[[link removed]]

HOW KENTUCKY GOV. ANDY BESHEAR THINKS DEMOCRATS CAN WIN RURAL AMERICA
 
[[link removed]]


 

Monica Potts
December 5, 2025
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The two-term governor spoke with TNR about the challenges and
opportunities for his party in the Trump era—and whether he’s
planning to run for president. _

Beshear in 2022, after visiting a house with flood damage in
Whitesburg, Kentucky, Michael Swensen/Getty Images

 

President Donald Trump and Republican governors are colluding
[[link removed]]
to try to rig the 2026 midterm elections in their favor through
gerrymandering. They’re helped by the fact that rural voters in
large swaths of many states are largely abandoning the Democrats, who
already suffer from a rural skew in the Senate and Electoral College.
But these Democratic disadvantages don’t have to be destiny. Last
week, in a _Washington Post_ op-ed
[[link removed]]
titled, “This slap in the face to rural America is a chance to turn
it blue,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear argued that Democrats
can’t just talk about the challenges facing rural Americans now, but
have to deliver on promises on what rural America can be: “Tackling
affordability is not enough. To truly lead again, Democrats must be
the party of aspiration.… Democrats are good at explaining our
“what.” Let’s get good at explaining our ‘why.’” 

This weekend, Beshear is set to be sworn in as the head of the
Democratic Governors Association
[[link removed]].
His elevation comes as no surprise, given that he’s a rarity in
national politics: a Democratic leader in an otherwise red state. He
won the office in 2019 by just over 5,000 votes
[[link removed]], in a state
Donald Trump won by 30 percentage points
[[link removed]] in 2016, and
his time as governor has made him even more popular in Kentucky (he
handily won reelection
[[link removed]] in
2023). Whether or not he seeks higher office after his second term
ends in 2027, he’ll help shape the party as it seeks to recover
voters it lost to Trump.

On Thursday, I asked Beshear about rural America, Democratic
messaging, and whether he’s running for president in 2028. This
conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

MONICA POTTS: When I saw the headline, I thought you were going to
write about farmers. I didn’t see that, and I was pleasantly
surprised. What you did write about is the loss of hospitals, where a
lot of rural Americans work now. I’m wondering if you feel that
that’s something that people misunderstand about rural America.
People still tend to think of it as a largely farming area and largely
affected by agricultural policy. Do you think that this is something
people miss about the new reality of living in rural America?

ANDY BESHEAR: I think people miss that rural America is more
complicated, and they might not think that there are more industries,
that there need to be more services, and that there are serious
implications of policies like the one that the Trump administration
has pushed forward. Our fastest growing industry in rural Kentucky is
health care. And so the idea that the “big, ugly bill
[[link removed]]”
would gut rural health care
[[link removed]]
means it’s not only reducing options to get health care in rural
America, but it’s attacking a foundation of the economy. Every rural
hospital we have is the number one payroll in its community and the
number two employer behind the public school.

If you remove that business, if you remove those employees who live
and spend money in that community, you don’t just close the rural
hospital. You may close the local bank, the local coffee shop, the
local restaurant, the local insurance company. Not thinking about
health care as essential to rural America is not understanding how the
economy works.

M.P.: As an example in your piece, you wrote about helping to bring a
green paper plant into a rural county in Kentucky. And I read that,
and I thought, well, that sounds nice, but we can’t do that
everywhere. What are some of the other kinds of ideas about the real
investment it would take to help sagging economies in rural counties
now?

A.B.: Well, first off, I think we have to be intentional where we can
be to locate new jobs in rural Kentucky and in rural America, and I
see a greater hunger for it out of the private sector than at any
point in my lifetime. We landed the Pratt paper mill
[[link removed]],
300-plus new jobs at $40 an hour outside of Henderson, Kentucky,
former coal mining town. We put two giant battery plants
[[link removed]], two of
the biggest in the world, next to a town called Glendale, a very small
town in Hardin County, but outside of Elizabethtown. So we’ve
created as many rural jobs as we have urban jobs by making sure that
we’re putting the opportunity in front of those businesses.

But to make that possible everywhere in rural America, it takes a real
investment in infrastructure. It takes making the upfront investment
that says to rural Kentucky and rural Americans that we care about you
and we want you to be able to compete for those next great jobs. Look
at Appalachia, the topography creates big challenges. We are
four-laning the Mountain Parkway, which is basically our own
interstate-like road to the heart of Appalachia. Why? Because if you
want to put a new manufacturing facility, they’re going to want four
lanes so that they can ship their products across the United States.
It means we also have to invest in water and wastewater, which, you
know, there are many parts of rural America that still don’t have
clean drinking water, which should be a basic human right, but then
you have to have the amount of water necessary to bring in that next
opportunity. So in Kentucky, we have programs like what we call our
Product Development Initiative [[link removed]],
where we put state dollars into improving infrastructure at sites.

