Beshear’s new ad features story of 12-year-old girl raped by stepdad

A Democratic governor in a red state is leaning on abortion messaging to boost his reelection bid.

Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s campaign on Wednesday released an ad featuring a woman sharing her experience of being raped by her stepfather as a child — attacking Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, his opponent in November.

“Anyone who believes there should be no exceptions for rape and incest could never understand what it's like to stand in my shoes,” the woman, named Hadley, says to the camera in the ad. “This is to you, Daniel Cameron. To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable.”

Beshear has placed abortion front and center in the campaign’s final weeks. Earlier this month, the governor launched a statewide, six-figure ad featuring a prosecutor calling Cameron not supporting exceptions for rape “extreme” and “dangerous.”

Planned Parenthood Action Kentucky is also getting involved in the race, launching a six-figure ad campaign earlier this week hitting Cameron over abortion.

Cameron’s public stance on abortion has changed. Throughout his campaign, Cameron has said that he supports Kentucky’s current law, which bans abortion even in cases of rape or incest. But earlier this week, he said that he would sign legislation that allows exceptions for rape and incest.

“It’s unfortunate, but Andy Beshear is running the most despicable campaign in Kentucky history,” Cameron said in a video response Wednesday, reiterating that he would sign a bill with exceptions should the GOP-controlled legislature pass one. Cameron called Beshear an “extremist” who “vetoed every pro-life bill he saw because Planned Parenthood and Joe Biden said so.”

Abortion messaging largely benefited Democrats in races across the country in last year’s midterms, as Republicans struggled with how to respond on the issue. And Kentucky voters last year shut down an attempt to add language to the state’s constitution that declares a lack of protection for abortion rights. Still, it’s a rarity for a Democrat in a Republican-dominated state to rely on such messaging.

And some Republicans continue to see abortion as a losing issue heading into the 2024 cycle. Former President Donald Trump has been warning Republicans about needing to improve how they talk about abortion. He then faced backlash this week from GOP governors for his recent comment labeling Florida’s six-week abortion ban “a terrible thing.”

Ad spending in this year’s Kentucky gubernatorial race has already outpaced the 2019 contest. During that general election, when Republican then-Gov. Matt Bevin lost reelection to Beshear, advertisers put in around $24.3 million in total, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact. Four years later, over $51.8 million has been booked in the general election so far, with more on the way.

The influx of spending is a sign of the high stakes of the race. Republicans are bullish that they can flip the seat, as it's a rarity to have a Democrat running a state in the South. Yet polls conducted by a Republican group over the summer have shown Beshear either with an advantage over Cameron or statistically tied.

Democrats aren’t taking Beshear’s incumbency for granted. Defending Bluegrass Values, the Democratic Governors Association’s affiliate group in Kentucky, is the top spender so far, dropping $19.4 million in support of the governor. Beshear’s campaign is not far behind, spending $15.6 million so far.

Beshear and Cameron are set to participate in their first general election debate on Wednesday, hosted by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.