Trail to ’23: Beshear’s bad week, Craft’s unforced errors and an extremely online discourse

This is the second installment in an occasional Herald-Leader series, Trail to ‘23, to catch readers up on all the latest from this year’s crowded governor’s race. There are less than 100 days until the May 16 primary that will decide who among several GOP candidates will take on presumptive Democratic nominee Gov. Andy Beshear.

Beshear’s bad week: Even America’s most popular Democratic governor has a bad week every now and again.

Sure, incumbent candidates have the advantage of name recognition and plenty of earned media, but they also get stuck with the blame when things go wrong.

Kentucky Republicans were quick to give Gov. Andy Beshear a new nickname last week — Blunderin’ Beshear — over his administration’s handling of several issues, including the ongoing dysfunction in the Department of Juvenile Justice, tornado relief checks landing in the wrong mailboxes and a fact-check on Beshear’s oft-repeated claim about teacher shortages.

After The Herald-Leader reported last week that thousands of dollars intended for tornado survivors were sent to people unaffected by the December 2021 storms, Fox News gave several of Beshear’s hopeful GOP challengers space to weigh in.

With about nine months until the election and more than $4 million in the bank, Beshear’s got plenty of time to bounce back from one bad week.

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Craft’s unforced errors: After facing backlash over her “empty chair” ad — which many viewers interpreted to signify the death of a family member — GOP gubernatorial candidate Kelly Craft is doubling down, blaming the news media for twisting her message in a video posted last week.

Longtime political observers in Kentucky have questioned Craft’s handling of the issue as it approaches the one-month mark. Al Cross, a veteran Kentucky journalist and director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, wrote in a column that if there is a misunderstanding of the message, that’s not just on viewers. Likewise, Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford questioned if Craft is “getting bad advice or she is fundamentally misunderstanding” the situation she’s in.

At a Thursday evening event in Versailles, LEX 18’s Ricky Sayer reported, Craft’s campaign blocked a group of protesters comprised of “mostly grieving mothers” from attending. When asked about the mothers, Sayer reported, Craft replied she “wasn’t aware there was a group... I was busy focused on the people who came here to see me today.”

And that’s not even to mention Craft’s other, much more minuscule, mistake last week, which you likely missed unless you are an extremely online person (like, say, political writers, for example).

Craft’s social media accounts shared photos of her with the Louisville-born-and-bred rapper Jack Harlow. In one photo, Harlow appears to be walking past Craft, and his eyes seem to be closed in the second. Both look like they were taken from a fair distance away, and they certainly don’t look posed.

As Louisville-based USA Today National Political Correspondent Phillip Bailey tweeted, “Whatever @jackharlow‘s politics it ain’t close to @KellyCraftKY‘s.” As Bailey pointed out, Harlow attended racial justice protests in Louisville alongside then-candidate for U.S. Senate, Charles Booker in 2020.

On being extremely online: GOP gubernatorial hopeful Ryan Quarles shared to social media photos of him changing a tire on his big, red truck. Sen. Jason Howell, R-Murray, responded with an important question: Which other candidates can change their own tires?

“Not that being able to change a tire is a necessary skill to be governor, but I think it is something to consider when all of the other candidates spend millions of dollars to get ‘folksy by trying to be one of us when really they’re not,” Howell wrote.

This very important debate continued over at Kentucky Sports Radio, with Matt Jones and the crew discussing if Beshear, Craft and Attorney General Daniel Cameron could also change their own tires.

(David Cooper, one of a dozen Republicans running for governor, chimed in on Twitter to say that he can, in fact, change his own tires. An ally of Geoff Young, a perennial candidate who is challenging Beshear, vouched for Young’s capabilities, too.)

Cameron’s ‘Operation Fight Fentanyl’ initiative: With a couple of polls showing that the GOP nomination is (at least currently) Cameron’s to lose, Cameron had a fairly low-key week on the campaign trail compared to some of his opponents.

In his role as Attorney General, Cameron’s office announced an initiative to combat the opioid epidemic called “Operation Fight Fentanyl.”

“The initiative will aid Attorney General Cameron’s office in tackling the opioid epidemic by hearing from law enforcement, legislators, stakeholders, and community members regarding the impact of illicit fentanyl on communities across the Commonwealth,” a news release said.

With Craft forcing the conversation around opioids, other candidates may be feeling the pressure to bolster their credentials in this area. Similarly, Cameron seems to be carving out a lane as the anti-ESG (environmental, social and governance in investing) candidate, announcing Monday he’d pledged to “stop radical leftists from destroying our energy industry and to keep politics out of our pensions.”

Minor candidates, major drama: No one said the governor’s race would be dull, but there was some recent hullabaloo that not even Kentucky’s most seasoned political watchers could have anticipated.

The Facebook page for Wesley Deters, Northern Kentucky Republican Eric Deters’ running mate, was hacked, the campaign says, resulting in pornographic content involving children being shown on the site. (This link is to a Herald-Leader story on the incident, not the Facebook page, just FYI!)

Also definitely not on the 2023 bingo card: Young, the perennial candidate, appearing in a video shared by Iran’s Foreign Ministry.