tried to put impeachment on the ballot in kentucky. and for the democrat to even make the race this close, we would be talking about it even if the democrat was coming in second. i think there are a couples things that happen. i think when you re a democrat and win a governor s race in kentucky a lot of things have to go right for you. there are two thing tuesday draw your attention to. one i ve been talking about tonight is in the suburbs, on the other side of the ohio river there is cincinnati. these are suburbs of cincinnati, these three counties that jut out here. population-wise, they make up 10% of the state population. they re traditionally republican bastions. that is not what happened tonight. you see two of these three counties in the cincinnati suburbs actually flipped and went democratic, went for beshear. and in the third boone county, bevin ran 10 points off what he did last time around. tonight they went far towards
in northern kentucky. even when you have a candidate like matt bevin, you do whatever you can try to do to win and that s clearly what they thought they had to do. when you saw the president of the united states coming into your state the night before the election, there s two ways to look at that. one you could be worried he s going to help the republican, but you could also expect that this president of the united states would help turn out, help energize turn out on the democratic side. is that possibly what happened with the president s visit? i think that s absolutely possible. if you look at the county which is where he showed up enlexington, the margins from this race versus 2016 were not even ca even comparable. you absolutely saw democrats fired up in kentucky. and as a campaigner i saw 15,000 people who sat there all day trying to get a view of the
over in kenton, and look at those counties. essentially they went from matt bevin victories in 2015 down to about a 55% number. so when you see the matter of closing those margins, that s where this campaign had the opportunity and through the louisville area, through the lexington number to have those sort of dramatic surges that ultimately were able to make up for what were still victories in some of those rural counties. we were talking about what that campaign was, and when you come in into town, and you turn on the television set, they were ability donald trump, about impeachment, about the closeness of the relationship between the white house and matt bevin. it was not so much about policy as opposed to andy beshear. andy beshear was focusing on issues like jobs and health care and education. and when you looked at this, i showed up at the polling site
i want to show the way republicans believed they could win this race in kentucky. let s take a look at this ad where the republicans basically were telling kentucky voters that only the republicans could save them from the socialists. let s watch this. president trump and governor bevin are making kentucky great again, but socialists in washington want to impeach trump and take us backward. andy beshear is part of their radical resistance. liberal andy beshear doesn t share our message. defeat andy beshear. sam stein, they sent the socialists the message tonight. yeah, they elected him. that ad might have been a little over the top, i think, maybe not believable. but i think you get to something bigger which is republicans and they probably still do, believe they can do what they did
the trump seasoning no longer works and the republican message of no medicaid for you, people are tasting that and not enjoying it. donald trump has spent his presidency trying to take health care away from people, trying to repeal completely obamacare. and so the campaign run against matt bevin in kentucky is the campaign you would run against donald trump nationally. it s so hard to tell sometimes, lawrence, because the president talks about how he s going to preserve various things that his government is trying to take away at the very same time. he goes out on the stump and talks about preserving medicare and you look in his budget and it s undercutting medicare. he said he s going to preserve preexisting conditions protections and his government is suing to undermine them. you would think that s something