Making sense of 2022 election: KY GOP gains in statehouse, Dems find hope in abortion vote
.JPG "The Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort.")
Kentucky Republicans had lots to cheer about on election night. So why do some state Democrats and politicos see a ray of light on the path forward from the 2022 vote?
In the state House, Republicans picked up six seats and only lost one, and they also picked up one seat in the Senate. That grew their majorities from 75-25 to 80-20 in the House as well as 30-8 to 31-7 in the Senate.
But they weren’t granted everything on their wish list. Republicans in and out of state backed candidates running for high-impact judicial races, and all of them lost decisively on Tuesday night.
One of the most closely-watched Republican priorities, the anti-abortion Amendment 2, also failed – as did the GOP-backed attempt to change the way legislative sessions are called in Amendment 1.
So the results are a mixed bag for Republicans. In the statehouse they made clear gains, but they didn’t translate that success into nonpartisan territory such as an all-important Franklin Circuit Judge seat or two close Kentucky Supreme Court races.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Frankfort are licking their wounds. They lost their only elected representative in the Central Time Zone, and now hold just two seats outside of the state’s ‘Golden Triangle’ region. Many Democrats blame the House losses on external factors like the overall political climate and gerrymandering.
Just two days after the election Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate ruled against the Kentucky Democratic Party in their first legal challenge against the new maps.
So where do Democrats go from here?
“Up. Up. The only way to go from here is up,” Rep. Josie Raymond, D-Louisville, said. “I do think this is rock bottom for the Kentucky Democrats.”
What do the 2022 results mean for the next big Kentucky election, when all eyes will be on Gov. Andy Beshear as he fights against whoever survives a crowded Republican primary for governor?
University of Kentucky political scientist D. Stephen Voss said Beshear should feel “pretty good” about the message and image he’s crafted thus far.
“The sort of mild-mannered, common-sense Democratic approach that he’s taking is the sort that voters around the state are willing to elect and willing to re-elect,” Voss said. “It’s an uphill battle no matter what because he’s going to have the D behind his name, but he’s also going into his re-election contest with fairly high popularity.”
What happened in the statehouse?
Outgoing House Minority Leader Joni Jenkins, D-Shively, was open about Tuesday’s result not being ideal for House Democrats in a statement to the press. She also laid much of the blame on external factors.
“The reality is that our candidates faced four hurdles beyond their control: increased nationalization of state and local races; a traditionally tough midterm cycle for a president’s party; a flood of ‘dark’ money from out-of-state donors; and a clearly gerrymandered state House map that we are confident the courts will reject in the weeks ahead.”
The most commonly cited gripe from Democrats on the reason for their losses is alleged partisan gerrymandering. That’s the subject of their lawsuit against the new maps, enacted this year, which were drawn by Republicans and later passed with little time for public review. The party has stated that it plans to appeal the ruling it got from Franklin Circuit Court.
Some Democrats pointed to a tweet from former House GOP majority leader Jeff Hoover, crediting the growing majority to a House GOP staffer involved in drawing the maps, as proof of the intentionality of Republicans using redistricting to guarantee positive partisan outcomes.
Republicans say they outplayed Democrats on the fundamentals of a good campaign cycle: recruiting, targeting races and messaging.
“The candidates that we had across the state were superior candidates that were talking about issues the voters were interested in – the price of eggs, the price of gas and rising crime,” chair of the House GOP campaign caucus committee Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Louisville, said.
Nemes easily survived his own challenge against Democratic challenger Kate Turner. He downplayed the role of redistricting in Republican wins, but did point to increased unification of Louisville neighborhoods in the GOP’s three Jefferson County wins.
Rep. Lisa Willner, D-Louisville, begged to differ.
“We cannot underestimate the role that redistricting played in those Jefferson County seats that the Democrats lost last night,” Willner said.
On Thursday, Beshear said each of the House seats lost had been “gerrymandered, significantly and intentionally.”
“I think if those districts had been run under the old map that those individuals would have won, but we’ll see what the law is going forward,” he said. “You don’t necessarily get to choose your terrain, but you’ve got to adapt to it.”
In the Senate, where the GOP picked up an expected single seat, Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, said that candidate quality and the Democrats not running anyone in contested districts played a big role.
