Kentucky governor Andy Beshear runs on his treadmill seven mornings a week. His doctor would prefer six. “He said you ought to take one day off and he’s probably right,” says the 47-year-old Democrat. “But I want to feel good that day.” Beshear says his morning run (three miles or so) is “essential,” and he hits the word with a gentlemanly emphasis that lets you know he means it. Otherwise the stress of leading the state, and raising two teenagers—responsibilities he notes in the same breath—could get to him. “You start your day like that, you’re ready for the rest of it.”
Not much seems to get to Governor Beshear. He has the placid self-assurance of a veteran camp counselor or fraternity president (he pledged Sigma Chi at Vanderbilt). On the day I interviewed him at Kentucky’s genteel Beaux Arts Governor’s Mansion situated on a bluff over the verdant, slightly sleepy capital city of Frankfort, he and his wife, first lady Britainy Beshear, were already seated and waiting for me when I arrived (I was early). Even their labradoodle, Winnie, seemed to have her act together, bounding over for a brisk hello and then withdrawing politely so we could talk.
This, I would learn, is typical of Beshear’s governing style, which is hyper-organized, well-rehearsed, on message, and largely drama-free. He has a habit of running ahead of schedule, which I experienced firsthand, once missing the start of his remarks when I was only 10 minutes early. (He was 20.) In 2023 his campaign bus tour was so far ahead of schedule that his staff had to work their phones to rally 40 people at a gas station to kill a half hour.
Beshear is the most popular Democratic governor in the country—and he’s achieved this in a state that has become a GOP stronghold. Donald Trump is incredibly popular here—he won Kentucky by 30 points in 2024—but so is Andy Beshear, and this is the source of his mystique. (Name another Democrat that attracts the MAGA vote. Senator John Fetterman? Senator Joe Manchin, before he retired?) Beshear’s elections have all been close, but in each the margin has widened: In 2015 he was elected attorney general by 0.2 percentage points, and then in 2019, he won the governorship by about 5,000 votes—Kentucky’s closest gubernatorial contest in more than a century. Four years later, in 2023, with Democrats 12 months from a national wipeout, Beshear was reelected by five points. “A landslide,” he jokes.
And he accomplished this without turning away from the values and priorities of the left. When Kentucky Republicans recently put forward bills dismantling DEI programs at public universities and setting medical guidelines around emergency abortions (Kentucky has a near-total abortion ban), Beshear took out his veto pen. “He hasn’t been shy about standing up for the things that he believes in,” says Jaime Harrison, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “And to do that in, you know, Mitch McConnell’s red Kentucky? And still get reelected? It shows that he has some real political skill.”
“In the years since Dobbs, he’s been very vocal about the harms of abortion bans,” says Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, referring to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. His recent veto of Kentucky’s Republican-led abortion bill “was an incredible stand,” McGill Johnson says, and “an example of what we need from elected leaders right now.”
Of course Beshear’s vetoes were gleefully overturned—Republicans enjoy a supermajority in Kentucky—but the governor saw no dip in his approval numbers. Beshear suggests that has something to do with the fact that he talks to Republican voters every day. “All day, every day,” he tells me. “And we vacation in the Florida panhandle. So, on breaks too.”
I ask him how he navigates these conversations. “They’re still our neighbors and our friends,” he says, with almost a shrug. “And most Trump voters aren’t thinking about politics or partisanship for the vast majority of their day. They’re thinking about their job and their family and whether they can support them. And about the other things that touch their lives: their next doctor’s appointment, what’s that going to cost? Can you afford it? Is your HSA card frozen like ours was? What’s traffic going to be like? Is your commute safe? Are the kids safe in their school, and are they getting the education that you want them to? And then do you feel safe in your community? Not what the statistics say, but how you feel. So many folks in the Democratic Party got that wrong. When people said, ‘I don’t feel safe,’ even if they were being stoked by misinformation, the response shouldn’t have been the numbers. For a party that believes that mental health is just as important as physical health, it should have been listening, and then proposing what we can do more to make you feel safer in your community.”
