What’s the matter with Kentucky? Depends who you ask

Kentucky’s Gov.-elect Matt Bevin wasn’t talking to the media Wednesday — the day after the millionaire investor surprised most poll watchers with a decisive victory over the state’s attorney general, Democrat Jack Conway. But the media were talking about him. Bevin was reportedly busy planning his transition and scheduled no public appearances, leaving many in and outside the Bluegrass State to speculate on what had happened and what would happen next.

The state previously elected only one Republican governor in the last 44 years, and Conway had been expected to succeed term-limited incumbent Democrat Steve Beshear. But Kentucky has consistently sent Republicans to Washington. Both of the state’s senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, hail from the GOP, as do five of the state’s six U.S. representatives.

Bevin’s victory may have been just a matter of one electoral map catching up with the other.

“We knew all along it was a toxic environment for Democrats,” said Lexington Herald-Leader political reporter Sam Youngman in an interview with Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post. “The results of last year’s U.S. Senate race were clearly a harbinger of a state on the verge of turning completely red.”

McConnell, the Senate majority leader, easily won re-election over Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, in 2014, after handily beating back a GOP primary challenge from Bevin. Lundergan Grimes narrowly won a second term as secretary of state on Tuesday.

Bevin, an avowed and self-financed outsider in what has been dubbed the year of the outsider, might have capitalized on a wave of cynicism about career politicians.

But the implications for next year’s presidential election might not be quite as monumental as some would like to spin it. Kentucky, after all, favored John McCain in 2008 over Barack Obama, 57 percent to 41 percent, and went for Mitt Romney over Obama by more than 20 points in 2012.

Instead, the real impact of Tuesday’s election might be felt most immediately by those in Kentucky and most profoundly by some of the state’s poorest residents.

Many outside observers have pegged Bevin’s victory to his promises to dismantle Kynect, the state’s health insurance exchange, built under the Affordable Care Act. He began his campaign with a pledge to reverse Beshear’s decision to accept funds under the act to expand Medicaid coverage to 420,000 state residents.

On Medicare expansion, candidate Bevin grew less definite with time, seeming to indicate as Election Day grew closer that people already enrolled would not lose coverage and saying that he wanted to explore conservative solutions to providing health care to poorer Kentuckians. With regard to Kynect, however, Bevin never walked back his desire to eliminate it — something he could mostly do via executive order — a move that would force 100,000 residents who buy private insurance through the state-run program to turn to the federal exchange, through HealthCare.gov.

Amid widespread problems elsewhere in implementing the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare,” Kentucky’s story has been one of the most consistently positive. The drop in the number of uninsured across the state has been termed unparalleled by some observers. Nine Kentucky counties, many in the poorest parts of the state, have seen decreases of 14 points or more in the percentage of people uncovered — effectively halving the rate in some parts. No other state can make such a claim.

But some of the same areas — in the state’s southeast — gave Bevin some of his strongest support. And it is also southeastern Kentucky that is home to many of the state’s poorest families.

That phenomenon has raised a “What’s the matter with Kansas?” conversation for some observers, referring to the 2004 book by Thomas Frank examining why rural and disadvantaged citizens seem to vote against their economic self-interest.

Frank’s book examines how explosive cultural issues steer the political conversation away from economic ones. Such a dynamic seems to have been in play in some parts of Kentucky.

This summer controversy sprang up around Kim Davis, a county clerk who was briefly jailed for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing religious objections. Bevin had planned to make economics the centerpiece of his campaign, but he discovered there was political gain in highlighting social issues such as marriage rights and federal support for Planned Parenthood.

“I hear more about those now as I’m out on the campaign trail than I do about anything else,” said Bevin, as quoted in The Washington Post before Tuesday’s vote. “This is what moves people.”

Bevin made a point of visiting Davis in jail, and he repeatedly voiced objections to same-sex unions during his run. His campaign material billed him as “the only candidate for governor that has stood up for traditional marriage and religious liberty.”

Conversely, Conway’s arguments that “the good-paying jobs of the future are coming to states with inclusivity” and that Davis went to jail for dereliction of duty and not for her religious beliefs did not seem to resonate with much of Kentucky’s electorate.

But in some cases, a purely Frankian analysis, in which social issues crowd out economic ones, might be too simplistic. For one, it ignores the deep distrust of the president harbored by many in the state, according to Al Cross, a longtime political reporter at The Lexington Courier-Journal. Cross, who spoke to Roll Call, observed that Bevin TV ads often featured Obama’s face side by side with Conway’s.

Additionally, for some of the 400,000 people who benefited from Medicaid expansion — many clustered in some of the counties with the lowest household incomes and some of the highest vote tallies for Bevin — the loss of benefits seemed less certain, given the Republican’s late-campaign promises that those already on the rolls wouldn’t lose their coverage.

The same could not be said for Kentuckians slightly up the economic ladder who benefited from the insurance plans and subsidies offered under Kynect. That program, if Bevin is to be taken at his word, is headed for the chopping block. And though numbers on how Kynect subscribers voted are not available, Conway’s strongest support clustered in areas between the poorer southeast and the more urbanized north of the state.

But all the analysis is based on small slices of a rather small pie. Turnout for this off-year contest was extremely low. Fewer than 31 percent of Kentucky’s registered voters cast ballots Tuesday. Compare that with what was a record poor performance in last year’s midterms (45.9 percent — the lowest since World War II), and the nearly 60 percent turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

“Democrats have not figured out how to turn their people out in nonpresidential years,” said MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Wednesday night. Looking at the low numbers in Kentucky, he observed, “Democrats can’t win elections with 30 percent turnout.”

Those two points historically go hand in hand, even in parts of the U.S. that are trending less Republican than the Bluegrass State. In the last several decades, low-turnout elections have tended to favor Republicans, while higher participation advantages Democrats. The reasons are economic, age-based and racially charged. But at the end of the day, people who are financially secure, older and white — groups that more dependably show up to vote, even in low-turnout years — more often cast ballots for Republicans.

And that factor may even trump the Trump-mania of this outsider year. Inside or outside the political system, on or off the health care rolls, it’s hard to get voted into office if your base constituents stay out of the polling booth.

Graphics by Joanna S. Kao