FRANKFORT, Kentucky — Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said Monday that he and Vice President Kamala Harris shortly after she became the unaffordable favorite to lead the Democratic ticketand said his state’s progress should be “a model for the country,” speculation swirled on whether he is in the running to join the list.
Beshear took a more aggressive tone in his criticism of Republican Donald Trump’s four years in the Oval Office. The second-term governor said his fellow Democrats needed to focus on the everyday concerns of Americans and he barked Senator JD Vance of OhioTrump’s recently appointed running mate, as a less than authentic representative of the American working class.
Beshear, who just returned from an economic development trip to Japan and South Korea, said Harris called him on Sunday, a few hours after President Joe Biden called him. announced that he would suspend his re-election campaignBeshear on Monday joined the ranks of Democrats backing Harris for president.
“That meant a lot to me, to reach out to me personally and ask for my support,” the governor said. “I pledged my support to her. The rest of that conversation would remain between us, I said. We have a trusting relationship where we can share ideas and give advice.”
Their interactions have been limited to a few meetings in recent years, but Harris has since become familiar with his family, Beshear said.
“She’s gotten to know my kids and always asks for them by name, which is an easy way to touch my heart,” Beshear said during an interview with The Associated Press at the Kentucky governor’s mansion.
When asked if he’s interested in running for vice president, Beshear stuck to his usual script: He loves his job as governor and says he plans to serve a second term.
“The only way that wouldn’t happen is if I had the opportunity to help the people of Kentucky in some other way that would provide additional value,” he said.
But the 46-year-old governor sounded like someone auditioning for the role, touting the Bluegrass State’s record pace of economic development projects during his time as governor.
“I certainly think what we’ve done here in Kentucky should be an example to the country,” Beshear said. “Not just in winning, but in governing. How at a time when the country is at a boiling point, with neighbors yelling at each other, we’ve lowered the temperature here.”
Republicans control Kentucky’s Legislature and say Beshear is taking credit for the economic progress they say has resulted from their pro-business policies.
In his re-election last year, Beshear won a number of rural counties that are Trump strongholds. Beshear said Monday that Democrats must focus on core issues that affect Americans — including jobs, health care, schools and public safety — to improve their standing in rural America.
“What Democrats need to do is focus on the concerns that people have when they wake up in the morning,” he said. “Concerns that are actually not partisan, even though everything is being made partisan now.”
During his tenure as governor, Beshear avoided criticizing Trump, who won the Bluegrass State handily in 2016 and 2020 and remains the heavy favorite to do so again in November.
When asked Monday to summarize Trump’s legacy as president, Beshear said it was one of stoking division.
“Listen, I worked with him and I was able to work with him,” the governor said. “He and his administration took my calls and I’m grateful for that. But pitting people against each other is wrong. It violates my faith, which is the Golden Rule that we love our neighbor as ourselves. And the parable of the Good Samaritan says that everyone is our neighbor. But the leadership that we saw during the four years of former President Trump was all about creating an ‘us versus them’ in our own country.”
Beshear delivered a scathing review of Vance, who based his recent speech at the Republican National Convention on his own Appalachian roots.
“You can’t just come to Eastern Kentucky a couple times in the summer and maybe have a wedding or a funeral and then pass judgment on us,” Beshear said Monday. “It’s insulting.”
Long before he became a U.S. senator, Vance rose to fame with his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy, which many felt captured the essence of Trump’s political resonance in a rural, white America ravaged by unemployment, opioid addiction and poverty.
The 2016 book sparked a debate in the region, with many Appalachian scholars arguing that it stereotyped and blamed working-class people for their own problems without giving enough weight to the decades of exploitation by coal and pharmaceutical companies that play a prominent role in Appalachia’s story.
Vance was raised by his grandparents in Middletown, in southwestern Ohio, while his mother, whom he introduced in his speech last week, struggled with an addiction that he said she left behind 10 years ago. He spent a lot of time traveling to Kentucky with his grandparents to visit family and said he hoped to be buried in a small cemetery in the mountains.
Beshear, the son of a former Kentucky governor, laughed at that biographical sketch.
“He’s not from here,” Beshear said.
