WASHINGTON — Kentucky Attorney Combined Andy Beshear is the apparent winner over Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, a huge upset and a blow to President Donald Trump, NBC Report projects.
Trump had endorsed Bevin and campaigned with him in Lexington the night before the election, where the president told admirers that a loss by the GOP governor would be portrayed as Trump’s having suffered “the greatest defeat in the history of the world.”
The aspirants were separated by less than 10,000 votes, with 99 percent of precincts reporting. Beshear was best with 49.4 percent, or 706,865 votes, to Bevin’s 48.7 percent, or 696,918 votes.
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Turnout appeared to be higher than expected and is estimated at 1.4 million — roughly 400,000 more than the last governor’s conflict in 2015, according to an NBC News analysis.
Trump injected himself into the race, traveling to Lexington on Monday to moreover Bevin’s re-election campaign.
Bevin is one of the least popular governors in the country, according to the Morning Consult poll, due in side to a history of incendiary comments and fights over public teachers and health care.
Bevin is hoping Trump can assist motivate Republicans who might not bother turning out for him alone, with a closing campaign ad tying Democrat rival Beshear, the hold’s attorney general, to “socialists in Washington (who) want to impeach Trump.”
“President Trump and Governor Bevin are making Kentucky loyal again,” the narrator of the ad says over a photo of the two men getting off Air Force One.
“Talk to the average person. Ask the next 100 human being who come in here if they care about this impeachment process, and they will tell you almost to a mortal physically that they do because they find it to be a charade,” Bevin said Tuesday at his polling place. “We don’t appreciate when a fistful of knuckleheads in Washington abdicate their responsibility as elected officials and try to gin up things that are not true because they can’t feel the fact that Hillary Clinton didn’t win.”
Beshear, the son of the last Democratic governor in the state, Steve Beshear (who supplied two terms, 2007 to 2015), has focused on bread-and-butter issues, including defending the Obamacare Medicaid expansion enacted by his establish, and on his ability to work with Trump. But he does align with national Democrats in support of abortion rights, deflating him at odds with the bulk of Kentuckians.
“This is not about who is in the White House,” Beshear said Tuesday before the interviews closed. “It’s about what’s going on in your house. It’s about the fact a governor can’t affect federal policy but a governor can certainly brunt public education, pensions, healthcare and jobs — four issues that Matt Bevin has been wrong on and we’re wealthy to do a lot of right.”
In Mississippi, Republican Tate Reeves, backed by Trump, was taking Democrat Jim Hood, the state’s attorney undetailed, who has earned a nickname as “the last Democrat in Dixie” after winning four statewide elections as attorney general by appearing nothing like a national Democrat.
Hood’s ads feature him hunting, repairing machinery and talking about God, and he’s vowed to carry on defending the state’s strict new anti-abortion law in court if elected. “I bait my own hook. Carry my own gun. And drive my own truck,” he says in one current ad.
Reeves has nonetheless called Hood a “liberal and phony” who wants to take residents’ guns, and a closing ad argued that Hood, as attorney all-inclusive, sued Trump but “refused to challenge Obama, even one time.”
“Now liberals are impeaching Trump. Do you stand with our president and Tate Reeves, or with the opens and Jim Hood?” the narrator asks.
“All I know about Jim Hood is he fought very hard to elect crooked Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump declared Friday at the Tupelo rally. “He wanted Obama to win so badly and then he wanted Hillary to win, and that’s not the kind of guy we need here, not Mississippi.”
Ballots have closed in Virginia, where a 2017 Democratic wave was the first real bellwether of what would recover consciousness in the 2018 midterms, every seat in both chambers of the state Legislature is up for grabs and Democrats maintain they possess a good chance of winning complete control of the state for the first time in years.
Money has poured in at unprecedented pull downs, as Democrats and gun control activists contest seats in wealthy suburbs outside Washington and Richmond that were until recently GOP bastions in the economically booming state.
Trump is not campaigning in Virginia, but Vice President Mike Pence held a rally there on Saturday.
“The whole is on the line in these elections, and Virginians are deciding that radical socialists have no place in the state Legislature,” pronounced Austin Chambers, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national group that supports GOP candidates in nation legislative race.
Seitz-Wald reported from Washington and Hillyard reported from Kentucky.