3 takeaways from Kentucky's big primaries

Sometimes, a frontrunner is the frontrunner for a reason.

In Tuesday’s biggest election, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron won the GOP gubernatorial primary, an expected outcome, but one that dispatched GOP megadonor Kelly Craft by a massive margin. She poured more than $9 million of her own fortune into the race, only to wind up in a somewhat humiliating third place.

Cameron emerged from a messy and contentious primary to face off with Gov. Andy Beshear this fall. His win wasn’t just a victory for himself, however: It was another notch in the belt for former President Donald Trump’s endorsement record, who backed Cameron's campaign early.

Here are three takeaways from Tuesday’s elections in Kentucky.

Trump (kinda) beats DeSantis

Tuesday’s GOP primary in Kentucky warped into a sort-of proxy war between Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his (likely) chief rival for the Republican nomination.

And Trump won it decisively. The former president backed Cameron early. It was a fairly low-touch endorsement for Trump — he did not travel to the state on Cameron’s behalf, but did host a tele-rally for him last Sunday — but it allowed Cameron not to worry about too many Republicans who love Trump straying from his camp.

“The Trump culture of winning is alive and well in Kentucky,” Cameron said at the top of his victory speech on Tuesday night.

Nevertheless, DeSantis jumped into the race at the very last minute to endorse Kelly Craft — thereby handing Trump an easy victory in the endorsement wars. DeSantis recorded a robocall for her that circulated on the eve of the election.

It was a curious endorsement, given its timing and the fact that many in the state believed that Cameron was the clear favorite heading into Election Day. Even worse, Craft looks likely to finish third in the GOP primary, behind Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles, an embarrassing black eye.

It wasn’t a full-on slugfest between the two presidential camps in the Bluegrass State. But Trump got an easy win, and his team was eager to spike the football.

“Republican voters stand with President Trump, not Ron DeSantis,” Alex Pfeiffer, a spokesperson for the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., said in a statement. “Voters know that President Trump has their interests in mind when he endorses a candidate, not the interests of the consultant class.”

Kentucky tests the culture wars

Now that Kentucky’s bruising GOP primary is in the books, the general election features a Republican nominee in an odd position for a deeply red state heading into the fall: an underdog. As Kentucky’s current attorney general steps into his role as GOP nominee for governor, look for Cameron and the Republicans to lean heavily into culture war issues to draw contrasts with Andy Beshear, the state’s incumbent Democratic governor who cruised by nominal opposition in his own primary on Tuesday night. Cameron, a protege of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, enjoys widespread name identification across the state and nationally and is seen as one of the Republican Party’s rising stars, and is among a handful of Black candidates the GOP has elected in recent statewide and federal campaigns. Should be easy for him in November, right?

Not so fast. Beshear is an incredibly popular incumbent, not just for a Democrat in an otherwise red state but for any governor in America more generally. He has led the state through a series of crises — including the pandemic, natural disasters and a recent mass shooting — and brags about the economic advancements the state has made during the first term. Republicans in the state believe he is beatable, but acknowledge it won’t be an easy task.

Look for Republicans to lean into the culture wars as a way to chip away at Beshear. Cameron is likely to reprise a line of attack previewed during the primary, including one stemming from the Covid-19 lockdowns where the attorney general paints himself as a champion of religious freedom, beating back the overreach of Beshear.

“Governor Beshear ignored the constitution and shut churches down,” Cameron said in an ad released last month, his first of the campaign. “So I took him to court and fought to reopen churches so we could come together for worship.” And the Republican Governors Association’s first ad, released last month, targeted Beshear for vetoing a bill that would block gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

“Crime runs rampant in our largest cities. Fentanyl is ravaging our communities,” Cameron said in his victory speech. “The left is trying to hijack women's sports and our schools are on the verge of becoming breeding grounds for liberal and progressive ideas.”

Republicans will likely try to nationalize the race to any degree that they can — something that’s likely helpful in a state that Trump carried by over two dozen points. Beshear, meanwhile, will try to avoid the national Democratic Party at all costs while trying to carry forward a brand that has made him popular: Being an apolitical bureaucrat who is best equipped to lead the state for four more years. “Let me ask you, is seeing people talk down our state and our economy, insult our people and stoke divisions going to help that next company choose Kentucky? Beshear said in his speech Tuesday night. “Of course not. But we know Kentuckians are tough, kind, hardworking people.”

Bad night for candidates who deny election outcomes

Trump regularly repeats lies about his loss in the 2020 election, and much of the Republican Party is still beholden to it. Even so, some of the most prominent propagators of those lies lost in Republican primaries on Tuesday night.

In Kentucky, incumbent Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams easily cruised to his party’s nomination, defeating Stephen Knipper, a prominent proponent of an election fraud narrative. Adams has been a prominent voice pushing back against that false narrative, both at home and nationally.

Before getting into the race, Knipper traveled the state after the 2020 election on a “Restore Election Integrity” tour. He said that President Joe Biden was not fairly elected and that voting machines have been tampered with, the Northern Kentucky Tribune reported.

“Kentucky Republicans rejected those who malign our county clerks and poll workers with conspiratorial nonsense,” Adams said in a statement. “That didn’t happen magically, and neither did election reform; they required strong leadership in the face of political and personal risk.”