“I think we had good candidates. Filing deadline day matters as well. In the Senate, we had (new GOP senators-elect) Matt Deneen, Gary Boswell and Lindsey Tichenor all unopposed by Democrats, then we had seven incumbents unopposed. That’s ten seats where Democrats didn’t even play,” Thayer said.
The Democrats didn’t field a candidate against Senate Minorty Caucus Chair Julie Raque Adams, R-Louisville, whose new district only went +3 for former GOP president Donald Trump, they didn’t get a candidate on the ballot for an open seat based in Oldham County that’s +9 Trump, and they failed to find a candidate to replace outgoing Sen. Dennis Parrett, D-Elizabethtown.
Voss, who served as an outside expert for GOP Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s legal team when it defended against the Democrats’ redistricting suit, said Democrats had a bad night in the state legislature, and they can’t chalk it all up to redistricting woes.
“Yes, these were districts that were more favorable to Republicans than they would have been under the old map, but it still required the Democrat to underperform expectations for these newly competitive districts to move Republican,” Voss said.
By his calculations, Democratic representatives Patti Minter in Bowling Green and Buddy Wheatley in Covington were casualties of the new maps, but the case isn’t as clear cut for the Louisville Democratic seats or Angie Hatton, D-Whitesburg, in Eastern Kentucky.
“Frankfort Republicans got what they wanted in Kenton County when they redrew our legislative districts. For the first time in the history of the Commonwealth, Covington will not be represented by a resident of the city. Wheatley ran a great race, but the combination of unfair district boundaries and an unprecedented negative campaign funded by downstate money has left him with a deficit,” Dave Meyer, Kenton County Democratic Party vice chair, said.
Kyle West, former executive director of the Louisville Democratic Party, called blaming the losses on redistricting an “easy excuse.”
“The minute we as Democrats turn and say, ‘Well that’s not fair. They can’t do that,’ all voters hear is whining,” he said. “You can cry about the situation, or you can buckle up and do something about it. It’s a problem up and down the line within the party, navel gazing and a lack of bravery to stand for something.”
Many GOP candidates likely got more money from the party, too, said Anna Whites, an attorney who frequently represents Kentucky Democratic politicians.
“Money matters. It makes a huge difference these days, and the Republican Party seems to recognize that it’s important to fund your bench building and your state-level offices,” Whites said. “They focused hard on the folks they thought could add. Democrats, on the other hand, seem to be conserving their money and looking at the governor’s race next year.”
West pointed to the Democratic misstep in House District 29 as an example of a “significant unforced error” by Louisville Democrats. The Democratic candidate, Matthew Pfaadt, withdrew because he was actually a Republican after a key deadline. That, West said, freed up money Republicans would have otherwise spent protecting Rep. Kevin Bratcher’s seat to attack other races. In addition to claiming three Louisville house seats, Republicans also flipped two Metro Council seats.
“That’s a blow and I don’t think it’s one you can attribute to, ‘This was just the environment at play this cycle,’” he said.
Neither RPK nor KDP responded to a Herald-Leader inquiry on how much they spent on state-level candidates this cycle.
The path forward for Democrats
Kentucky Democrats lost control of the House — the last Democratic-controlled law-making chamber in the South — in 2016 and have mostly lost ground since.
Raymond pointed to the undervote for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker compared to the ‘no’ vote on Amendment 2 — which was a disparity of more than 170,000 votes, according to the AP.
Those voters “share some values, and some ideology, and some thinking and some perspective with the majority of Democratic candidates in Kentucky, but they just didn’t vote for Democrats,” she said.
Key to tapping into that population: “We need to do the hard work of developing the message and telling people what we are offering and what we’re for and not just what we’re against. … I think that we have a winning message around public education, workers’ rights and family stability and family income, where we can find a lot of commonality if we can deliver it in the right way.”
One Democrat whose message all eyes will turn to next year: Beshear.
That’s where Republican attention is focused.
In both post-election statements released by RPK spokesman Sean Southard, Beshear gloom and doom is a central theme. One tied him to President Joe Biden, and another expressed optimism about the House results “laying the groundwork” to defeat him.
According to Voss and Northern Kentucky University political science professor Ryan Salzman, election night wasn’t so bad for Beshear given the mixed bag of results.
