Beshear has also benefited from relatively weak opponents, particularly in 2019, when he challenged deeply unpopular incumbent Republican Governor Matt Bevin. “I said in this in 2019: ‘Don’t read any more into this than Matt Bevin was just an asshole, and everyone hated him,’” said Tres Watson, the former spokesperson for the state Republican Party. Cameron, now the state attorney general, was a stronger candidate than Bevin, but Watson said that his campaign was “not particularly well-run.” Cameron emphasized culture war topics, particularly transgender rights, which turned out to be less salient for voters in the general election than in the primary.
Moreover, Beshear had the advantage of near-universal name recognition, not only as the incumbent but as the son of former two-term Governor Steve Beshear. “He’s basically the fourth-term of the Beshear dynasty,” cracked Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican. “You could try to read something into it, but the danger in doing that is, I think he’s the last Democrat who is ever going to be governor in Kentucky.”
Despite these relatively favorable conditions, McGarvey said that Beshear still had notable strengths as a candidate. In congressional campaign terms, McGarvey argued, Beshear was running in a “Trump +30 district”—meaning an area where the former president won by nearly 30 percentage points. “Can you imagine the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] playing in a Trump +30 district, regardless of what our candidate looked like, and regardless of what their candidate looked like? You’d just write it off,” McGarvey said.