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| If only Matt Bevin's family had been old enough to vote. |
The key to victory is always to unite your own side and divide that off the enemy.
The cuckservative wing of the GOP not only failed to do that in the Kentucky Gubernatorial election, but actually did the opposite under the banner of incompetent incumbent Matt Bevin, who has narrowly lost to Democrat Andy Beshear.
Bevin was elected Governor in 2015 when his Democratic opponent signalled too hard on Green issues. This spooked a lot of Kentuckian voters, who rely on the state's big coal industry for their livelihood. But since then voters have got to know Bevin better and didn't like what they saw.
Bevin has a large family, which is usually a good thing, but the fact that it includes four Ethiopian adoptees strikes a bum note among Conservative White voters in a state where the races tend to keep a respectful distance.
Bevin's attempts to appeal to the Conservative base -- by allowing the concealed carrying of firearms, banning abortions, and outlawing sanctuary cities -- all failed to strike a chord, and instead energised his Leftist opponents, along with his cost-cutting attempts, such as his reform of teacher's pensions, an implicit threat to the 16.4% of the state's workforce employed in the public sector.
But the real story here is demographics. No the state isn't being swamped by ethnic minorities voting Democrat -- that;s Virginia. By contrast Kentucky is relatively stable with an 87.6% White population! This means there is less of the defensive White identity that you find in other more "enriched" parts of America.
But the real demographic shift is the one that is moving the population slowly away from a rural and industrial character to a suburban and post-industrial one. This creates a softening of socially conservative attitudes and a greater focus on immediate economic interests, along with a tendency to aspire to the "cultural fashions" being pumped out America's culturally hegemonic centres of New York and Hollywood, which continue to move rapidly to the Left.
The GOP, it seems, will have to come up with a lot of new ideas if it is to stop the Left defeating it in states that should be solidly Republican.
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