Listening is an underappreciated political skill, says former Ohio governor John Kasich, a lifelong Republican who has found himself susceptible to Beshear’s charms. “I just like him. He’s basically a pretty humble guy. When he wants to talk to you or to discuss something, he really takes his time. You don’t feel this pressure, this sense of, Oh, I’m really very busy and I don’t have time. It’s the thing that they used to say about Bill Clinton—when he talks to you, you’re the only person in the world.”
Beshear might blanch at the comparison. Clinton was a political superstar right out of the gate, and Beshear tends to joke about the school elections he lost, the fact that he didn’t make law review at UVA, that Winnie the labradoodle has two coloring books to her name but he’s yet to publish anything. “Is he the glitziest, glam-iest, flashiest political figure in America? No, absolutely not,” says Rob Flaherty, a former Kamala Harris campaign manager. “But he’s clearly effective and relates to people really well, and listens to them and makes them feel heard. And I think that’s an incredibly important thing right now.”
He’s also a reminder of the lost art of self-deprecation. “I get more wins from my Republican legislature than I do from my two teenagers,” he said on his weekly podcast, an interview and political discussion series that includes an occasional segment where Beshear brings his 16-year-old son, Will, on to help him grapple with Gen Z lingo (in one episode the governor artfully strung together “vibe check,” “aura,” and “fire”). Beshear is term-limited, meaning he can’t run again, and thus sits at the top of the list of names who are expected to vie for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028—“no one dismisses him, no one,” says Kasich—but he doesn’t act like a man edging on to the national stage.
The day after California governor Gavin Newsom’s office posted a Star Wars meme with Trump cast as sinister Emperor Palpatine, Beshear was congratulating a local cookie entrepreneur for boosting Kentucky’s tourism dollars. (That would be Brooke Vaughn, founder of Please Thank You, a string of Louisville cookie shops that have taken off without her quite intending them to. “I was an English major!” she told me helplessly. She’s not involved in politics but likes Beshear. “I hope he runs for president.”)
Beshear keeps his focus. “He’s got a local identity,” says the poet Maurice Manning, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who lives in an 1840s farmhouse in a rural part of the state and is descended from seven generations of Kentuckians. “That’s been a very effective—and I believe a genuine—way that he has presented himself and conducted his leadership. He doesn’t convey that he’s jockeying for the next political office. He knows there’s work to do here, and he wants to keep doing it.” School teacher Ashley McKnight, who met Beshear at a moment of profound loss in the winter of 2021—her teenage son Logan was killed in a traffic accident, and then, days later, her house was nearly destroyed by a catastrophic tornado—tells me that “after the tornado you saw a different side. You didn’t see just the politician side. You saw the compassionate side. You saw—all day—the small-town side.” McKnight and her family live in Hopkins County, a red county in a sea of red counties where Beshear himself has roots, and the governor arrived there in the immediate aftermath of the storms (tornadoes and floods have devastated Kentucky in recent years). McKnight brought her then 10-year-old daughter, Kara, to a toy drive first lady Beshear had organized, but Kara, dazed, wouldn’t take any of the toys.
“He noticed this,” McKnight remembers. “And he’s like, ‘Oh, no, you’re going shopping.’ ” Beshear introduced Kara to his daughter, Lila, now 15, who they’d brought along. “And it was like they were at Walmart. They’ve got this black trash bag and she’s smiling from ear to ear. And I’m like, Oh my God, this is worth everything.”
McKnight tries to stay off of Facebook. “But I kind of get fighting mad,” she says. “People see this D beside his name, and, you know, this hatred just starts. I’m like, You guys don’t understand the man. Y’all don’t. I don’t see a D. I don’t see an R. I’ve never seen that. Actions speak so much more than words.”
