The Other McCain

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The Covington Boys Election

Posted on | November 5, 2019 | Comments Off on The Covington Boys Election

 

Kentucky’s Republican Gov. Matt Bevin faces a tough re-election contest today. Bevin is personally unpopular in the Bluegrass State, a problem exacerbated by a falling out with Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton, and polls indicate a surprising tight race in a state that Trump won by a landslide in 2016. Liberals view Bevin’s problems as a harbinger of difficulties for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election next year, but this may be one of those red-to-blue pipe dreams like when Democrats got all excited for Wendy Davis and Beto O’Rourke for statewide office in Texas.

At any rate, Trump held a rally Monday night in Lexington to rally support for Bevin ahead of today’s election, and hit hard on the cultural issues that define the Left-Right divide:

President Trump invoked the Covington Catholic High School incident and protests against Confederate statues Monday night in Kentucky as examples of his liberal opponents’ dangerous “authoritarian ideology.”
Speaking at a campaign rally in Lexington, Kentucky, Mr. Trump cited the infamous confrontation of the high school boys from Kentucky at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in January as proof of leftists’ values run amok.
“They want to indoctrinate your children [and] destroy anyone who holds traditional American values,” Mr. Trump said. “All you have to do is ask the boys from Covington, Catholic high school, some of whom are here tonight.”
Critics on the left accused the high school students of intolerance in a confrontation with a leftist activist and a black supremacist group at the Lincoln Memorial in January. An independent investigation found the students, some of whom were wearing “Make America Great” hats, were blameless in the encounter.
Mr. Trump said it was an example that “the far left wants to impose their authoritarian ideology on the nation, telling you what to think what to believe and how you should live.”
“They want to erase our traditions, our culture, our history and our heroes,” Mr. Trump said in an apparent reference to the movement to take down statues of prominent Confederates.
The president said the left won’t win.
“Kentucky will never be broken,” he said. “Kentucky can’t be broken — you’re too strong and you’re too smart.”

Remember how Trump stood by those kids in January:

 

You have to understand how the Covington Catholic School fiasco — where boys in MAGA hats were falsely accused of racism — plays out in the context of Kentucky’s demographics. It is a largely rural state where 88% of the population is white. The five largest counties in Kentucky are:

  1. Jefferson County (Louisville) ………………. 770,517
  2. Fayette County (Lexington) ………………… 323,780
  3. Kenton County (suburban Cincinnati) …. 166,051
  4. Boone County (suburban Cincinnati) …… 131,533
  5. Warren County (Bowling Green) …………. 131,264

If the anti-white/anti-Christian bias expressed in the Covington Catholic incident is on the minds of voter in Kenton and Boone counties and elsewhere in Kentucky today, that could help shift toward the Republican column many Trump voters who might not like Matt Bevin very much.


 

Category: Election, Kentucky

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