“I’d say that Beshear shouldn’t read too much into this. The amendments were a repudiation of the legislature, but they only went down by five points. Likewise, the legislature lost seats, and we expected that. If I was talking to someone in their campaign right now, I’d say ‘whatever you thought on Nov. 7 should be the same as Nov. 9,’” Salzman said.
As for the GOP contest for the governor’s mansion, Voss said Kentucky’s closed primary system means a more moderate stance on abortion could be the “kiss of death” for a candidate.
“It’s hard to do. It’s a gamble,” he said. “Now, if you’re in a crowded field of strongly anti-abortion people, you might take that gamble and hope that by setting yourself apart, you rise to the top. I imagine one of these Republicans looking at otherwise facing a loss in the primary might experiment with that.”
Louisville State Rep.-elect Daniel Grossberg said he’d encourage Beshear to continue to be strong on abortion, “particularly when the lead candidate against him might be the biggest obstacle to reproductive freedom,” a reference to Cameron, who is also vying to become governor in 2023.
“Abortion was on the ballot — in Kentucky, quite literally so — and the people made clear that we are unabashedly pro-choice. It’s long overdue that the Democratic Party do the same.”
Republicans fall short on amendments, judges
Aside from claiming a more dominant hold on the statehouse, some state Republicans took on a lot of extracurriculars: advocating for the anti-abortion amendment, the other amendment changing how legislative sessions are called, and three high-profile judicial races.
They fell short in all of them. None were particularly close, either. The anti-abortion Amendment 2 lost by about 5%, while Amendment 1 lost by a bit more. Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Michelle Keller’s was the closest of the three targeted judge races, and she coasted to a 10 point win, beating Rep. Joe Fischer, R-Ft. Thomas, architect of both Amendment 2 and Kentucky’s trigger ban on abortion.
Willner said the defeat of Amendment 2 is a “huge relief.”
“Kentuckians really clearly said that kind of extremism, they don’t want that in their politics or from their politicians. I don’t know how that’s going to play out in the long run, but I think we got a message last night and we need to be thoughtful about listening to that message and trying to understand exactly what that means,” Willner said.
Grossberg said the House Democratic caucus has not had an official stance on abortion, and “needs to recognize how powerful of an issue it is and needs to run on it.
“In general, the Democratic Party needs to stop being a party of opposition to the Republicans and stand for something because if we don’t define ourselves, the Republicans will define us for us,” he said.
How do Republicans feel about one of their top priorities, the anti-abortion Amendment to the state constitution, falling? Thayer said that it’ll be business as usual in Frankfort when it comes to anti-abortion legislation
“I don’t read anything (into the result) at all. 80 Republicans just got elected to the House. I think a majority of Kentuckians want their legislators to be ostensibly pro-life and I think the pro-choice side ran a very deceptive campaign about what the amendment really did,” Thayer said.
In addition to the amendments and Supreme Court races, many GOP legislators backed Joe Bilby against Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd after a lot of grumbling over perceived bias in that court, where many challenges related to bills and state government start.
That race, in particular, became heavy on attacks – particularly against the incumbent. But those attacks didn’t work, Shepherd said. The pro-Bilby effort, split between his campaign and PACs, totaled close to $400,000, yet the challenger lost by 26 percentage points.
“The line of attack that was advanced against me did not ring true because it was not true,” Shepherd said. “People in the community know me and they’re very smart about current events, the courts system and issues involving the government. The idea that I don’t ‘follow the law’ was really kind of absurd. I don’t think it gained any traction with people who were well informed about the legal system.”
On Thursday, Beshear called the election results “a rejection of the General Assembly’s attempted power grab in both the executive and the legislative branch and maybe in people’s private lives as well.”
“People said ‘No,’” he said. “’The governor has certain jobs and you have certain jobs. Both do your jobs and we expect you to get along.’”
He also called out Republicans for getting involved in nonpartisan judicial races.
”They got out there and very clearly said, ‘This is us backing these candidates,’” he said. “In every one of these elections, the people said ‘No.’
”“The people stood up for our constitution and what it’s supposed to mean. Under our constitution, even if you have a supermajority ... that doesn’t mean there aren’t checks and balances from the other branches of government that preserves our democracy and our way of life.”
This story was originally published November 10, 2022 at 2:00 PM.
