION
Coal-mine canary: Kentucky race may be 2020 preview

By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | June 3, 2019

Consider, if you will, a leader who is unapologetic, unconventional and unleashed. Who is in office not because of, but in spite of, the political class, and cares little for its opinions.

A man whose opponents are reduced to sputtering fits of rage at the mere mention of his name. Who plays happily to his base, unperturbed by tepid approval ratings.

That, of course, describes Donald Trump, but it also describes the central player in the South’s hottest governor’s race in 2019–which could very well be the first canary in the coal mine telling us how Trump himself might fare in 2020.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin is running for re-election after four turbulent years in Frankfort, in which he sparred with his fellow Republicans in the legislature, accused teachers of endangering students by leaving their classrooms to protest changes in their pensions, and lamented that Americans had become “soft” after school districts canceled classes during a subfreezing cold snap.

He has even endured the worst indignity that can befall a Kentucky politician–being booed lustily by the crowd on Derby Day.

In November, Bevin will face Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, the son of his predecessor, who over the past four years has made it his personal mission to sue Bevin–over pension reform, over higher education cuts and, most recently, over subpoenas issued to teachers who called in sick to protest at the Capitol.

A preview of both camps’ general election strategies was on full display on the night of May’s primary. Beshear called Bevin a bully and said the election would be about “right versus wrong.”

Bevin called Beshear a liberal and said the election would be about right versus left.
The governor is betting that a binary choice between himself and a “liberal” candidate will work to his advantage in Kentucky, just as Trump is painting his re-election as a binary choice between him and the “socialists” he says are running amok in the Democratic Party.

The question will be whether, when it comes time for voters to render a verdict, the pull of that binary choice will be stronger than the incumbents’ personal unpopularity (which is, arguably, how Trump became president in the first place.)

In a sense, Bevin was Trump before Trump was Trump. His came on the political scene in 2014 with a kamikaze mission to unseat U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell in a Republican primary with Tea Party support. In 2015, he won the GOP primary for governor by less than 100 votes after his two better-known rivals savaged each other. He won the general election by opposing same-sex marriage and tying his Democratic opponent to Barack Obama.

But as controversies have mounted, his fortunes have fallen. When Morning Consult looked at gubernatorial approval ratings in April, Bevin came in dead last, at just 33 percent and nearly 20 points under water.

Being tagged as America’s most unpopular governor is certainly no badge of honor when running for re-election, although Bevin, characteristically, insists he pays no attention to such things.

The governor’s job approval is about 10 points lower than Trump’s and, while the president retains strong support among Republicans, Bevin could only manage to win 52 percent in May’s GOP primary against three little-known opponents.

However, if the strategy of presenting a binary choice against a liberal is going to work anywhere, it should work in Kentucky, home to many rural, white, religious voters who propelled Trump to a whopping 40-point win in 2016.

Abortion is likely to be the key fault line in Bevin’s quest to paint Beshear as too liberal. Bevin opposes legal abortion; Beshear supports it and has refused to defend abortion restrictions passed by the legislature in court.
Bevin has also, not surprisingly, wrapped himself firmly in Trump’s aura. The president is featured prominently in his campaign ads and is expected to travel to the Bluegrass State this fall to campaign for him.

A Bevin victory, despite weak poll numbers and ceaseless controversy, would be a boon for the binary-choice strategy and a testament to Trump’s enduring popularity among his supporters.

A Bevin defeat could show the limits of trying to overcome marked unpopularity through ideological contrast. While that won’t have implications for 2020 in places such as Kentucky where Trump is popular, it could illustrate the limits of a contrast strategy in battleground states he needs to win.

No matter how Bevin versus Beshear 2019 turns out, it will be loud, expensive and mean–just the thing to get us ready for Trump versus Democrats 2020.

Rich Shumate, founder and editor of ChickenFriedPolitics.com, where this article first appeared, is a former Arkansas resident.