On Thursday, GOP Gov. Matt Bevin conceded defeat to Democrat Andy Beshear in last week’s race for governor of Kentucky. Election night returns showed Beshear leading Bevin 49.2 to 48.8, a margin of 5,189 votes, but Bevin responded to his defeat by repeatedly claiming that the election was marred by "voting irregularities." Unsurprisingly, he never produced a shred of evidence.
One prominent GOP leader initially seemed more than willing to try and rod Beshear of the governorship he’d just won. The day after the election, state Senate President Robert Stivers cited a provision in the state constitution that specifies that "[c]ontested elections" for governor "shall be determined by both Houses of the General Assembly"—and hasn't been used since 1899. Stivers even said it was "appropriate" that Bevin hadn't conceded because he thought that most of the votes received by Libertarian John Hicks, who won just under 2% of the vote, "would have gone to Bevin."
However, Stivers began to back down days later, saying that if the upcoming recanvass of the election results didn’t materially change the results, it would be time for Bevin "to call it quits and go home." The Senate leader acknowledged the backlash to his earlier comments, acknowledging he'd "received numerous angry calls and messages from people accusing him of somehow trying to steal the election.
Stivers admitted Bevin had well and truly lost on Thursday during the recanvass, which consists of officials checking the tallies reported by each voting machine and comparing them to the numbers that were reported to the state Board of Elections. Bevin himself then conceded defeat a short time later minutes before the recanvass was done, though he continued to claim there were unspecified irregularities. Soon afterwards, we learned that the recanvass led to one extra vote being counted for a write-in candidate, but absolutely no change in Beshear or Bevin’s vote totals.
Bevin’s defeat ends, at least for now, a short and volatile political career that plenty of his fellow Kentucky Republicans will hope is over forever. Indeed, perhaps the worst thing for Bevin—at least, as far as political obituary writers are concerned—is that his career was filled with so many hideous moments only a Caro-length biography could include them all, but we’ll give you the highlights of the man who will soon be the powerless broker. Bevin, who was the owner of his family’s Connecticut-based bell company, first sought elected office in 2014 by challenging Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was still the Senate’s minority leader at the time, in the GOP primary.
Bevin brought in millions through a mixture of donor support and self-funding, and he was able to rally support from anti-establishment groups who detested McConnell. However, the incumbent fought back hard and went after Bevin’s many weaknesses. Bevin was put on the defensive after it was revealed that he had signed a 2008 letter supporting one of the most hated pieces of legislation in tea party circles, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, and he also struggled to explain what he was doing at a pro-cockfighting rally. McConnell buried Bevin 60-35, and at the time, it looked like this would be the last we’d see of the challenger.
In January of the following year, though, Bevin surprised the political world by launching a bid for governor on the final day of candidate filing. The tardy new arrival very much looked like the underdog in that May’s primary between Agriculture Commissioner James Comer and former Louisville Metro Councilor Hal Heiner. However, he benefited after the two frontrunners went hard negative on one another, and he ended up beating Comer by all of 83 votes.
Bevin spent months running a terrible campaign against Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway by doing no fundraising and only going on TV in late September. Bevin’s would-be allies at the Republican Governor’s Association even stopped airing ads just a little over a month before Election Day in what seemed to be an attempt to force Bevin to shape up.
The RGA’s early results were not encouraging, but they came to Bevin’s rescue two weeks before Election Day by returning to the airwaves. Still, despite Bevin’s many flaws, he always had a shot at beating Conway in a state where Barack Obama was incredibly unpopular and where Democrats were struggling to hold on. However, pretty much no one expected Bevin to win by a 53-44 margin, especially since not a single poll showed him ahead.
Bevin got some good news the next year when his party took control of the state House for the first time since the early 1920s, a result that made him the first GOP governor in generations to enjoy unified control of the state government. However, Bevin spent his time fighting with just about everyone, including his own party.
Bevin’s approval ratings took a beating over a series of unpopular moves like a set of state pension cuts that the state Supreme Court later unanimously struck down. Before they were invalidated, those cuts prompted a teachers' strike last year that successfully pressured legislative Republicans to appropriate new funding for education, and even his own party turned on Bevin and overrode his veto of that bill.
Republicans spent the first month of 2019 wondering if Bevin would even run again, and true to form, he only made his plans known just before the filing deadline. Bevin hobbled out of the May primary with a 52-39 victory over state Rep. Robert Goforth, and unsurprisingly, the governor kept fighting with his defeated opponent months later.
Despite all of this, though, Bevin still had plenty of advantages over Beshear. Kentucky had become even tougher turf for Democrats since Bevin’s 2015 win, and the incumbent enjoyed Donald Trump’s support. While Beshear focused on local issues, the GOP did everything they could to tie him to prominent national progressives who were unpopular in the state.
Trump also sought to encourage his base to show up for Bevin by holding a rally the night before Election Day. Trump sought to frame the race around himself, and he said hours before polls opened that a Bevin defeat in this red of a state “sends a really bad message.” Trump implored his fans “you can’t let that happen to me!” but not enough of them listened to keep the Kentucky governor’s office red.
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