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Andy Beshear Is What’s Wrong With the Democratic Party in the Trump Era

The Kentucky governor isn’t doing what Mitch McConnell would do—and that’s the problem.

Andy Beshear, governor of Kentucky, speaks during a campaign event with Rob Sand, Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Iowa, not pictured, at the River Center in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sunday, June 7, 2026.

Andy Beshear’s biggest political problem right now is that he isn’t Mitch McConnell. Hospitalized on June 14, moved to “a rehabilitation center” per social-media post on July 12, and dead silent since that day, McConnell has left Kentucky’s Democratic governor—and the 4.6 million Kentuckians he’s supposed to represent—with pretty much no information and even fewer options on what comes next.

The Kentucky governor announced on Monday that despite his July 8 letter requesting evidence of McConnell’s capability to serve, Beshear has received “not an email, not a letter, not a call, not a video…absolutely nothing.” A growing chorus of Democratic voices has only grown more impatient and angry with Beshear in the interim for what they perceive as typical Democratic inaction. Although, to be fair, there’s not much the governor can do under Kentucky law and with a Republican-controlled state legislature. But were the roles reversed, you can bet that McConnell—a man whose career has been about power at all costs, political rules and norms be damned—would sure as hell not be waiting by the mailbox for a response.

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We can accurately predict what McConnell, and just about any member of the state’s power-hungry Republican Party, would do because they’ve already done it. Twice. First in 2021, when Kentucky’s GOP legislature rewrote state law to strip the governor of the historically held power to appoint a US Senate replacement, instead requiring that he pick from a short list handpicked by state Republicans. Then–state Representative Patti Minter rightly groused at the time that “it wouldn’t be happening if we had a Republican governor.” The Democrat would also call it a “blatant power grab”—which I would call vintage McConnell, who even admitted the change was his idea, deeming it “the best way to go.” As with the roughly 40 other bills stripping him of traditional gubernatorial powers that session alone, Beshear—not coincidentally, Kentucky’s first Democratic governor since 1999—vetoed the measure, but the Republican legislature just overrode his veto.

Three years later—and less than 24 hours after McConnell announced his retirement in 2024, no less—Kentucky’s GOP changed the........

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