Kentucky’s governor is a rising political star who learned from another governor, his father

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To understand Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s two-term Democratic governor and a potential choice for vice presidential nominee in coming days, it helps to know something about his father.

That would be Steve Beshear, who was Kentucky’s two-term Democratic governor just four years before his son won the commonwealth’s top political job.

A lot of what Andy knows about politics he learned from Steve.

“Dad and I are really close, as you can tell. I always say I’ve got two jobs — to be the best governor I can be, and to be the best Gov. Beshear,” Andy Beshear said in March 2024 as he appeared with his father at an event sponsored by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“I will take every single bit of advice that he gives at any given time,” he continued. “That doesn’t mean I’ll always follow it, but to have somebody who’s been through it — to have somebody you can bounce your ideas off of — and to have the humility to know that you don’t know it all, I think it makes us better.”

Among the lessons passed down:

• Even in a conservative state like Kentucky, voters will support a Democrat with a genial “aw, shucks” manner.
• Have the good fortune to face a disliked Republican incumbent, as the Beshears did with Ernie Fletcher and Matt Bevin, in 2007 and 2019, respectively.
• Define yourself as someone seen as protecting people through good policies and authentic interactions.

Who is Steve Beshear?

Steve Beshear, now 79, was Kentucky’s 61st governor from 2007-2015. Prior to that, he represented Lexington in the state’s House of Representatives from 1974-1980, was attorney general from 1980-1983 and served as lieutenant governor from 1983-1987.

He is best remembered today for his 2014 decision to expand Medicaid coverage to about 400,000 adults, many of whom held low-income jobs that didn’t offer health insurance. The number of Kentuckians without health insurance plunged from 14.3% to 5.4% within just a few years.

Steve Beshear was able to expand Medicaid, a federal and state health care program for the poor and disabled, because of tens of millions of federal dollars provided by Democratic President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

The association with Obama made the decision controversial enough in Kentucky that Bevin, who succeeded Steve Beshear, campaigned for election on repealing the expansion, and he spent the next four years trying to add restrictions , only to be thwarted in court.

“The Affordable Care Act had become known as Obamacare,” Steve Beshear recalled in a recent interview with the Herald-Leader.

“And President Obama had about a 30% approval rating in Kentucky at that time. So I had several political advisers who said, ‘Don’t touch that with a 10-foot pole, because it will ruin any political chances you may have for the future,’” he said.

“But I looked at it and I felt — you know, this was probably the one opportunity we would ever have in Kentucky to provide the opportunity for affordable, quality health care to every single Kentuckian,” he said.

“When you look at our health statistics, it was a no-brainer, because we’re one of the worst states in the country from a health status standpoint. You pick any chronic disease or condition and we were 48th or 49th or 50th, no matter what it was.”

Winning school teachers’ loyalty

Steve Beshear also won praise during his eight years in office for trying to spare K-12 schools from the hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts he had to make across state government due to revenue shortfalls at that time.

In 2011, the National Education Association gave the elder Beshear its America’s Greatest Education Governor Award. He won statewide support for his reelection from grateful school teachers and their families, a constituency that later transferred its political loyalty to his son.

Hoping to avoid further cuts, Steve Beshear lobbied the General Assembly in 2008 for legalized casino gambling in Kentucky. He said he could raise $500 million a year in state revenue without new taxes.

Lawmakers wouldn’t go along with it, but Beshear kept arguing that many of the public services threatened by rounds of budget cuts were essential for Kentuckians.

“My philosophy was always, on a basic level, try to figure out the right thing to do and then try to figure out how you can survive and still do it in a state that’s sometimes not as progressive as you would like,” he told the Herald-Leader.

Like father, like son

Andy Beshear was a young Louisville lawyer in his father’s old firm of Stites & Harbison. He worked on Steve Beshear’s campaigns and was part of his informal “kitchen cabinet” of advisers, the elder Beshear said.

By the time Andy Beshear started campaigning for office himself, he had absorbed these lessons about public service, his father said.

The younger Beshear was elected attorney general in 2015 and became governor in 2019.

His father’s political machinery, including donors and some top aides, such as cabinet secretaries J. Michael Brown and Larry Hayes, swung over to help his son in his early years.

This was usually a big advantage, but not always.

Tim Longmeyer, a longtime Democratic Party insider who served as Steve’s personnel secretary, became Andy’s deputy attorney general. Then he was convicted of bribery in a case involving a Frankfort lobbyist and sentenced to prison.

Running for governor, Andy Beshear campaigned for expanded gambling, like his dad, including legalized sports betting and casinos. He got the sports betting in 2023. Although Kentucky never authorized casino games, it does permit electronic games very much like slot machines at horse racetracks.

The younger Gov. Beshear also tried to steer large sums toward schools, proposing teacher pay raises and early childhood education, like his father. But the General Assembly — now controlled by Republican super majorities — tends to disregard the Democratic governor’s budget priorities. They scuttled his legislative efforts.

COVID and ‘Team Kentucky’

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, just months into Andy Beshear’s first term, he — like most governors — imposed a number of unpopular restrictions to curb the spread of the virus. He required masks in public places and temporarily closed businesses, schools and churches, where crowds would have gathered.

But he also held daily televised news conferences to explain the state’s actions using a reassuring tone and plain language, updating Kentuckians on the number of people infected and killed by the virus. He became even more of a celebrity than governors usually are.

And he popularized the unifying name “Team Kentucky” at his news conferences, soon to be found on yard signs and bumper stickers across the state. That since has become his personal political slogan.

Even when voters didn’t agree with him during the pandemic, they usually concluded that Andy Beshear was trying to save lives, his father said.

“People saw a person who had the courage to step up and do what he thought was best for them,” Steve Beshear said. “While some of them may not have agreed, they saw him as a genuine, empathetic person who cared about them and was making those decisions in their best interest.”

“They liked him for the fact that he was putting his own political future at risk in order to take care of them. I think that showed through loud and clear. And that’s why today he’s one of the most popular politicians Kentucky has ever seen.”

A response to toxic politics

Steve Beshear did not speculate on what role Andy Beshear might play on a Democratic presidential ticket this year or in the future. But he said he understands why his son looks attractive to a lot of people at this moment, when national politics have become so toxic.

“Right now, you’ve got people who feel it’s legitimate to hate other people because of their religion or their color or their nationality or whatever may be there. And a lot of politicians are encouraging that just to get votes,” he said. “That’s wrongheaded and it’s dangerous for the preservation of our democracy.”

His son has refused to follow that playbook, the former governor added.

“He is determined to maintain the decency and dignity that the political world ought to have, and to reach out and work with people who feel differently than he does — to work to find common ground where you can work to move our state and our country forward.”