I benefited from watching election returns on tv last night because
(1) the close Kentucky governor's race set my metabolism into overdrive, making me feel alive; and
(2) I learned how to pronounce "Louisville," the largest city in Kentucky.
Regarding (2), it's not "Looey-ville," as I have always said, almost exclusively to refer to the University of Louisville in the month of March. In addition to a basketball team, the university has a Department of Linguistics, and one of its professors, Elizabeth Patton, grades diverse pronunciations:
(a) Looey-ville: F
(b) Louis-ville: F
(c) Loo-a-vul: Passing
(d) Loo-a-ville: Passing
It can be hard to distinguish (c) from (d), which I guess is okay, since either is acceptable. If you're wrong, however, people who know will notice. MSNBC may not be at the top of the ratings in Kentucky, but I wonder whether some of their on-air personalities have gotten mail, because I noticed last night that Rachel Maddow and Steve Kornacki both seemed to make a point of saying Loo-a-vul. Or possibly they are just woke. If you're curious about how Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham pronounces "Louisville," you'll have to wait for another day, because Fox was not covering Kentucky's gubernatorial election last night.
First notice that something was up came during the 7 o'clock hour with Chris Hayes. More than half the vote was in, and Bevin, the incumbent Republican, was ahead by 52-46 percent, which isn't a lot for a Republican in Kentucky, but it's not neck-and-neck, either. Yet there was Steve Kornacki gesticulating somewhat wildly in front of "the big board" showing returns by county. He was highlighting the data from Jefferson County, home to Louisville. It's one of the few reliably Democratic counties in Kentucky, and it's also the biggest—its population is well over twice that of the second most populous county. Only about a fifth of the precincts in Jefferson had reported their totals, and in those Beshear, the Democratic challenger, was getting 65% of the vote. Since about three-fifths of the statewide precincts were counted, but only one-fifth in Jefferson County, the outstanding vote was concentrated in Jefferson County, where Beshear was doubling Bevin's vote total. Kornacki said that explained why the race was still deemed "too close to call."
Sure enough, by the time Hayes had handed off to Maddow, the percentage of statewide precincts reporting had risen to 90, the percentage of reporting precincts within Jefferson County had shot up to 96, and Beshear, instead of trailing 52-46, was ahead by 50-48. In raw votes, the margin was 30,000, and there then began the agonizing crawl to the finish as votes from the last scattered precincts were tabulated. These were mainly from rural Kentucky, and the narrow gap kept narrowing. The raw vote difference dropped below 10,000 at about the time that the percentage of uncounted precincts had dipped to 4%, so Bevins was gaining at a rate that would have put him over the top by the end, but then suddenly the difference shot up to about 13,000—the last remains of the Jefferson County vote, perhaps. Within a few minutes Rachel had to interrupt whoever she was interviewing to announce that NBC had called the race for Beshear.
Trump won Kentucky by 30 points. Kornacki, explicating the upset later in the evening, stressed three factors.
(I.) Beshear did much better than anticipated in rural eastern Kentucky—coal country. In some counties that Trump had won with two-thirds or more of the vote, Beshear actually prevailed. These counties are so small that it was a matter of winning by a hundred votes instead of losing by a few hundred, but, considering that the final difference was about 5,000, that's significant. This surprising result in parts of rural Kentucky should probably be attributed to factors unique to the state and the particular candidates. Bevin, for example, is so widely disliked that last night one Republican commentator quipped that the result proved how, in Kentucky, being an a-hole is still marginally worse than being a lib-hole.
(II.) When Bevin was first elected governor four years ago, he lost Jefferson County by about 37,000 votes. Last night, he lost it by 99,000. In addition to losing in the city of Louisville, he suffered something like a meltdown in the surrounding suburban areas. This is part of a national trend that also explains, for example, why Texas is becoming competitive.
(III.) Kornacki's third point amounted to an amplification of the second. Kentucky's three most northerly counties adjoin one another at the top of the boot on the south bank of the Ohio River, just across from Cincinnati, Ohio. Though these suburban counties are small in area, they are home to one of every ten Kentuckians. Trump won all three counties, and his narrowest margin was a whopping 59-35. Last night, Beshear carried two of them. In the third, which Trump won by 68-26, Bevin won by 55-43—twelve points, instead of forty-two!
Trump traveled to Kentucky to campaign with Bevin on Election Eve. He tweeted today that, but for his efforts, Bevin would have lost by fifteen points. Maybe, but it's also possible that one a-hole campaigning for another makes for a losing look, including in Kentucky.
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