Every summer, a church in western Kentucky hosts an event called Fancy Farm. It’s both a fundraising barbecue and an iconic political tradition, with leaders from across the state showing up to roast one another. This year, Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Andy Barr, both Republicans, not surprisingly took some shots at the Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. Beshear had skipped the event to attend his son’s baseball game, but later that day he weighed in on X: “Sorry to miss Fancy Farm today, but let me get in on the fun. Rand Paul apparently said I’d been ‘neutered’ by my legislature. Rich coming from a guy who’s never had a pair of balls and if he did they’d be held by Trump.” He continued: “I’m told Andy Barr also spoke. We aren’t the same. Yes, same first name, hometown and high school, but I don’t run racist ads.”
Coming from most politicians in 2026, those social media posts wouldn’t have turned heads. But from Beshear — one of the most mild-mannered politicians in America; a governor who was once likened by a Kentucky radio host to “eating vanilla ice cream with no topping”; someone who has often been compared to Mr. Rogers and in fact dressed as him last Halloween — the zingers were stunning. “Out of character,” concluded one local columnist. Multiple commenters on X wondered if the governor’s account had been hacked. The contrast to his usual public persona was so stark that, when a local news outlet asked him about the posts in his weekly news conference, Beshear felt the need to declare: “I’m still me.”
The dustup came just weeks after another very un-Beshear-like move: In July, the governor had sent a stern letter to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) — who had been missing from the Senate for nearly three months — demanding proof of his capacity to continue to serve. A few weeks later, he sent a second one.
These episodes raised an obvious question: Was Andy Beshear trying to demonstrate something about his verve, his charisma, his fight because he’s about to run for president? When I interviewed Beshear recently at the Old Governor’s Mansion in Frankfort, he insisted — as expected — that he hadn’t “made any final decision” about 2028. Still, he didn’t exactly sound like someone who was not planning a White House bid. “What I can tell you,” he said in response to my are-you-running query, “is I won’t leave a broken country to my kids or to anyone else’s.”
Over the past two years — ever since Beshear made Kamala Harris’s vice presidential short list — it has felt like everyone outside the Bluegrass State has at some point texted their Kentucky friend a version of “So what do people actually think of this Beshear guy?” I’m a born-and-raised Kentuckian who still lives in and reports from the state, which means I have found myself confirming that, yes, lots of people really do just call him Andy.
It’s easy to understand the national fascination with Beshear. How has a Democrat managed to win two terms as governor of this deeply conservative state? And could his crossover appeal to Republican voters translate to the national stage? Based on a cursory reading of his résumé, you might assume that Beshear is a classic red-state Democrat: generally centrist, especially on cultural issues, and focused on compromising with those across the aisle.
Here on the ground in Kentucky, though, the reality is quite different. Beshear’s politics actually aren’t all that centrist and are, in some respects, surprisingly progressive. For instance, at a moment when many Democrats (including in blue states) have suggested the party should back away from transgender rights, Beshear has emerged as a defender of the trans community. In 2022, he vetoed legislation to ban trans girls from participating in girls’ sports, and in 2023 he vetoed sweeping legislation that sought to, among other things, ban gender-affirming health care for youth. “LGBTQ+ youth are children of God, and it means I have to stand up for them,” he told me. “That’s my job as governor, but it’s also a calling from my faith.”
Beshear’s success in Kentucky, it turns out, has little to do with ideology. Moderate, liberal, progressive — those labels, so pivotal to the intra-Democratic debate that has taken place across the country this past year, are a bit beside the point. Instead, the key to his appeal is that in a political world growing more vicious by the minute, Andy Beshear is perceived as aggressively, persuasively, exceptionally nice.
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Beshear, as he recently told Axios, doesn’t consider himself a “nepo baby,” but arguably his political biography begs to differ. His dad, Steve Beshear, was the governor of Kentucky from 2007 to 2015 and left office with a 57% approval rating. Father and son worked at the same law firms in Washington and Louisville, and both served as the state’s attorney general.
