Last fall, voters in deep red Kentucky delivered a win for Democrats when they rejected an amendment that would have written opposition to abortion into the state constitution.
This year, state Democrats are again banking that voters will side with protecting abortion rights. They're putting the issue front and center in the closely watched governor's race on Nov. 7, hoping it will help boost Gov. Andy Beshear to another term.
The race between Beshear, the popular Democratic incumbent, and his Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron, the conservative attorney general, has emerged as yet another test of whether abortion rights can help Democrats in otherwise tough political terrain.
In the 16 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, candidates and measures supporting abortion rights have won in every election in which the issue was on the ballot or a prominent feature of the campaign.
“Abortion is going to win Beshear the race, because it is a winning issue,” said Tamarra Wieder, the Kentucky state director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, one of the national reproductive rights group’s political arms. “We have already won on this in Kentucky.”
Sam Newton, a spokesperson for the Democratic Governors Association, which has spent heavily in the race, said, "The 2022 ballot initiative paved the way for this election to hold Cameron accountable for his extreme position."
“Cameron clearly learned none of the lessons,” Newton added.
Abortion is almost entirely banned in Kentucky under a 2019 law called the Human Life Protection Act, which prohibits abortion in every situation, except when a doctor has deemed the woman’s life to be at risk. The law was one of more than a dozen so-called state trigger bans that went into effect after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022. As the state’s attorney general, Cameron has repeatedly defended the law in court.
Democratic-aligned groups have bombarded voters with ads and other messaging attacking Cameron. Cameron has maintained his support for the ban, though he has made conflicting comments about whether he supports adding exceptions.
The loudest Democratic voice on the issue so far has been that of Defending Bluegrass Values — a political action committee affiliated with the Democratic Governors Association — which plans to spend over $17 million on the race.
In an ad that hit the air last week, the group criticized Cameron for opposing adding exceptions to the existing law for situations when fetuses face serious birth defects if they are carried to term. It featured a couple who was forced to travel out of state to obtain an abortion for a fetus with a serious brain defect. The couple were forced to terminate the pregnancy with a procedure they didn’t want because of restrictions issued by their Kentucky-funded health insurance.
Other ads have criticized Cameron for having supported the ban, even though it doesn’t include exceptions for victims of rape and incest. One such spot, put on the air last month and paid for by the Beshear campaign, featured a Kentucky woman who said she was raped at age 12.
Cameron, meanwhile, appears to have repeatedly shifted his stance on what exceptions he would support adding to the ban.
In a Sept. 18 local radio interview, Cameron said that, if he is elected, he would sign legislation that would provide exceptions for rape and incest if the Republican-controlled Legislature passed such a bill.
But the next week, Cameron was captured on an audio recording obtained by The Associated Press telling voters that he would support exceptions for rape and incest only “if the courts made us change that law.”
In a statement to NBC News, a spokesperson said Cameron remained supportive of the 2019 near-total ban on abortion and of exceptions for rape and incest.
“Daniel Cameron is the pro-life candidate for governor and supports the Human Life Protection Act,” said the spokesperson, Courtney Norris. “If the Legislature brought him a bill to add exceptions for rape and incest, he would, of course, sign it.”
Norris went on to slam Beshear — who defeated Republican Gov. Matt Bevin in 2019 by less than 1 percentage point in a state Donald Trump would win the next year by 26 percentage points — as an “extremist” on the issue who supports “abortion on demand all the way up until the moment of birth.”
In April 2022, before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Beshear vetoed a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, but the veto was overridden by the GOP-controlled Legislature.
Cameron and Republican groups have moved to make the race about anything other than abortion, focusing instead on issues like the economy and Joe Biden's presidency.
Abortion “is not going to be the deciding issue in this race,” a Republican strategist involved in the race said.
GOP groups, including Kentucky Values, a Republican Governors Association affiliate that plans to spend at least $10 million on the race, have largely aimed the bulk of their own messaging at trying to tie Beshear , whose above-60% approval rating is among the highest for any governor in the country, to Biden, who, an Emerson College poll this month found, has a dismal 22% approval rating in the state.
Beshear has largely avoided discussing Biden, and at a debate last week, he criticized Cameron for so doggedly trying to link the two Democrats.
Beshear’s campaign and Defending Bluegrass Values have outspent Cameron and GOP-allied groups on the airwaves since the May Republican primary by $35.6 million to $21.6 million, according to AdImpact.
Meanwhile, polling shows Beshear with a sizable lead in the race: An Emerson College survey this month showed Beshear leading Cameron among Kentucky registered voters 49% to 33%, with 13% undecided.
Polling specifically about abortion rights has been sparse in Kentucky, though a survey published in June by the Democratic Governors Association found that 62% of registered voters in the state opposed the 2019 ban, while 14% said abortion should be illegal in all situations.
But even without nonpartisan polling on the question of abortion rights, reproductive rights groups say the 2022 ballot measure defeat should have been a wake-up call for Republicans to understand that voters didn’t support hard-line abortion policy in their state.
Their failure to do so, however, reproductive rights groups said, has allowed Democratic-aligned groups to seize on the issue in a state that many national groups had long seen as hostile territory for abortion messaging.
“We’ve been written off a lot of times in the national discourse on what issues can win in states like Kentucky, and we don’t always get the investment to be able to run full-fledged campaigns. But we were able to last year, so we were able to change the narrative a bit,” said Wieder, of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates. “And that has continued to some degree into this race.”
