Rural vote shift helped re-elect Ky.'s Democratic governor

When the Democratic governor of one of the nation's more rural and Donald Trump-voting states was re-elected last week, rural voters were a major piece of it.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear carried few rural counties, but he got 43.3 percent of the rural vote, a big improvement (5.9%) over the 40.9% he got in 2019, says an analysis by The Daily Yonder.

Daily Yonder/Datawrapper graph, adapted by The Rural Blog; click on it to enlarge

That added much to his 52.5% of the total vote, because voters in rural counties made up 38% of the total, more than any other category in the Yonder analysis. Beshear's next biggest gain was in midsized metropolitan areas (5.3%), then major metros (2.9%), midsize-metro suburbs (2.6%), major-metro suburbs (1.4%) and small metros (1.1%).

Beshear defeated Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron by 5 percentage points. In 2019, he beat GOP incumbnent Matt Bevin by 0.4 points. In 2020, Trump carried the state by 26 points.

"Beshear won 17 of Kentucky’s 85 rural (nonmetropolitan) counties this year, compared to 13 in 2019," the Yonder's Tim Marema notes. "The governor’s handling of the catastrophic 2022 flood in Eastern Kentucky may have been a factor with some voters. The disaster killed 45 people and destroyed and damaged thousands of homes in East Kentucky. The seven counties that gave Beshear his largest percentage-point increase compared to 2019 were all affected by the flooding. Two of the hardest hit, Letcher and Perry, flipped from Republican to Democratic. Beshear lost those counties by 9 points in 2019. After recovery efforts that included several gubernatorial visits, Beshear won Letcher by 5 points and Perry by 11."