Trail to ’23: Debates! Plus, Jordan Peterson, Fox News and governor-legislature politics

This is the third installment in an occasional Herald-Leader series, Trail to ‘23, to catch readers up on all the latest from this year’s crowded governor’s race. First and second editions can be found online. There are less than 100 days until the May 16 primary that will decide who among several GOP candidates will take on presumptive Democratic nominee Gov. Andy Beshear.

Debates are set!

With a few months until the May 16 primary, we still don’t really know what policy stances separate the candidates for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. We’ll get a better sense of that by March, when the first debate among (most of) the top-tier candidates will take place. Attorney General Daniel Cameron, Commissioner of Agriculture Ryan Quarles, Auditor Mike Harmon and Somerset Mayor Alan Keck will all duke it out on March 7.

Notice anything missing? Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft won’t be there, saying that she’ll instead by traveling the state on that day.

“I am traveling. … I’m going across the state of Kentucky as I have been, sitting at boardroom tables, kitchen tables, any table that I can find,” Craft told the Kentucky Lantern.

Craft will be attending two other debates, though: Kentucky Sports Radio is hosting one on April 19. KET is hosting another on May 1.

Candidates in the legislature

Thanks to Northern Kentucky GOP Rep. Savannah Maddox’s early exit, nobody in the state legislature is running for governor. So, for the most part, the legislature hasn’t overlapped too much with the gubernatorial race.

But the presumed Democratic candidate, Gov. Andy Beshear, has been faced with some decisions that could have some political impact. At the end of last week, Beshear broke with his party when he signed into law a bill cutting Kentucky’s income tax from 4.5% to 4%. The Republican Party of Kentucky framed Beshear’s decision as pure politics, while Beshear said it was an imperfect choice between potentially threatening future state revenue streams and providing tax relief to many Kentuckians – the decision went against most all legislators in his party, who railed against the bill.

On the GOP side, Craft’s lieutenant governor running mate Max Wise has been pushing the most watched (and controversial) bill of this year’s short session: Senate Bill 150, which among other things would enshrine a teachers’ right to not use students’ preferred pronouns. The bill has been met with major pushback by trans activists and Democrats, including Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville, whose transgender son took his own life late last year.

Unlike Senate Bill 150, a bill introduced by Louisville GOP Rep. Emily Callaway that would allow abortion to be prosecuted as a homicide seems to be going nowhere. But that didn’t stop Cameron, who has tried to stake out the anti-abortion lane in the GOP gubernatorial primary, from distancing himself.

“While I strongly support prohibiting abortions in Kentucky, I just as strongly support helping pregnant women. Pregnant mothers deserve our help, support, and life-affirming options, not to face criminal charges,” Cameron’s office wrote in a press release.

The response is a preview of what many see as a strength of Cameron’s in the primary – being seen as a force in the anti-abortion movement – and a potential weakness in the general. Kentucky just rejected an anti-abortion constitutional amendment last November, one that many Republicans said was being conflated with the state’s trigger ban that Cameron has defended.

One big mailer

GOP gubernatorial candidate Eric Deters has been spending.

We’ve known this – he dropped as many as $100,000 each on speakers for his Freedom Fest event in Northern Kentucky – but earlier this month we got a taste of what that money might look like on the campaign trail. Deters told the Herald-Leader that he spent $400,000 on a mailer that went out to roughly 800,000 Republican households in Kentucky. The mail piece listed off several items that applied to “only Eric,” such as “only Eric publicly denounces Mitch McConnell” and “only Eric works 20-hour days - living on naps.” It also included his personal cell phone number as well as the URL for a website promoting a book he wrote.

Though the contents of the mailer are interesting, the sheer investment of it signals that Deters has money and he’s willing to spend it.

“If anybody wonders if I’m serious or not, well, I just spent $400,000 on an 800,000 Republican household mailer. I’m going to spend the millions that it takes to win,” Deters said.

Craft-Peterson

In Republican politics, the culture wars aren’t going anywhere. At least that’s what a writer for the National Review said recently.

Craft’s camp seems to be aware of this, as she recently sat down with one of the right’s chief culture warriors, Jordan Peterson. She posted a photo of herself and her husband Joe Craft, a billionaire coal magnate and philanthropist, with Peterson and his wife to Twitter last week.

Peterson, a Canadian professor who rose to prominence as something of a traditionalist self-help guru for aimless young men, has become one of the world’s most prominent public intellectuals. His brand of social conservatism pushes back on perceived political correctness and transgender identity in general. He also promotes patriarchal ways of structuring society, going so far as to blame a mass killing perpetrated by a man on the lack of “enforced monogamy.”

In the tweet, Craft said she discussed education reform in Kentucky with Peterson. What kind of reform? We’re not sure. But Peterson did respond to Craft’s post by tweeting about education departments at college and universities, which he believes hand “the entire ed system to the woke.” He said: “Look out, Faculties of Education. Your halcyon days of monopoly may be over :)”

Peterson is widely disliked among the country’s more politically engaged class of liberals. That might be the point, as Craft’s post gained significant negative traction on social media. Still, attention is attention – a valuable commodity in politics. Watch out for more of this from gubernatorial candidates: sometimes it helps to have the right enemies, and for Republican politicians in a post-Trump world that can include the media and chattering class.

Education, the subject of Senate Bill 150, has become one of the hallmarks of the so far issue-oriented Craft campaign (along with combating the drug crisis) – the Courier-Journal recently penned . And it’s a hot-button issue among conservatives. Despite the vast majority of Americans satisfaction with their own child’s K-12 education (80%), only 40% of Americans are satisfied with K-12 education in general, according to a Gallup poll. Satisfaction is significantly lower among Republicans.

In other Craft news: she just hired Jordan Wiggins, the campaign manager for author-turned-Ohio-Senator J.D. Vance, as an advisor to the campaign.

Cameron on Fox

Though most GOP candidates for governor share a lot of policy positions, most have carved out their own lane for unique campaign strategy: Quarles is leading in county and statehouse elected official endorsements, Craft was up on television two months ago, Keck is leaning into direct engagement on social media, Harmon is traveling the state as much as any of them, and Deters’ approach has been the most unconventional. Cameron, meanwhile, has played the celebrity angle.

And in a national Republican party eager to push back on the narrative that it’s racist, Cameron, who is Black, is a welcome figure. This is true in Kentucky politics as well, where Cameron’s 2019 win made him the second elected, and first independently elected, Black person to hold statewide office in Kentucky. That’s two more than Kentucky Democrats.

Cameron made a late night appearance on Fox News’ Ingraham Angle on Monday night to that effect. Before Cameron came on, Ingraham, one of the conservative movement’s most popular media figures who said she was “very excited” about Cameron’s campaign, gave a monologue decrying the “equity lie.”

“Well, ‘equity,’ just like all their buzzwords like ‘diversity and inclusion’ or ‘gender affirming care’ or ‘vaccine disinformation,’ they’re just verbal clubs to use against dissenters to force you to give up your freedoms and your way of life for a fraudulent utopia,” Ingraham said just before introducing Cameron.

Cameron, who reminded viewers that he was running for governor ten times in a four-minute interview, railed against Critical Race Theory (CRT), a framework for considering how much of society is shaped by race that conservatives frequently rail against and argue has seeped into K-12 education.

“What you’re seeing from this administration in Washington right now is the idea that we need to pit each other against one another. Talk about CRT: I’m the first Black American independently elected in Kentucky. You think if I was learning those CRT principles that tell folks that I’m inferior because of the color of my skin, or that my white friend is an oppressor, do you think I would be in this position? No,” Cameron said.