While attorney general from 2016 to 2019, Andy filed nine opioid lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, created the Office of Child Abuse and Human Trafficking Prevention and Prosecution, and prioritized ending a significant backlog of untested rape kits. His tenure wasn’t without controversy, however: His deputy, Tim Longmeyer, admitted to accepting bribes in a previous state-government job. (Federal investigators said Beshear did not know about the bribes.) Toward the end of his term, the Lexington Herald-Leader unearthed that, in 2012 when he was a lawyer with the firm Stites & Harbison, Beshear had defended the Boy Scouts of America in lawsuits brought by men who said they were sexually abused as minors in the 1970s. Beshear, the Herald-Leader reported, had successfully argued that the filing deadline passed in the 1980s. (Beshear has said that what he learned in that case drove his work as attorney general in prioritizing arresting child predators.)
Despite these revelations, Beshear won his first gubernatorial race in 2019. Name recognition helped; so did the unpopularity of Beshear’s Republican predecessor, Matt Bevin, and a swell of support from public educators, whom Bevin had repeatedly targeted. In the end, Beshear won by just 5,136 votes.
One of his first executive orders was to restore voting rights to more than 100,000 Kentuckians who had felony convictions, an early example of how he would approach social justice issues. “My faith teaches me to treat others with dignity and respect,” he said, announcing the executive order during his inaugural address in 2019. “My faith also teaches me forgiveness.” Restoring voting rights, recalls Sadiqa Reynolds, then president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League and now a Beshear appointee to the State Fair Board, “meant the world to a lot of people.”
Not long into his first term, the pandemic hit, and Beshear quickly earned a reputation for empathy and steadiness. In his press conferences, he mourned Kentuckians lost to COVID-19 and talked about mental health challenges; he was sometimes visibly emotional. “He really puts everybody at ease,” one Kentuckian, a registered Republican, told National Public Radio at the time.
In late May 2020, Louisville residents protested the killing of Breonna Taylor, who was fatally shot by police officers in her own apartment in the middle of the night. Beshear ordered the National Guard into the city for the first time since 1975.
Soon, another tragedy unfolded, when a Guard member shot and killed restaurant owner David McAtee in West Louisville. Reynolds told me she spoke with Beshear almost immediately after McAtee’s death, describing it as the single saddest phone call she’d ever had with an elected official. “I believe he got bad information and that he knew it’d been an awful decision” to activate the Guard, she told me via email. (“The Governor deeply respects Sadiqa Reynolds and considers her a friend,” wrote Eric Hyers, one of Beshear’s political advisers, in response to a request for comment. “While the Governor believes the death of David McAtee was a tragedy, he continues to believe that the deployment of the guard was necessary for a brief period of time to ensure the safety of both the protestors and the surrounding community.”) Former state Rep. Attica Scott, who joined the protests and was arrested, had a harsher interpretation of Beshear’s decision. “It just was a complete failure, in my opinion, on the part of the administration,” she told me.
But if the summer of 2020 left some feeling disappointed in Beshear, he would receive strong marks for his handling of a series of weather disasters that have defined his time in office. In December 2021, catastrophic tornadoes destroyed parts of western Kentucky and killed more than 70 people. The following July, thousands of homes were wrecked and 45 people were killed in devastating flooding in eastern Kentucky. The National Weather Service called it a thousand-year flood.
By August 2022, Beshear and his team had begun work on what would become the High-Ground Initiative, a collaboration among state and local officials and nonprofit builders, using state, local and federal funding to build homes at a safer elevation — some on reclaimed strip mines. (The New York Times reported in 2025 that it’s the country’s largest known housing project on reclaimed mine sites.) Beshear took a hands-on approach, at one point sketching what communities could look like on a white napkin ahead of a meeting with federal and state leaders. “He drew a neighborhood,” says Kentucky Public Protection Cabinet Secretary DJ Wasson, who has been heavily involved in the high-ground work. Here could be a health care center, she recalled him saying. Here could be a community with a park so families can gather.
“He stayed and has kept coming back,” Stacie Fugate, executive director for the advocacy group Appalachians for Appalachia, told me. “More times than any governor in my lifetime that I’ve seen.”
