By Nick Corasaniti

Reporting from Versailles, Lexington and Louisville, Ky.

July 27, 2024

A political scion with the most famous last name in Kentucky Democratic politics, Andy Beshear, the affable, aw-shucks governor, is best known around the state for showing up.

Everywhere.

He hosted nightly “Andy Hour” broadcasts for months during the pandemic. He met with families and held daily briefings after tornadoes tore through western Kentucky and flooding drowned eastern parts of the state. He’s constantly cutting the ribbon on a road or a bridge or a factory.

This boundless public schedule helps explain why Mr. Beshear is one of the rarest politicians in the country: a two-term Democratic governor in a deeply red, and deeply rural, state. His singular achievement, capped by a comfortable re-election victory in 2023, has made him tantalizing to national Democrats, who are eager for a candidate who can mend the party’s broken bonds with rural and working-class voters.

Now Mr. Beshear is squarely in the mix of potential running mates for Vice President Kamala Harris, who is considering several white, male Democrats who have proven their ability to attract moderate voters. He has said he received one of the first calls she made after President Biden dropped out.

Like the other contenders, Mr. Beshear is playing it coy.

“What I’m able to confirm,” he said in an interview, a smile escaping as he evaded a series of vice-presidential questions, “is that it’s an honor to be under consideration.” He declined to confirm whether he was being vetted or whether he had received requests for personal documents from the Harris campaign.

Working against Mr. Beshear is the fact that his party has no hope of flipping Kentucky in a presidential election. Republicans have also largely rendered him a policymaking figurehead in his state, where they hold legislative supermajorities. But plenty of Democrats believe his biography, rather than strict geography, could help the Californian at the top of the ticket.

“She would get a guy who knows how to talk to rural Americans, who knows how to reflect the most positive aspects of rural America, and therefore able to make our case to the folks in rural America who felt abandoned by the Democratic Party,” said Mike Ward, a Democratic former representative from Kentucky.

But with his television-ready presence, trial-lawyer training and a teaspoon of Appalachian drawl, Mr. Beshear appears ready and willing to take on another role: attack dog.

‘JD Vance ain’t from here’

Tryouts have already begun.

Mr. Beshear, like other vice-presidential hopefuls, has been making the rounds on cable news. He has notably hit out at Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the newly minted Republican vice-presidential nominee, questioning his Appalachian street cred.

“JD Vance ain’t from here,” Mr. Beshear said this week on MSNBC, assailing the senator as an Ohio interloper. (Mr. Vance spent summers in Kentucky, according to his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”)

Mr. Beshear kept it up later on CNN.

“He claims to be from eastern Kentucky, tries to write a book about it to profit off our people, and then he calls us lazy,” he said of Mr. Vance, who has suggested that Mr. Beshear, the son of former Gov. Steve Beshear, owes his own success to nepotism. “This makes me angry.”

The harsh words might seem surprising from a governor who often promises to put policy over party loyalties and turn down the political temperature. But for Republicans in Kentucky, it was familiar.

“He is a partisan Democrat to his core,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist in Kentucky. “He carries all of their views.”

Mr. Beshear has been outspoken on one of Democrats’ strongest issues: abortion rights. During his re-election campaign, he ran a series of emotional and cutting ads attacking his opponent’s anti-abortion position as extreme.

Though he speaks frequently of his Christian faith, Mr. Beshear sees no conflict with his support for abortion rights, an issue he would be expected to campaign on aggressively if Ms. Harris makes him her running mate.

“My faith doesn’t prevent me from supporting that a woman should be able to make her own health-care decisions,” he said in the interview. “We men certainly can. And no one’s tried to take that away from us.”

National ambitions

On Thursday, his weekly news conference in Frankfort, the state capital, morphed into yet another vice-presidential audition of sorts, as he unintentionally — or perhaps quite intentionally — pitched what he would bring to a ticket.

“You travel around Kentucky right now and you see a state where the temperature is turned down, where neighbors aren’t yelling at neighbors,” Mr. Beshear said as he responded to a question about his interactions with the vice president.

He recounted a recent event he had held with two Republican legislators announcing a new investment in rural Allen County. “Whoever makes up this ticket, if we can get to that type of place in the United States of America, I think everyone will take a breath. I think everyone will smile a little bit more.”

Mr. Beshear’s mission to broaden his political appeal beyond Kentucky began well before his recent ascension to the vice-presidential parlor game.

