Sometimes in politics, the thing is only about the thing.
Kentucky held a governor's election last week that meant something only in Kentucky, despite excited and hopeful chatter otherwise.
At first glance the outcome appeared to hold implications for the presidential race and the Arkansas Republican condition. But, on closer look, it didn't.
Donald Trump remained as stout as ever in the places where he's stout, meaning the sparsely populated expanses, and as deplored as ever in the places where he's deplored, meaning the places where large numbers of people live close together, called cities.
Kentucky is much like Arkansas. It is mostly white conservative and working class, relatively poor, overrun in Republicanism and in the midst of destructive Medicaid debates and divisive education battles. But the Kentucky governor's race was no remote harbinger of anything similar in Arkansas.
What happened in Kentucky was that a Republican governor, Matt Bevin, got beat by fewer than 5,000 votes, pending a recanvassing. He was taken down by a young Democratic attorney general, Andy Beshear. It happened the day after Trump came to Kentucky to try to save Bevin with one of his patented self-celebratory blowhard resentment orgies.
Bevin lost because he fell behind by 17 points after making himself one of the nation's most unpopular governors when he cut teachers' pensions, ridiculed teachers for an ensuing walkout, and said he'd kill Medicaid expansion altogether without a work requirement on recipients.
Kentucky was the first state in the union to design such a work requirement. Arkansas became the first actually to implement one, until both states were foiled in court.
In Arkansas, quite by contrast, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson remains pragmatist-in-part, and popular, with a 61-19 positive-to-negative rating in the latest University of Arkansas poll released last week. He has engendered teacher resentment not statewide, or on disputes affecting pay or pensions, but mostly within Little Rock alone over the state takeover of the district and the decertification of the teacher union.
Hutchinson hasn't talked of ending Medicaid expansion without a work requirement. To the contrary, he has indicated he is pushing a work requirement only to try to save Medicaid expansion--by keeping his right flank in the Republican Legislature from killing it otherwise.
Bevin's health-issue problem was behaving heavy-handedly. He filed suit against 16 Medicaid recipients specifically and otherwise demonized the lot of them generally.
The likely fact is that federal appeals courts are going to cement the ditching of work requirements in Medicaid, which, by operative federal law, exists to provide health care to poor people. Work incentives must be an entirely separate undertaking. Medical attention is not something to withhold punitively.
Every other Republican on the Kentucky statewide ballot won easily Monday. Bevin lost from those self-inflicted wounds. Trump's last-night rally couldn't quite lift his late comeback over the top.
Bevin also lost because Beshear was a popular moderate whose dad had been governor and a popular moderate.
The best comparison I could offer to Arkansas would be to imagine that Hutchinson was horribly unpopular--or to more easily imagine Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Tim Griffin being horribly unpopular in six years--and that David Pryor's son Mark was running against one or the other.
Bevin also lost because Beshear racked up massive margins in Kentucky's progressive urban areas--Louisville and Lexington, along with the capital city in Frankfort--that Bevin's dominance in rural counties couldn't overcome. That can't happen in Arkansas, despite the strong cultural and political resemblance to Kentucky. The difference is simple mathematics.
Louisville and Lexington are larger and a greater share of the Kentucky population than their two nearest liberal-island counterparts in Arkansas, Little Rock and Fayetteville. Louisville, Lexington and Frankfort have a combined population of about a million people and make up more than 20 percent of the Kentucky population. Little Rock and Fayetteville have a combined population of about 300,000, which is about 10 percent of the statewide population.
So nothing really changed from the Kentucky governor's race other than the name on the governor's office door and the nominal partisan association thereof.
The race portends nothing for the entirely different binary choice a year from now when Trump will be taking Kentucky for granted and the Democrats will be writing it off. Beshear will be trying to keep his distance from his party's presidential nominee, whether Trillion-Dollar Warren or Gaffe-Machine Biden or someone else.
Arkansas will bounce blithely along its Republican way, with the percentage of its population professing Republican preference or Republican-leaning independence at an all-time and majority-imposing high in the new University of Arkansas poll.
Arkansas will continue to differ from Kentucky in two key factors: Its liberal cities are smaller and more easily contained, and its Republican governor hasn't made a mess of himself, though the next one might.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/10/2019