Kentucky Governor’s Race Shows Making People’s Lives Hell Isn’t a Winning Strategy
This week’s elections have a lesson: even red states can reject right-wing government
It appeared on Tuesday night that loudmouth Kentucky governor and likely CNN contributor Matt Bevin had narrowly lost his reelection bid. And while it’s unlikely that one of the most Trump-friendly states will be anything but red in 2020, Bevin’s loss is a good indication that even some states that have rejected Democrats in recent years aren’t satisfied with their right-wing governments, either.
After Bevin was elected in 2015 and the Kentucky House flipped to the GOP the following year, he immediately took a hatchet to health care, public education, and workers’ rights. In 2016, Bevin smothered Kentucky’s health insurance exchange three years after it launched, even though it had helped cut the uninsured rate to 6%. (It’s since ticked back up.) Then, he signed the state’s new right-to-work law the following year.
Bevin made the baseless claim that the sickouts caused students to be sexually assaulted.
And over the past two years, Bevin has engaged in a war on the state’s public school teachers, who’ve launched sickouts over…