The initiative isn’t without challenges. At least one community was wary of parts of the state’s plan, offering its own alternative that is still being considered. But many describe the response to the eastern Kentucky flooding as Beshear at his best: present, caring, eager to collaborate. “One of the great things about the High-Ground Initiative, and the governor’s approach, is he’s said all along [that] it’s not about just simply housing people and getting them in any house,” says Scott McReynolds, executive director of the Housing Development Alliance, an eastern Kentucky nonprofit. “That this really needs to be about building the housing that we need today and for the future, and so there’s been a focus on high-quality, energy-efficient, modern housing that will meet people’s needs and also be an asset 10 or 15, 20, 30, 50 years down the road.”
In total, the state has experienced 17 federally declared disasters since Beshear took office. His active involvement has given Kentuckians the impression that he “brings empathy to the job,” says Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky.
That empathy extends to constituencies that don’t often get a hearing from red-state politicians. And somehow, he has managed to deploy this empathy without torpedoing his electoral prospects. His 2022 veto of the bill banning trans girls from girls’ sports — which was overridden by the Republican-dominated legislature — became fodder for GOP attack ads during his 2023 reelection bid. Yet he won by about 5 percentage points. He even flipped eight counties, including two in eastern Kentucky, a once-Democratic area that had trended rightward in recent decades.
Not long into his second term, Beshear vetoed the sweeping Senate Bill 150, which sought to outlaw gender-affirming health care for youth, block trans children from using the school restroom that corresponds with their identity, and ban any public education instruction related to gender or sexual orientation. Once again, the legislature overrode his veto — but Beshear’s stance still left a powerful impression. “Andy made it clear to, frankly, the entire country that red states don’t equal small minds,” says Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., who was Kentucky’s 2022 Teacher of the Year but left the profession after facing discrimination and harassment for being gay. “Andy dares us to think: No, there’s a good guy here in this office, and he actually is going to do what he says. He’s going to do it to the best of his ability.”
Reynolds gives Beshear credit for speaking out for marginalized Kentuckians. “We are in the most openly racist history of my lifetime, and to have a governor who is a white man stand up and say … what the Trump administration is doing is wrong, what’s happening with ICE — that matters in these days,” she told me.
This year, Beshear has touted the creation of 70,000 jobs and the cancellation of hundreds of millions in medical debt for more than 130,000 Kentuckians. His approval rating of about 65% makes him one of the most popular governors in the country, and he is now chair of the Democratic Governors Association.
Still, as he has spent more time on the national scene, Beshear has opened himself to criticism. Some national Democrats, according to CNN, are frustrated that, in his DGA role, he hasn’t allocated more money to the Texas gubernatorial race, where Democrat Gina Hinojosa could be in striking distance of an upset. “It just felt that he’s not taking Latinos seriously, and they’re not taking Latinos seriously as a voting bloc in the Democratic Party,” Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) told CNN. “And if that’s the case, then he is going to have a Latino problem in 2028.”
Back in Kentucky, Republicans have portrayed Beshear’s rising national presence as a sign that his attention is elsewhere. “I think he puts more value on the friction between himself and the Republican supermajority, and what that can do to help kind of bolster his appearance of being a fighter for a national audience,” says Tres Watson, a Republican political consultant in Kentucky. “I think he probably values that more than he values any sort of cooperation with the General Assembly.”
Beshear has managed to get some bills through the legislature — medical marijuana legalization, for instance — but there can be little doubt that the Republican supermajority has tempered his reach. No one, Voss says, should get the idea that Beshear is a “bipartisan, moderate dream candidate” in terms of working with GOP politicians. And yet, Voss argues, his red-state background isn’t irrelevant on the national scene. “What Andy Beshear does superbly is offer Democratic policies using language that plays better with swing voters,” he explains, “because Beshear has honed his messaging selling an electorate that’s not already in his party’s pocket.”
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On a warm September afternoon, I arrived at the Old Governor’s Mansion for an interview with Beshear. He was in the midst of his book tour for “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country,” which may have been his bat signal for starting a presidential campaign.
He introduced himself to me as Andy, extending his hand while Winnie, his big black labradoodle, bounded into his office alongside him. Winnie had two books before he had one, Beshear quipped, referring to coloring books released as part of Kentucky first lady Britainy Beshear’s literacy initiatives.