M.P.: The plant that you wrote about is an environmentally conscious
paper plant. When I see a lot of people talking about Democrats
winning back voters, they’re talking about moderating on some
issues, including things like the environment, and some cultural
issues. I’m wondering if you think that to win voters in rural
America, Democrats need to moderate on anything?

A.B.: I think when it comes to jobs, they’re not Democrat or
Republican, they’re not left or right. A green job to someone is a
job that pays them enough to support their family. I remember that
paper plant and the groundbreaking, and we’re in this former coal
town, and the owner comes on through a Zoom on a massive screen and
says, We’re bringing 350—and then he said the phrase “green
jobs”—to Henderson. And everyone stood up and applauded, because
they are great jobs where you can support a family. I believe that
communities are ready.

And I also believe that sustainability isn’t primarily being driven
by government policy. It’s being driven by the demands of the
private sector. Every company that comes to Kentucky with their power
wants affordability, wants reliability, and then wants sustainability.
And so for me, being pragmatic, I’ve got to deliver all three, which
means we need greener, more sustainable power production. We need
greener jobs, because that’s what the private sector and ultimately
consumers are demanding. So no, I don’t think that we have to back
away from beliefs about climate change, but I do think within those
beliefs, we have to deliver a better life for our people. That means,
if you can bring in good, paying green jobs, people of all political
ideologies will work in them because it makes life better and easier
for their family.

M.P.: One of the things that I thought that President Joe Biden was
underappreciated about was that he did make a big effort to bring new
plants, especially to red states, and to reform American industrial
policy through the Inflation Reduction Act. He did talk a lot about
the day-to-day economic concerns that people had. He walked with
unions, and he tried to reach out to workers. Why do you feel like
that message wasn’t convincing, even when Vice President Kamala
Harris took it up in her race in 2024?

A.B.: Well, I think two things. First, as Democrats, we got to get
dirt on our boots, and we’ve got to show up in the areas where our
policies are creating new jobs, new opportunities, more accessible
health care, safer infrastructure, better schools. The signing in the
Rose Garden isn’t real anymore. A signing of a bill in Frankfort
[Kentucky’s capital] doesn’t directly impact people on that day.
So we’ve got to be there at the announcement, at the groundbreaking.
And you know, people make fun of it, the most important one is the
ribbon cutting. Why? Because the jobs are there, because the future is
better for families. We’ve got to make sure that people in rural
America see Democrats and see the results of the policies that we’re
pushing for.

The second piece, though, is we’ve got to do things faster. The
Biden administration passed a lot of good legislation that has spurred
a lot of economic development in my state, but the Democrats need to
admit that there are times when we are over-regulated, and we’ve
created so many rules that some programs that we believe are essential
for the American people simply take too long. American people don’t
see and feel now the Internet for All program
[[link removed]].
It’s been three years, and we don’t have a single inch of fiber in
the ground. So if you’re a Democrat or a Republican and you believe
that the internet is essential, then we should be able to develop a
program that gets it out much, much faster.

M.P.: What are some of the regulations that you feel like could be
maybe waived or used to speed up the process?

A.B.: What we’ve seen in Kentucky is even a permitting process
doesn’t have to be adversarial. If you were talking to the companies
and groups that you’re working with, we get most of our factories up
and running three to six months faster than most states, and we abide
by every environmental and workplace safety rule. What we do is work
with and communicate with groups that are doing these projects. They
know the expectations. If there are ways to find a solution, move
something one direction or another, you impact fewer streams, you
invoke fewer rules. In the Internet for All, it wasn’t that they
were going to provide the money, set the rules, and then audit us to
make sure that we followed them. It was that we had developed every
piece of a plan we had to contract and subcontract before we could
even submit the plan to potentially be approved. It was set up as a
multiyear process before the construction ever started. And again, it
was meant to be transformational. But if you want to actually
transform in a way that helps people’s everyday lives, you’ve got
to be a little bit impatient. You’ve got to understand that people
are hurting now and need help now. But if it takes five years to put a
program in place, you may have lost an entire generation that needed
that help, that needed that assistance, or that deserves that
infrastructure.

