Politico: “To win a second term as governor next week, Andy Beshear needs to prove that the Democratic Party isn’t dead and buried in places like the Eastern Kentucky Coalfields.
And he needs to do it with unpopular President Joe Biden in the White House….
Democrats repeatedly invoked the specter of Trump to energize their base and defeat GOP candidates in blue states. Now, Republicans are hoping Biden’s deep unpopularity will help them in places like this.
“I know there’s a lot of folks here that want to make sure we get Joe Biden out of the White House. But before we do that, let’s remove Andy Beshear from the statehouse,” Cameron says in the final plea of his six-minute stump speech.
The Republican strategy to tie Beshear to Biden is easily apparent on television. A few months ago, GOP ads kept hitting Beshear on crime and transgender policies. Now, it’s almost all Biden and Trump. One ad running this week backed by the Republican Governors Association splices a clip of Biden acknowledging Beshear at a bridge dedication four times in 30 seconds. A super PAC supporting Cameron went up with an ad this week featuring a direct-to-video endorsement from Trump in which the former president says Beshear’s endorsement of Biden “is about as bad as it gets.”
“You’ve got two totally different strategies,” said Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state who’s campaigning for Cameron and seeking a second term himself next week. “Beshear’s strategy is a more traditional strategy: Hold your base and reach out to the center. And the attorney general’s strategy is really more about base mobilization. And they both have precedents on their side to support their approach.””