As we talked about his tenure in office, Beshear explained his 80-100 rule of governing, which he refers to as his north star. “Eighty percent of my time is spent on things that matter to 100% of the people of Kentucky,” he said. “It’s the roads and bridges you drive, the public school you drop your kids off at and whether you feel safe in your community.”
I asked him what policy he wishes he could’ve done more on. Without hesitation, he answered: “Not getting pre-K through is one of the things that keeps you up at night, because over half of Kentucky’s kids show up for the first day in public school for kindergarten not kindergarten ready.”
In the spring, the last budget session of Beshear’s second term, the General Assembly rejected his proposal for expanded statewide pre-K. “While they’re trying to prevent me from having a win, they’re handing 4-year-olds every year a loss,” he said. “But when you’re governor, you don’t get to make excuses.” He explained that he had used flexible funds allocated for economic development to launch a universal pre-K pilot program in five school districts. “If somebody attacks you one day and you stay mad the next day,” he said, “you might lose out on an opportunity to get things done.”
He told me governors have an advantage on the national political scene. “I’m on the record as saying, whoever our nominee is, I think they ought to be a Democratic governor because we’ve got the receipts,” he said. And what receipts would Beshear point to? “I suspended 10 cents [from] the gas tax for as long as I could, under law; the housing we’re building in eastern and western Kentucky and everywhere in between; the first hospital in West Louisville in 150 years,” he replied. “They’re just things people can touch and feel and believe.”
I asked him about his pointed defense of trans rights, noting that he had done something different from other Democrats — California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example — by insisting, as he recently put it to CNN’s Jake Tapper, that “we don’t throw anybody under the bus.” “Right,” he responded, looking at me somewhat bewildered, as if wondering how there could be an alternative.
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The day after my sit-down with Beshear, I attended his sold-out book event in Bowling Green. His conversation partner for the evening was Hadley Duvall, a Kentuckian and reproductive rights advocate. In 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned and a near-total abortion ban became law in Kentucky, Duvall posted a photo on Facebook of herself as a seventh grader with a caption describing the sexual abuse she experienced from her stepfather, who impregnated her when she was 12. She was speaking up for victims of rape or incest who would now lose abortion access.
Beshear’s team learned of Duvall and her story through that post and reached out to her. Soon, she agreed to film an ad for his 2023 reelection campaign, criticizing his Republican opponent, Daniel Cameron, for his opposition to abortion rights. The ad made waves in the state and across the country. Some think it played a pivotal part in Beshear’s reelection.
In his book, Beshear calls Duvall’s decision to publicly share her story “the most Christlike action I have ever seen.” He mentioned Duvall during our conversation too. “She was willing to put herself out there in something that could have dramatically changed her life in a place like Kentucky,” he said, “because as she told me, there was another 12-year-old out there that needed her help.” He continued, “She was willing to radically change and risk parts of her life for someone she had never met. That’s pretty special.”
Outside the event in Bowling Green, protesters held signs about abolishing abortion to give glory to God. Inside, Duvall reflected on her conversations with Beshear leading up to the release of the 2023 ad. “I also remember you personally calling me on my cellphone and just asking how I was doing, asking how it felt, and if I was too overwhelmed and wanted to back out,” she said. “And I could just tell you weren’t calling as my governor. You were calling as a mentor, as a father, and that has just been very special to me.” She added, “I have just always been able to attest to your genuineness and your kindness.”
Notably, Beshear didn’t avoid the 2028 presidential race in their chat, saying he could be the best candidate to run against Vice President JD Vance. If he does end up in the general election with Vance, much would be made of their similarities: two men of faith from the same region of the country. But it would be their stylistic differences that might matter most. No one, after all, would mistake the vice president — whose combative persona reflects the wider tone of the Trump era — for Mr. Rogers. Perhaps, in that scenario, Beshear would feel that he has no choice but to shed his nice-guy image, giving voters more and more of the governor who ripped into Rand Paul and Andy Barr after Fancy Farm. Or maybe he would do something really bold — and find out just how far kindness can get you in American politics in 2028.
Rainesford Stauffer is a freelance journalist in Kentucky and the author of “An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way in a World That Expects Exceptional.”
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