County by county: A closer look at Gov. Andy Beshear's path to reelection in Kentucky

Kentucky has 120 counties, and every one of them played a role in Gov. Andy Beshear's reelection.

From sweeping wins in Louisville and Lexington to gains in other parts of the Bluegrass State, Beshear rolled past Republican challenger Daniel Cameron in Tuesday's election, defeating the state's attorney general by racking up 53% of the vote.

It was an improvement on his 2019 win over then-Gov. Matt Bevin, where Beshear won by less than half a percentage point. And those gains show up when you take a closer look at maps of voter trends.

Blowouts in Louisville and Lexington

Before the race, University of Kentucky political science professor and elections expert Stephen Voss said the "golden triangle" — which stretches between Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky and contains the majority of the state's population and economic centers — would need to show up for Beshear to beat Cameron. And those voters delivered.

Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky's two largest cities, were particularly critical. Those counties were a combined 70.5% in favor of Beshear and delivered more than 254,000 votes for him alone, good for more than a third of his statewide total.

No one came into Tuesday's elections expecting Jefferson and Fayette counties to go for Cameron, though some Republicans had hoped gains in south Louisville would keep the race more competitive.

Voss said before Election Day he believes Lexington's Fayette County is "the most progressive county in the state, (with) Democrats who are notably leftward on social and cultural issues," while University of Louisville political science professor Dewey Clayton said Cameron's handling of the Breonna Taylor case would hurt him among Jefferson County voters.

In the end, Beshear did better in those counties than in 2019, where he landed 66.5% of the vote against Bevin and Libertarian John Hicks. Turnout in those two counties was also higher four years ago, with more than 30,000 additional votes in 2019.

Gains in Northern Kentucky

Wide margins in Louisville and Lexington were expected. Those areas have been reliably blue long before Beshear came into office.

Winning Northern Kentucky, though, was going to be trickier. That's a relatively densely populated and traditionally red portion of Kentucky that has voted GOP Rep. Thomas Massie into the U.S. House of Representatives for more than a decade.

Beshear had success in 2019 though, landing 47.4% of the vote in Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties. This year, he won the three of them by 52.2%, with more than 65,000 total votes.

He courted voters throughout the campaign by reminding them he'd worked to help green-light the $3.6 billion Brent Spence Bridge Corridor Project, which will construct a new crossing between Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky — without tolls, as Beshear frequently mentioned.

Smaller metros show up

Beshear won only 29 counties — it's an improvement from the 23 he carried in 2019, but Republicans remained in control of many of Kentucky's more rural areas.

Smaller cities showed up for Beshear, though, along with counties just outside bigger metro areas.

Warren County, the home of Bowling Green and Western Kentucky University, went for Beshear by 52%. Henderson County and the city of Henderson, in the heart of the deep-red western portion of the state, went for Beshear by 56%. Daviess County, home to Owensboro, was one of the six counties that Beshear flipped this time around. Even Hardin County, where Cameron was raised in Elizabethtown, was a 50-50% split.

Counties that neighbor the state's biggest cities split in favor of Beshear, as well, especially near Lexington — he won Woodford, Scott and Franklin counties to its west, along with Clark and Madison counties to the south.

East and west

Tragedies on opposite sides of the state — tornadoes in Western Kentucky in 2021 and floods in Eastern Kentucky in 2022 — were defining moments in Beshear's first term. And the governor made some inroads in those regions.

Eastern Kentucky in particular made a difference. Breathitt County gave Beshear about 50% of its vote four years ago but was deep blue this time around, with 61% of voters picking him once again. Letcher and Perry counties, which went for Bevin in 2019 but were hit hard by the 2022 floods, also flipped to Beshear this time, with a combined 54.1% voting blue.

Western Kentucky remained red for the most part, like the southern portion of the state. Graves County, hit the hardest by the 2021 tornadoes, went to Cameron by 64%, about the same margin Bevin won it by four years ago.

Reach Lucas Aulbach at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky election map shows how Andy Beshear won governor race again