Andy Beshear Is Laying Groundwork For A 2028 Campaign: ‘he’s An Intriguing Dark Horse’

PERRY COUNTY, Kentucky — Andy Beshear isn’t just saying he “would consider” running for president. He’s actively laying the tracks for a potential 2028 campaign.

He’s meeting privately with donors, recording a podcast and regularly popping up at national events. A former Kamala Harris communications staffer is consulting for him, and he’s speaking at the Future Forward donor summit this weekend in California. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk hasname-checked him as among the toughest Democrats to beat.

The selling point for Beshear, the popular, two-term governor of Kentucky, is his proven ability to win in Trump country while still running as an unapologetic Democrat. But he’s also done that by flying under the national radar, leaving him in a relative obscurity that he must now overcome. The challenge is translating what he calls his “reasonable” and “common sense” Kentucky story into a national Democratic primary campaign, and testing whether his low-key personality can excite major Democratic donors and primary voters — and break through a fragmented media environment.

“He’s the kind of guy that is either going to bump along at two percent and never catch fire, or he’ll catch fire and you’ll say, ‘Where did this guy come from?’” said Pete Giangreco, a veteran of several Democratic presidential campaigns. “He’s a former attorney general, he talks about ‘all God’s children,’ and you believe him, he’s the exact opposite of Donald Trump, so he’s an intriguing dark horse for a reason.”

It worked for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, whom Beshear occasionally draws comparisons to, but that was several political lifetimes ago. Recent rural-state Democratic governors to try it, Montana's Steve Bullock and Colorado's John Hickenlooper, never cracked the single-digit polling basement of the 2020 Democratic primary.

The 2028 campaign may present the most favorable conditions for governors in recent history, with Democrats out of power in Washington and struggling to mount a coordinated pushback to Trump’s overhaul of the federal government. Governors saw their influence — and their public profiles — grow during the coronavirus pandemic and, for Democrats, they now represent a rare bloc of power.

He’s “definitely actively making the rounds on the donor circuit,” said one major Democratic donor adviser, granted anonymity to discuss private events. His super PAC spent six figures on a rural mail program in the Wisconsin state Supreme Court race in March that was one of the first electoral tests of the second Trump administration. He’s delivered speeches at Davos in Switzerland and the House Democrats’ “issues conference” in Leesburg, Virginia, just outside of Washington, as well as headlining Nancy Pelosi’s fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in March. Lauren Hitt, the former Kamala Harris staffer, is consulting for the governor, as are a new set of fundraising consultants.

Arguably Beshear’s biggest springboard will come next year, when he’ll serve as the Democratic Governors Association chair, a perch used by other presidential aspirants like Tim Walz to widen their connections.

“What you see are cable news stations that set up a camera outside of Congress because it's the easiest thing to do, and then take whatever is said there, and say, ‘that's this party or that party.’ Governors are very different,” Beshear said in an interview with POLITICO, sitting in the backseat of his black SUV. “You have a big difference, I will say, between the DC bubble and when you’re a governor.”

But even among the governors considered potential candidates, Beshear faces more obstacles in expanding his national name recognition. He doesn’t represent the fifth wealthiest economy, along with its billionaire networks, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom. He’s not a billionaire himself, like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. He isn’t well-known on the cable news airwaves or the high-dollar donor circuit, like purple state regulars Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.

One Democratic operative who invited Beshear to headline a fundraiser in 2024 said major donors didn’t recognize the Kentucky governor when he first arrived at the event — even as he was speaking to them — because “no one knew who he was. He’s just not exciting or interesting enough,” the operative said, granted anonymity to describe a private event.

“He strikes me as a great Cabinet secretary,” the operative added.

Some in Washington have taken notice of Beshear. A handful of Democratic senators have reached out directly to Beshear in recent weeks to talk about how he’s framing key issues for Democrats, according to one person directly familiar with the outreach and granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. And House Democratic leadership continues to invite Beshear to key events, this person said.

“There’s not enough people who have watched what he’s done,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “I think people should be studying what he’s done.”

For a party that lost ground nearly everywhere in 2024, Beshear has a red-state streak dating back to 2015, when he won Kentucky’s attorney general’s race — the same year his father, Steve Beshear, finished his term as the state’s Democratic governor. At the time, some chalked his victory up to his last name. In 2019, Beshear narrowly beat Matt Bevin, the deeply unliked Republican governor, a former businessperson who ran in a Trumpian mold. And again, some observers credited Beshear’s victory in a state Trump won by 30 points in 2016 to Bevin’s unpopularity.

But by 2023, when Beshear defeated then-state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a rising star in the GOP, by more than 5 percentage points, even skeptics took note. Beshear not only won in liberal cities, like Louisville and Lexington, but built bigger margins over Cameron in rural counties — particularly those that had weathered catastrophic flooding and tornadoes.