That might as well be a Beshear campaign line. He is a deacon at Beargrass Christian Church in Louisville, and he loves to quote scripture, routinely calling his constituents “children of God,” and leans hard on the parable of Jesus and the Good Samaritan. “Every now and then after a few of his public addresses I’ll text him, ‘That was a great sermon, Governor,’ ” says his close friend Rob Shrader, a minister at Beargrass. But as devout as Beshear is, I note an equally fervent faith in the power of pragmatism. He boasts to me about restraining regulation in Kentucky: “We’ll get a business up and running faster than any other state.” He’s fascinated by entrepreneurs and invites them on his podcast (so far, Mark Cuban and Pinterest CEO Bill Ready). “I have a genuine interest in what other people do and how they’re successful at it,” he says. “I’ve always been more pragmatic than political. I got in this to actually do things. And that’s a lot more important to me than whether I score this many points with that group or this many points with another.”
For instance, here’s something he’ll tell you without a moment’s hesitation: “Trump’s FEMA operation on the ground in Kentucky is the best I’ve ever seen.”
Beshear doesn’t actually talk much about Donald Trump. “Five and a half years into being governor, people almost never bring up the president to me,” he says with satisfaction, as if that’s one more problem he’s solved. What he does do is lament the state of American politics. “We’re not gonna allow the national division to pull us apart,” he assured a crowd of local business leaders at the Louisville Slugger museum, his podium neatly situated in the shade of the museum’s enormous baseball bat. Then, in a tent erected on a suburban field where a children’s hospital would be built: “While we’re standing up, some of our leaders in DC are threatening to leave about 16 million Americans without health care.” He was referring to the Trump-approved, Republican-led policy bill, which he likes to call “the anything-but-beautiful bill.” (“I’ve just never seen Congress do something so callous and so cruel to so many Americans,” he told me in July after it passed the Senate.) I could barely hear him in that field over the summertime roar of cicadas, but he raised his voice to deliver his applause line: “Let me say in my Kentucky accent, that just ain’t right.”
The accent isn’t a performance. Beshear is a native son of Kentucky, born and raised in Lexington, and his father, Steve Beshear, also served as Kentucky’s governor, from 2007 to 2015. His mother, Jane, worked as a school teacher, bookkeeper, and real estate agent at different points in her life. Much of who he is is down to them, Beshear allows, and it’s true that his Southern gentility, his easeful hospitality, has a trained air. “They’re people of strong values,” Beshear says. “Now, they have very high expectations and at times can be exceedingly critical.”
“The 2 percent thing is a perfect example,” says Britainy. Californian by birth, age 46, she’s as upright in her bearing as he is; they met when both were working in DC, Beshear as a young attorney, Britainy in marketing. (“At Cantina Marina because all great love stories start in a Mexican restaurant,” Beshear says.)
The governor explains that he’d come home from school with a 98 percent on a test. “And my dad thought he was joking but he always had the same response: ‘What happened to the other 2 percent?’ ” Tiny pause. “It does make you strive for that next piece,” he says. “Even the things that I thought were awful as a kid have helped me as I’ve gotten older.”
Beshear was raised alongside his older brother, Jeffrey, now an equine veterinarian in Virginia. “Both were very intelligent, very competitive, very strong-willed,” remembers Steve Beshear, 80. “Our job was to mold and direct all of that. So we set high standards and goals.” He reminisces about how teenage Andy became his “sidekick” when he ran as a Democratic candidate to unseat Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell in 1996. “He drove me around all that summer and saw the ins and outs of what a campaign is,” Steve says. “He also experienced what it’s like to lose, which I think is a valuable experience.”
After college and law school, and after he and Britainy married and moved to Louisville, the younger Beshear joined his father’s campaign for governor. “I performed a year and a half of free legal work,” Andy jokes.
“And we were the hotel,” says Britainy.
“I bunked in with them because that didn’t cost anything,” remembers Steve. “I never was independently wealthy and so I couldn’t write big checks to myself, like so many people these days can do. And so we had to be frugal.” The elder Beshear won that election and served as governor until 2015. Andy then took over his father’s job just four years after Beshear vacated it. (“Sort of slid into this office on his dad’s coattails,” is how the Republican commentator and Kentucky native Scott Jennings put it last year when Beshear was being considered as Kamala Harris’s running mate.)
