State elections show voters value ‘kitchen-table issues’

President Trump is in a whole lot of trouble. Andy Beshear, who has claimed victory in the Kentucky governor’s race, showed that Democrats prosper when they focus on what he called “kitchen-table issues.” In Virginia, voters demonstrated that support for gun control is now an asset, not a liability, in American politics.

More broadly: Railing against impeachment and attacking Democrats as “socialists” won’t get the job done for Republicans when the GOP finds itself on the wrong end of questions such as health care and education.

Tuesday’s elections were terrible for Republicans. Their only major victory came in Mississippi, where they held on to the governorship in the face of a spirited Democratic challenge.

Beshear’s victory, assuming it holds, was both revealing and important because Trump and incumbent Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin chose to make the race a referendum on the president.

And the contours of Kentucky’s voting sent an important message to Democrats as they go into 2020. Mobilizing your natural constituency matters, but so does winning back restive voters who backed the president in 2016, and so does continuing to make inroads into the suburbs. Beshear did all three. Turnout in Kentucky’s Democratic strongholds was through the roof for an off-off-year election. In Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, Beshear won 186,510 votes, nearly 100,000 more than Bevin. Four years ago, Jack Conway, the defeated Democratic candidate for governor, also carried the county, but with only 112,232 votes — and by half of Beshear’s margin.

But Beshear also flipped many rural counties and cut the GOP margins in others. Typical was eastern Kentucky’s Carter County, which went for Beshear even though it backed Bevin four years ago and gave Trump 73.8% of its ballots in 2016. Breathitt County in Appalachia also flipped, having gone for Bevin and voted 69.6% for Trump.

“Andy focused a lot on education and especially health care, and that cut through a lot of the partisanship,” said Fred Yang, Beshear’s pollster, noting his candidate’s criticism of Bevin’s efforts to narrow the expansion of Medicaid and the incumbent’s fights with the state’s teachers.

“In a lot of these counties, the school systems or the hospitals — or both — are the biggest employers,” said Fred Cowan, a former Kentucky attorney general and a Democratic political veteran. “The Medicaid expansion helped a lot of people over there.”

The flight of suburban voters from the GOP was also central to Democrats’ success in seizing both houses of the Virginia Legislature. In an effort likely to be a model for other states, supporters of gun safety rallied against a GOP that had blocked new regulations.

Trump’s failure to rally Republicans with his anti-impeachment message in Kentucky — a state the president carried by 30 points and that is home to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican up for reelection next year — should give Republicans pause about a Trump-centric approach to their own political futures.

For Dems, the lesson is to continue their 2018 midterm successes in highlighting “kitchen-table” issues Beshear touted in declaring victory. He called health care “a basic human right,” vowed to restore voting rights to some felons and said he’d make public education his “central priority.”

Voters want elections to be about them, not the narcissist in the White House.