During his first term, Beshear backed broadly popular, Democrat-aligned proposals like expanding Medicaid and legalizing medical marijuana. He ran on abortion rights — airing a devastating TV ad that became a blueprint for other Democrats after Roe v. Wade was overturned — while also braiding his Chrisitian faith, his “why” as he calls it, into nearly everything he says.

“Andy’s been able to break down political barriers and work across party lines with people … because he focuses on the issues that matter most to people,” said Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey. “Governors have to get stuff done … and I think it’s pretty clear that people are going to vote for someone who’s going to deliver for them.”

In Perry County, Kentucky, where Beshear handed out millions of dollars to community organizations helping flood victims rebuild homes on top of a reclaimed mine, the governor presented the kind of scene Democratic ad-makers would salivate over. A rain-soaked Beshear raising the walls on new houses alongside Republican legislators in a rural county that backed both the Democratic governor in his reelection campaign in 2023 and, one year later, Donald Trump.

“I see God in every person who's working to bring this neighborhood to life,” Beshear told the crowd at the wall-raising.

Beshear insists that if Democrats focus “on the reality of what people think about when they wake up in the morning,” then they can “re-earn the trust of the American people by showing them that we are focused on their everyday needs.” He wants Democrats to talk again “about faith or values or the reason we do things.” He wants them “talking like a normal human being” — it’s addiction, not a substance abuse disorder, he often says.

And, most importantly, “the next presidential candidates need to get dirt on their boots,” he said.

That was working for Beshear on that recent, rainy day in eastern Kentucky, where his boots were, indeed, muddy, as he put his arm around a flood victim’s shoulder and joked with a local county official about her birthday. Even the Republicans in attendance had nice things to say about their governor.

“When I’m around him at things like this, he seems more like the old Democrats that I grew up with, our coal-miners, our laborers,” said Republican state Sen. Scott Madon, who joined Beshear under a tent in Letcher County, where the governor was handing out more oversized checks to break ground on another new neighborhood for flood victims. “The Democrats we see on the news every night now are not the same Democrats.”

That might be one of Beshear’s biggest challenges as he turns toward a Democratic primary, much of which traditionally plays out on cable news. His newness to it was exposed in a series of cable news appearances during the 2024 vice presidential audition, when Beshear, along with a handful of other Democratic officials, were trying out for a spot on the Democratic ticket. Beshear made pointed contrasts to then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance, whose family roots can be traced to eastern Kentucky, and his record as an affable Southern governor was clear, said two former Harris staffers.

But his cable news tryouts didn’t go well, they said. He came off as “canned and corny,” said one former staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

"The Morning Joe interview hurt him. It was, 'Are you ready for primetime or no?' And he wasn't ready,” said a second former Harris staffer. “Now, that may have been the best thing for him because he's not tied to that ticket and he, I'm assuming, learned a lot from that experience."

His understated and aw-shucks demeanor stands in contrast to Newsom, who has waded into several controversies on his podcast, or Pete Buttigieg, who went viral with a nearly three-hour appearance on “Flagrant” last month. It’s not clear, several Democratic strategists and operatives said, how Beshear might stand out on a debate stage — much less build national name recognition that may be required to get there.

Beshear, for his part, said he “can be as loud as I need to be, when I need to be, but oftentimes when somebody's yelling, and you yell back, then there's just two people yelling, and nobody hears a thing.”

He’s also shown some willingness to go for the jugular. Earlier this year, he sharply attacked Newsom for interviewing Steve Bannon on his podcast, telling reporters that “I don’t think we should give [Bannon] oxygen on any platform — ever, anywhere.” And while Newsom broke with Democrats on trans athletes in sports, Beshear defended transgender athletes in his state, drawing praise from progressives.

In March 2023, ahead of his re-election campaign, Beshear vetoed a bill that sought to regulate the choices of transgender youths, telling reporters at the time that “all children are children of God.” In his retelling, the next day, “a guy walked up to me, big baseball hat and all, and I thought, ‘oh my goodness, I know what's coming here.’”

“But he stuck out his hand, and the first thing he said surprised me a little bit. He said, ‘I'm not sure I agree with you … But I know you're doing what you think is right,’” Beshear said. “And he slapped me on the back, and he said, ‘I support you,’ and walked away.”

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville said if the party’s primary electorate in 2027 is “in the mood for the most partisan, loudest person, then Andy is not going to win. That’s pretty clear, that’s not going to be a race he’s going to win.”

“But I think he’s on the better side of that trade [because] when he says, there was a differential of 30 points between my performance and Trump, that will impress people because they want to win,” Carville continued. “He can say, ‘If you need a podium pounder, I’m not your guy, but if you want somebody that can effectively do things to help people, then I’m there for you,’ and that may be the winning way to distinguish yourself.”