Election Time in the Bluegrass

Tomorrow my fine state is holding several important primaries. Most notable among these is the GOP gubernatorial primary, which has pitted Attorney General Daniel Cameron against former UN Ambassador Kelly Craft and Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles. Here’s the state of the polling:

Released by Emerson College and WDKY/Fox56 television station on Sunday, the survey of 500 “very likely” Republican voters showed Cameron with 33% support compared to former ambassador Kelly Craft with 17.6% and Commissioner of Agriculture Ryan Quarles with 13.2%.

I’ll confess that I’m a touch surprised by this. Cameron started with a big lead, but Craft closed to within seven points in the previous poll on the strength of a very heavy (and hilarious, but not in a good way) ad buy. I’ve found Cameron’s response ads to be a bit underwhelming, but clearly I’m not the intended audience. FWIW, word on the street is that the Beshear team believes that Cameron is the weakest of the three, with Quarles the toughest and Craft somewhere in the middle. Take that with all the salt you like, but apparently the idea is that Cameron is much hated in Louisville (driving Democratic turnout in the Commonwealth’s biggest city up) because of his role in the Breonna Taylor response. Craft has a lot of money but is clearly a lightweight, while Quarles is merely a competent, well-liked public servant. As we all know, Democrats aren’t great about making these kinds of assessments. In any case, Beshear remains the favorite to hold onto the Governor’s Mansion.

We also have primaries for Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Agriculture Commissioner. Advertising in these races has all focused heavily on the fight against “wokeism,” to particularly surreal effect in the Ag Commissioner race (woke bureaucrats something something Kentucky way of life something). The Secretary of State race is also vaguely interesting, pitting incumbent Republican Michael Adams against a couple of extremely wingnutty competitors. Adams, who helped structure the controversial June 2020 primary that made everyone mad at Kentucky for a series of incredibly stupid reasons, is looking worried. A lot of his campaign ads feature incredibly dumb tweets attacking the June 2020 primary, apparently in an effort to demonstrate that if Hillary Clinton and various Hollywood celebrities hate him then he must be doing something right. In related news Ava Duvernay blocked me for trying to explain why the primary worked the way it did and now apparently pays $8/month to Elon Musk to keep her blue check. Go figure.

In case you’re wondering why Kentucky has elections in an off year, the answer isn’t actually “because powerful people want to depress turnout.” Rather…

In 1891, when delegates wrote a new constitution, much like in Mississippi, delegates openly worried that holding state contests at the same time as federal ones meant that federal officials would send troops to Kentucky. “We want no federal authority to interfere with our local elections,” said constitutional convention delegate Bennett H. Young, according to the official account of the 1891 debates. “If we have all county, state and district elections held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in the odd years, that will avoid the United States election.”

Now you know. In other news the voting day ends at 6pm (yes, that’s super early) and all public schools are closed (dunno what the actual impact of that is on voting). Fortunately, the law prohibiting bars from serving alcohol before polls close on Election Day was repealed a decade ago. Drink early, drink often!