Gov. Matt Bevin and attorney general hopeful Daniel Cameron evidently think immigrant-bashing wins votes even in a state that’s more than 96 percent native-born.
“One way to get people to vote for you is to scare them,” said veteran Kentucky journalist Bill Straub. “It’s been known to work before.”
It might work again next Tuesday, suggested Straub, a political columnist for Kentucky Forward and Northern Kentucky Tribune online.
Bevin and Cameron are Republicans.
For instance, a Bevin ad claims his Democratic opponent, “liberal Andy Beshear[,] sides with illegal immigrants” and “would allow illegal immigrants to swarm our state.”
In his Fancy Farm speech, Cameron said his challenger, Democrat Greg Stumbo, wants “to give illegals driver’s licenses” and supports “open borders and sanctuary policies.” (By “illegal immigrants” Bevin and Cameron mainly mean Latinex.)
Bevin and Cameron’s charges are demonstrably false.
No matter, Straub said; the GOP duo figures to make political hay by depicting “these poor immigrant folks who are doing nothing but trying to make a living as…gangbangers, rapists and thieves and all sorts of awful things. It’s as nasty and terrible as possible, but that’s what they’re relying on.”
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Straub, who is in the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, said progressive younger voters might reject Bevin and Cameron’s pandering and fear-mongering, but he added that “it’s still old white men who go to the polls.”
Time was, likability was a big factor — if not the deciding factor — in getting elected. Not so much any more, said Straub, who is retired in Silver Spring, Md., near Washington. (He was The Kentucky Post’s Frankfort bureau chief and was a White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service.)
“It’s a completely different political scene now,” Straub said.
Bevin ranks 49th in popularity among the nation’s governors in the most recent Morning Consult tracking poll. Even so, a Mason-Dixon poll released earlier this month showed Beshear and Bevin tied.
“The Republicans saw that they were losing ground and decided the way to make it up was to devise an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ strategy. ‘They’ are not like ‘us,’ blah, blah, blah. That appeals to certain people. ”
Kentucky is more than 87 percent white. Nonetheless, Straub said, “the white folks in Kentucky and elsewhere are feeling pressured because they are no longer as dominant as they once were. Now you’ve got Latino folks, you’ve got African Americans, and you’ve got women who were ignored for centuries.
“So white people are feeling threatened” and they “vote in that way…to fend off any of folks who they feel threatened by.”
Straub acknowledged that Bevin had an unexpectedly tough time winning the May GOP primary. Beshear had a nine-point lead in an August Hart Poll. “But there has never been much doubt in my mind that the Republicans in Kentucky were going to come home to Bevin,” he said.
“Landslide Matt Bevin, the incumbent, didn’t exactly set the world on fire in Tuesday’s Republican gubernatorial primary, garnering just 52 percent of the vote against three other jamokes who aren’t even substantial enough to be referred to as nobodies,” Straub wrote in his May 23 column.
“But don’t kid yourself. When November rolls around, the Commonwealth’s least-liked-in-the-nation governor could very well earn sufficient public support to ensconce himself in Frankfort for four more years, thus resulting in another era of Yosemite Sam-like chaos.”
From the start, too, Bevin (and Cameron) has also stressed that he is anti-abortion and pro-gun, popular positions in mostly rural and conservative Kentucky.
“While most voters in the 50 states place a premium on the condition of the economy, it seems more often than not that Commonwealth voters are interested in social issues – abortion, same-sex marriage, bible in schools, crime in the streets and the like,” Straub also wrote in his immediate post-primary musing.
“Bevin will go gangbusters on the social issues side. Five will get you 10 he plays the abortion card quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.”
Straub said Bevin (and Cameron) added to their pitch to voters “the fear of immigrants, which is really not that big of an issue in Kentucky. It’s sort of a bait-and-switch situation; they’re just bringing it up for political advantage.”
He compared Bevin and Cameron’s pandering to anti-immigrant prejudice to the race-bating tactics of old-time white supremacist Southern Democratic politicians.
“It’s a sad situation and no different than what went on the segregated South when George Wallace was saying ‘segregation forever.’ It’s the same idea. You are picking on poor people and deeming them lower than you and making them a threat.”
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