Andy Beshear joins The View, The Daily Show, weighs in on ICE & elections
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Road to 2028: Gov. Andy Beshear’s political future
Gov. Andy Beshear is increasingly in the spotlight as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate. The Herald-Leader believes Kentuckians should know what he is saying and doing, where he is traveling and what is being said nationally about the two-term governor.
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Editor’s Note: Gov. Andy Beshear is increasingly in the spotlight as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate. The Herald-Leader believes Kentuckians should know what he is saying and doing, where he is traveling and what is being said nationally about the two-term governor. To keep the commonwealth updated, our journalists will publish a periodic round-up of the latest news and headlines about Beshear.
Andy Beshear has had a busy few days.
Kentucky’s governor appeared on television programs like The View and The Daily Show, he took shots at Republicans on social media and said he’d refuse to show up to an upcoming dinner for governors.
Beshear, 48, has long been considered a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028. That year is still a ways away, but the talk about potential candidates, including Beshear, has heated up — and he hasn’t shied away from it.
The governor has given the same answer to the question of whether he’ll run so many times, the programs basically interview him with the assumption he’s vying for it.
His heightened profile has also led to heightened criticism from Republicans. Even though he repeated many talking points he’s used before, some drew a different volume of backlash from Republicans, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
What Beshear said on The View, The Daily Show
It was on the back of survey results showing Beshear is still the country’s most popular Democratic governor that he appeared on talk shows Monday to discuss with hosts why his strategy as a Democratic leader in a Republican state works. The governor also appeared in part to promote the podcast he launched last year in April.
Beshear told the hosts of The View he’s been able to win multiple times as a Democrat in deep red Kentucky because of three things: he said he stands up for his convictions, tries to talk “like a normal human being” and connects his politics and policy back to what drives him.
“Especially in a world with social media where everyone’s looking for the next authentic thing, for me, that’s my faith,” he said on the morning talk show. “Most of the decisions I make are based on that golden rule that says we love our neighbor as ourself, and that parable, the good Samaritan, that says everyone is our neighbor.
“And so, when I’ve taken actions like vetoing the nastiest piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation that ever came through my state, I described it in those terms. I said, ‘my faith teaches me that all children are children of God,’ and I didn’t want people picking on those kids,” he said.
Beshear was referencing 2023’s Senate Bill 150, which banned gender-affirming health care for transgender teens, including puberty blockers and surgeries. The GOP-controlled legislature ultimately overrode his veto.
He repeated similar sentiments to Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, a late-night Comedy Central talk show where the governor had a more humorous tone than he took with the moderators of The View earlier the same day.
In response to Stewart asking if the country’s Democratic governors know each other, talk about running for higher office or even future endorsements for those campaigns, Beshear said the group is focused on the 2026 midterms. Other Democratic governors, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, are also believed to be eyeing 2028 presidential runs.
Stewart asked if the governors had a pick for who they thought would be the best president.
“We’ll put it a different way: Who’s the worst one?” Stewart asked. “Who’s the one where you guys are at the governor’s conference and the elevator opens, and he’s about to walk in, and you just go, ‘f--k.’”
Without much of a pause, Beshear named the Florida Republican: “Ron DeSantis.”
Beshear on ICE, nationalizing elections
Beshear, who was the state’s attorney general before running for governor, said on The View the aggressive actions of ICE are those you don’t see anywhere else.
“There is a body count of American citizens right now because of the actions of this agency,” Beshear said. “That should be enough to say, ‘We’re going to take a pause, we’re going to pull everybody back, and we’re going to try to get it right.’”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has led antagonistic immigration operations in Minneapolis after federal agents shot and killed two Minnesotans.
“Every ICE agent should be withdrawn from every city and every community that they’re in,” Beshear said. “This organization has to be reformed from the top down. Secretary (Kristi) Noem needs to be fired, and every agent needs to be retrained.”
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said Republicans should nationalize elections in as many as 15 states, a declaration that was also a topic on The View Monday morning. The president claimed, without evidence, that fraud and corruption in state-run elections threatened his and his party’s success.
“This should concern everyone, and it should start with the fact that he didn’t use ‘nationalize’ in his first statement, he said Republicans should take over elections in certain states,” Beshear said. “You know, this president does show you who he is, and he says the quiet part out loud so everyone can hear it.
“We’re not going to let him mess with our elections.”
National Governors Association
Trump is hosting a dinner for America’s governors later this month at during the bipartisan National Governors Association winter gathering, but Beshear won’t be there.
“I ain’t going,” Beshear told the hosts of The View when asked about it.
His reasoning: Trump snubbed two Democrats, Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland and Jared Polis of Colorado, from the guest list.
Beshear also said Democrats didn’t get invites to a part of the program devoted to business.
“Wes is a friend of mine. Even if he wasn’t a friend of mine, this would be wrong — and Jared as well — but the other thing that’s going on is they didn’t invite any Democratic governor to the business section,” Beshear said.
Moore and a Polis spokesperson told ABC News they did not know why the governors were excluded.
“As the nation’s only Black governor, I can’t ignore that being singled out for exclusion from this bipartisan tradition carries an added weight — whether that was the intent or not,” Moore said.
On Tuesday, Beshear and other Democratic governor put out a statement via the Democratic Governors Association saying it was “disappointing this administration doesn’t seem to share” a goal of working across the aisle.
“If the reports are true that not all governors are invited to these events, which have historically been productive and bipartisan opportunities for collaboration, we will not be attending the White House dinner this year,” the statement said. “Democratic governors remain united and will never stop fighting to protect and make life better for people in our states.”
Ted Cruz back and forth
Multiple Republicans slammed Beshear for his comments about vetoing SB 150, the “nastiest” anti-trans legislation the governor mentioned on The View.
When Beshear offered his usual explanation of the veto, saying that “all children are children of God,” the Republican National Committee posted that interaction to social platform X.
“Kentucky Democrat Governor Andy Beshear uses the Bible to justify the gender mutilation of children,” they wrote.
Andrew T. Walker, a prominent theology professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, wrote that Beshear was twisting the Bible.
“The irony is that Governor Beshear’s appeal to the command to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ inverts the meaning of the text. As is often the case with progressive revisionism, the command is treated as a moral permission slip: love your neighbor in the way your neighbor defines as loving. That reduces love to radical subjectivism and evacuates it of moral content,” Walker wrote on X.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also entered the fray Monday.
After Cruz quoted the post, asking Beshear “why are you sterilizing & mutilating the children of God,” Beshear responded swiftly.
“Do you ever get tired of being wrong and mean? My faith teaches me to love everyone. Full stop. No exceptions. Enjoy Cancun,” Beshear wrote on X.
Cruz recently boosted a false post about Beshear’s travel in the lead-up to the recent snow and ice storm that rocked much of Kentucky; that post was later deleted. Cruz himself was the subject of intense scrutiny in 2021 when he was spotted on a flight to popular vacation destination Cancun, Mexico, in the middle of an historic ice storm in Texas.
This story was originally published February 10, 2026 at 2:31 PM.
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