M.P.: Speaking of losing a generation, I know that in Kentucky there
were some really bad river floods a few years ago, and some early
decisions made by the Trump administration in a second term may have
delayed some of the money going out for recovering from those floods.
There are other issues like that going on now, where we’re losing
funding for science, for education, for all kinds of things. And I’m
wondering how people in the near term kind of survive, or think about
the future.

A.B.: Decisions by the Trump administration are making life a lot
harder for our American families. Start with tariffs that are raising
the price on everything. That young couple in rural or urban America
that can’t buy their first house, even though they’re older than
their parents were when they could buy it; it’s only become harder
for them with tariffs on lumber and upholstery and cabinets, virtually
everything that goes into a house has been made more expensive by
the tariffs.

Then move to the big, ugly bill that’s going to make it harder to
get health care in your own community. Many will lose coverage.
People have to drive two hours just to give birth. And what does that
mean near the end of a pregnancy? Does it mean staying in a hotel
where your husband or spouse is hours away and might not be there?

The Trump administration says it’s going to [change how it assesses]
natural disasters, saying large snowstorms might not be included in
the future. Well, those have significant costs, and people’s lives
are on the line every time that there is a large snowstorm. Look at
the amount that’s being shifted in the SNAP program. You know,
almost $66 million of new administrative costs in Kentucky, and what
that’s going to mean to food availability. All of these policy
positions by the Trump administration make life harder for for
Americans, but make life a lot harder for rural Americans.

Trump pushed for a tax cut for the wealthiest
[[link removed]]
of Americans, who primarily live in big urban cities, but won’t push
for an extension of a tax credit
[[link removed]]
to help people who get health care through the ACA that primarily live
in rural America.

M.P.: In some ways, do you think that the actions the Trump
administration has taken make the job for Democrats easier in 2026 and
2028 because they can say, “Look what we can offer as a change from
this, if you don’t like what he’s done”?

A.B.: I think it puts Democrats in a better position _if_ the
Democratic Party remains laser-focused on people’s everyday needs
and then provides them the roadmap to a better life. That’s why I
talk about simply saying “affordability” isn’t enough. We need
to be talking about it a lot. It needs to be talking about the
American dream, where it’s not just that you can pay your grocery
bill at the end of the month, but you can actually get ahead. The
young couple can get that new house. You can take your family on the
same vacation you went on as a kid. You believe if you show up and
work hard at your job that you can be a little bit better off, and
that your kids can be much better off. Yes, I think that’s a
compelling message for all of America, and it’s probably more
compelling, sadly, because of the pain that Trump is causing and will
continue to cause.

M.P.: We’ve avoided talking about agricultural policy a little bit,
but it does shape a lot of how rural America is funded. And I’m
wondering if there’s anything you think should be revised or
reformed in agricultural policy.

A.B.: Well, you look at what the tariff policy is doing to soybean
farmers that may lose the Chinese market, the largest market,
potentially forever, to Brazil and Argentina, at a time when the U.S.
is trying to send billions of dollars to Argentina. These are
hard-working farmers that when they’re not growing soybean,
they’re growing corn, and Donald Trump’s tariffs and his attacks
on the sovereignty of Canada have impacted our bourbon industry, which
is a huge purchaser of the corn. You look at the elimination of
USAID; you look at the elimination of the Farm-to-Cafeteria
[[link removed]]
programs, and our farmers have been getting hit every way possible,
losing multiple markets all at the same time. Now I’m starting to
see them speak out. Certainly, our cattle farmers
[[link removed]]
are speaking out, and that’s important because we all care about our
families more than we care about any political party, and we need to
make sure that simply being a Democrat or Republican isn’t as
important as being an American with an economy that can work for all
of us.

M.P.: Are you going to run for president?

A.B.: Well, this weekend, I’m going to become head of the Democratic
Governors Association. What you’re going to see out of me in 2026 is
working to elect Democrats all over the country.

I think you’re going to see us win in rural America. You know,
we’ve got a very strong candidate in Iowa, [gubernatorial
candidate] Rob Sand; I’m excited to see his campaign. And if we do
our work, we’ll change the map for 2028, where Democrats won’t
just be battling in five states with zero margin of error. We’ll
have an expanded map to where whoever our candidate is can compete in
more places and get their message out to more Americans. 

 

Monica Potts is a staff writer at _The New Republic_. She is the
author of _The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost
Promise in Rural America_ [[link removed]].

* Rural America
[[link removed]]
* Rural organizing
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]