Soon after his 2023 victory, he formed a political action committee called In This Together, whose stated aim is to help Democrats in both battleground states and Republican strongholds. The group, however, has raised just $493,000 this year, according to the most recent campaign finance reports, and has announced only five endorsements so far.

But Mr. Beshear has hit the campaign trail for Democrats in such areas. This year, he traveled to Montana in support of Senator Jon Tester, one of this year’s most endangered Democrats, who has also managed to hang on in a deep-red state.

“He was talking my language,” said Evan Barrett, a Democratic operative from Montana who attended the fund-raising event. “He was talking Jon Tester’s language. He was talking the language of anybody successful in a business where you don’t have doctrinaire control.”

The omnipresent governor

In Kentucky, Mr. Beshear’s comfort zone is anywhere outside Frankfort, his uniform a shirt and jacket, no tie and rubber-soled loafers. All he needs is a government-sponsored project or windfall.

On Wednesday, that project was the Governor’s School for the Arts, a summer program for high school students held this year at the University of Kentucky. The governor ricocheted around campus to congratulate graduating students and listen to some performances.

“Programs like this helped my confidence immeasurably,” Mr. Beshear told a student choir that had just finished a rehearsal. “To the point where now, I don’t care what anybody says about me — which I hope you all have seen!”

Few governors have been as adept at drawing federal money to their home state and showing off the rewards. Kentucky had received $8 billion in federal infrastructure money as of May, according to records from the Biden administration, including $1.6 billion for a much-needed project to rebuild a bridge connecting Cincinnati and Kentucky.

Mr. Beshear has a visual flair: As he posed with local companies to roll out a $386 million investment in broadband internet, he often brought along an oversize check.

But he was most visible during the pandemic. Like many governors, Mr. Beshear tried to reassure his state with nightly broadcasts.

“His daily briefings were like an appointment-TV event for people,” said Joshua A. Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky.

A weak governor with a strong reputation

Despite what his public appearances project, Mr. Beshear is limited in his powers. The Kentucky Constitution ensures that the governor remains weak, and Republican supermajorities in the Legislature can override the governor’s vetoes.

Mr. Beshear says this has forced him to work across the aisle and forge momentary partnerships on budget deals — or to play hardball to pass controversial bills on issues like sports betting and medical marijuana.

While the Legislature “said they would never pass while I was governor,” Mr. Beshear said, he managed to pass both. “Those took bipartisan votes.”

Republicans in Frankfort feel differently.

“He doesn’t communicate with us, he doesn’t talk with us, he fights against and speaks against a lot of our initiatives,” said State Senator Damon Thayer, a Republican. “He’s vetoed over 100 of them, and we overrun them. And then he takes credit for our work when we’re not in session.”

Mr. Beshear brushed off Republican criticisms.

“I have been Monday in somebody’s district and they stand up and say, ‘Thank you to Andy Beshear for showing up here, for bringing this money,’” he said. “And then Wednesday, they’re on the floor in Frankfort saying, ‘Andy Beshear has never been in my district.’”

According to Jake Cox, a Republican operative in the state, the G.O.P.-led Legislature has overridden 107 of 127 vetoes by the governor since 2020.

These veto overrides, however, help explain Mr. Beshear’s strong political standing. They allow him to defend Democratic values — he vetoed a bill last year to restrict transgender rights — even as Republicans in the state ultimately get what they want, leaving conservative voters with little to agitate over.

Some Democratic voters in Kentucky think Mr. Beshear could bring balance to a presidential ticket with Ms. Harris.

“I think he would bring her more into a moderate lane,” said Stephen Smallwood, 57, of rural Menifee County, east of Lexington.

For now, Mr. Beshear professes to be focused on Kentucky, though his digs at Mr. Vance are telling.

At a roadside sandwich joint with a famous pimento cheese melt, Mr. Beshear offered up a bottle of Ale-8-One, a soft drink he described as “insanely caffeinated ginger ale.”

“That’s what we drink in Appalachia,” he said, before taking a swipe at the lime-green soda Mr. Vance had recently signaled a softness for. “Not Diet Mountain Dew.”

Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.

Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections. More about Nick Corasaniti

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5565242&forum_id=2#47898715)

At a roadside sandwich joint with a famous pimento cheese melt, Mr. Beshear offered up a bottle of Ale-8-One, a soft drink he described as “insanely caffeinated ginger ale.”

“That’s what we drink in Appalachia,” he said, before taking a swipe at the lime-green soda Mr. Vance had recently signaled a softness for. “Not Diet Mountain Dew.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5565242&forum_id=2#47898723)