Barring some unforeseen, cataclysmic shifts in the public mood, Kentucky Democrats will score a huge win in next Tuesday's gubernatorial election, booting one-term incumbent Ernie Fletcher. But as euphoric as the Democrats are about the prospect of retaking the governor's mansion in the Bluegrass State, they have their eye on a bigger house, hoping that a 2007 victory in the governor's race will be a harbinger of what's to come across the country in 2008.
They dream of a win in Kentucky for the Democratic presidential nominee and defeat of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senator who has acquired a reputation as a real Machiavelli for having outmaneuvered home-state Democrats so often and for so long. "That is not going to happen this time," promises State Party Chairman Jonathan Miller.
The incumbent Fletcher, a physician and former three-term congressman, trails his Democratic challenger, Steve Beshear, by double digits, with the most recent polls showing him 20 points down. Fletcher once got in trouble for flying his plane too close to the U.S. Capitol during Ronald Reagan's funeral, only to return home and watch his administration crash and burn in the face of corruption charges. He was indicted by a grand jury in 2006 after facing accusations of corrupt hiring practices. None of the charges were felonies, and the case was eventually settled, but Fletcher never seemed to recover.
Democrats smelled blood in the water. As one of only three statewide contests anywhere in the country, Kentucky offered a rare chance to measure the public mood in a non-election year, and it gave Democrats a change to do a test run on their 2008 campaign apparatus.
While there were also governors races in Mississippi and Louisiana, the results there seemed forgone conclusions -- Republican wins -- and the races were never really contested. (In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour is headed for easy re-election on Tuesday, and two weeks ago, GOP Congressman Bobby Jindal became the first Indian American elected chief executive of a U.S. state.)
Kentucky, however, was another story; in part because it has long been a place where frustrated Democrats believed they should be performing better. There have been constant hints and reminder of what is possible Bill Clinton won Kentucky twice. When Fletcher resigned his House seat to become governor four years ago, Democrats won the special election and have held onto it since. And of course, in 2006, they finally knocked off the perennial endangered 10-year incumbent Anne Northup, who lost by three percentage points (51 to 48 percent) to John Yarmuth, a political columnist who was stridently anti-war and anti-Bush.
"Kentucky is going to be blue next year, even if Hillary Clinton is the nominee," says anti-McConnell crusader and blogger Matt Gunterman.
But for more than two decades, the state'solitical apparatus has been controlled by Republicans, most particularly McConnell, who may be the most attractive target of all the current efforts. McConnell, whose willingness to stand by the White House on Iraq has hurt his standing at home, has had to endure a sustained barrage of attacks led by national Democrats and an increasingly organized grassroots effort at home.
On McConnell's birthday in February, Gunterman launched a blog called DitchMitchKY.com, which has become a popular clearinghouse for all things anti-McConnell. "The conservative movement is just imploding, and you could see he was vulnerable," Gunterman says,
After wild successes in the 2006 midterms, Democrats saw Kentucky as a way to keep their momentum going, and they have invested enormous amounts of time and money to what would have otherwise been a little noticed, off-year re-election campaign for a troubled incumbent governor.
But McConnell is not on the ballot until next year, and Republicans say Democrats are setting themselves up for more heartbreak with all the talk of unseating him. "I don't see where they are getting their information that he's vulnerable," says Rebecca Fisher, spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She also points out that Democrats have not yet found an opponent for McConnell.
The Republican hope is that voters in Kentucky next week, and around the country next year, will decide to vote on issues like taxes, abortion, and guns, instead of Iraq, corruption, and their general gloom about the country's future. Fletcher's spokesman told me that he expects Kentuckians to come back to conservative issues, and when that happens the governor's race will tighten up. That is likely the same playbook that will guide GOP strategy in the 2008 presidential race. The question is whether they have the time or the credibility to pull it off either in Kentucky or beyond.
Democrats, from national party insiders to independent advocacy organizations to big labor, have all descended on Kentucky. This week the AFL-CIO announced a final weekend push to turn out union members across the state. Beginning Saturday, organizers said they expected union volunteers to knock on up to 17,000 doors and make 72,000 calls in the last four days of the gubernatorial campaign. Those are also the first four days of Get-Out-the-Vote efforts for the 2008 campaign.
