Political Notebook: Could Rocky Adkins be Kentucky’s Joe Manchin in 2022 Senate race?
At a bill-signing ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda last week, Rocky Adkins did what he’s been doing for 34 years in politics.
He worked the room.
The tall man from the left hand fork of the middle fork of the Little Sandy River congratulated the people who got the bill passed. He cracked a joke with House Minority Leader Joni Jenkins. He acted surprised when a reporter told him that his name kept getting mentioned as a possible U.S. Senate candidate.
“What are they saying?” asked Adkins, a senior adviser to Gov. Andy Beshear.
They are saying there is potential for a competitive Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 2022 against former state Rep. Charles Booker, who formed an exploratory committee Monday. They are saying it might take a specific kind of conservative Democrat to win statewide in Kentucky. They are saying it’s Rocky Adkins.
They are also saying a run by Adkins is unlikely.
“I don’t see Rocky getting into a primary,” said former Rep. Russ Meyer, a longtime friend of Adkins who had an unofficial “Rocky” bumper sticker on his car long before Adkins entered the 2019 gubernatorial race. “Nor do I think he should.”
Democrats, having been largely pummeled in elections over the past decade in Kentucky, are lost. They can’t figure out how to be a minority party in a state where people no longer have to register as Democrats to have any say in local elections.
Booker — who’s promising to revolutionize how progressives run elections in red states — presents one argument for a path forward, one in which an unapologetic embrace of the ideas that excite the next generation of voters will not only win now, but lay the foundation to win later.
Adkins is the counterargument.
He is the coal country Democrat, the pick-a-guitar with a Bluegrass band at Hillbilly Days Democrat, the stand in a corner at the Frosty Freeze (RIP) and tell stories about how your grandfather helped you win your first election Democrat, the old-school labor Democrat, the member of the pro-life caucus Democrat, the Democrat who’s been a Democrat so long you may not really think of him as a Democrat Democrat.
He is the Democrat for those who aren’t ready to give up on the old base of the party and the ones who think the math says you can’t afford to.
Rep. Angie Hatton, D-Whitesburg, is one of the few rural Democrats who has still been able to win in Eastern Kentucky (she ran unopposed in 2020) and she’s spent a lot of time thinking about how Democrats can win in the type of place where she lives. She said the national political argument has become so prominent that people who have been registered as Democrats their whole lives are vowing never to vote for another Democrat because of issues like immigration, abortion and gun control.
“The Republicans have been able to scare folks who live in Eastern Kentucky about immigration issues, where they’re worried about the security of our borders to the point that it’s keeping them up at night,” Hatton said. “We don’t really have an immigration problem here. That’s not what our trouble is. They’re not coming to steal our jobs, we don’t have any.”
Kentucky isn’t the only former Democratic stronghold where the party is in an existential flux. Across the river, West Virginia is undergoing a similar transformation. There, two Democrats have been able to win statewide recently — Gov. Jim Justice, who switched parties after winning the governor’s mansion, and U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin.
With an even partisan split in the U.S. Senate, Manchin, 73, has quickly become one of the most powerful senators in the country, in part because Democrats wouldn’t have a majority without him.
Some Kentucky Democrats wonder whether Adkins, 61, is Kentucky’s Manchin. The two are friends and, like Manchin, Adkins is an Appalachian, pro-life, conservative Democrat with longstanding roots in his state’s politics. Unlike Manchin, who was a two-term governor, Adkins launched a failed gubernatorial bid in 2019 and since has been a senior adviser to the guy who beat him, Gov. Andy Beshear.
“I mean over 30 years in Kentucky politics [Adkins] knows everyone,” Hatton said. “So nearly everyone feels comfortable calling him. At the House leadership office, where I work, we still get calls for him every day. And he hasn’t worked there for two years now.”
The leadership position in Beshear’s administration not only gave Adkins more money (he now makes $136,000 a year), it gave him a bigger platform, potentially setting him up for future elections. He’s served as somewhat of an Eastern Kentucky liaison for Beshear, becoming a point person during this year’s ice storm and flooding.
Adkins isn’t making signs that he’s running, like he did two years before the governor’s race by courting attention at Fancy Farm and saying he was thinking about challenging former Gov. Matt Bevin.
There has been limited interest in the U.S. Senate race in general, as a thin Democratic bench doesn’t appear eager to jump into an uphill battle against U.S. Sen. Rand Paul. Democrats in Kentucky haven’t come within 10 points of winning a U.S. Senate seat since 2008.
Adkins dominated Eastern Kentucky in the Democratic Primary in 2019, but he struggled to expand his base. Despite winning 31.9 percent of the vote overall, he won only 22 percent of the vote in Lexington and 10 percent of the vote in Louisville. Those cities contain about 30 percent of registered Democrats in Kentucky.
Meyer said he thinks a moderate Democrat has a chance in a statewide general election, but he doesn’t believe Adkins can get out of a primary against a well-financed progressive like Booker.
“In primaries, it’s a different vote,” Meyer said. “In primaries, a moderate may not be coming out to vote.”
This story was originally published April 16, 2021 at 3:39 PM.