“Kentucky is a very traditional state,” says the writer Chris Offutt, who grew up in Kentucky’s Appalachian mining country. “Many, many, many sons do what their fathers did. So that tradition is there.” Nepotism isn’t the harshest critique on Beshear; it’s that his compassion, humility, and faith in pragmatism have a quieting effect. Is he exciting enough to be a national figure? Can he rally younger voters? Self-deprecation may be a lost art, but mastering it does not make you go viral on TikTok.
Kasich puts it this way. “He does need to demonstrate some muscularity. He needs to demonstrate some strength.” At a Democratic leadership gala in Florida in June, Beshear and Senator Cory Booker were the two keynote speakers. Beshear kept his remarks to a tight 15 minutes and remained behind the podium. Booker took the microphone in hand, moved into the crowd, and went long, revving people up. “Some people are better speakers than others,” says Kasich. “I don’t think George W. Bush was such a great speaker. As I still keep telling people, ‘This is my strategery.’ ” (A Will Ferrell reference, by the way.) “He needs to demonstrate through words and pictures what it was like when he was trying to deal with the legislature that was intent on stopping everything he wanted to do. I think he needs to tell those stories, and illustrate that he’s tough.” Do this and he’ll have a leg up. “No hit on Booker,” Kasich adds. “I like Cory. I think he’s a good guy.
But there’s a difference between a senator and a governor. The one is sort of theoretical and the other is practical.” (“One hell of a ticket right there,” says Jaime Harrison when I ask him to comment on the Florida gala. “Top and bottom: Cory Booker, Andy Beshear. Andy Beshear, Cory Booker. A really, really interesting ticket.”)
Another critique may be Beshear’s relatively slim track record on foreign policy. He does meet with foreign dignitaries to promote Kentucky as a place to do business—and he had a star role at Davos this year. In early July, when I reached him over the phone, I asked about President Trump’s decision to strike Iran, and he said history would be the judge. “We cannot have a nuclear Iran,” he added. “But was it effective? If you’re going to commit this act, it better work.” He was positive about a possible ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and said Israel was a critical ally. “I believe when someone is an ally, when you disagree, you don’t do it publicly or through the media.”
Responsible statements, but none that would rally a crowd. AOC does that whenever she finds a microphone. As this story went to press, the No Kings movement had just staged a day of national protests. Pragmatism may have gotten Beshear to Frankfort, but isn’t something a little more confrontational needed to take him farther?
“I think what AOC is doing in generating energy is important, and it’s needed, and I believe in a party that everyone can be a part of,” he tells me, without saying that he’s intending to run for anything. “But if we want to not only win, but then govern, well, it’s got to be more than about being against someone. It’s got to be about being for something. We have to have a compelling vision of making someone’s life better.”
I bring up Zohran Mamdani, the New York assemblyman who won the mayoral primary, and how much excitement he’s generating.
“As did the vice president,” Beshear reminds me. “Energy doesn’t always translate into victory.”
Maryland’s governor Wes Moore is a friend of Beshear’s. They go to each other for advice. (“He’s my workout muse,” Moore jokes.) Moore doesn’t agree that Beshear needs to be bolder, or somehow less humble to attract a national following. “I think Andy’s done just fine by being himself,” Moore says. “Andy’s superpower is that Andy Beshear is Andy Beshear.”
But Democrats do need dynamic leaders, figures who can win hearts and minds, even put on a show sometimes. “Democrats need to do a little bit more of that,” Beshear agrees. “We need to do it in an honest way, but we’ve got to do the podcast. We’ve got to do the YouTube shows.” Yes, Beshear would have gone on Joe Rogan (as Harris notoriously did not). “We have to participate in all of it.” Beshear pauses. “Actually, I was on MrBeast once.”
“You were?” I ask.
His aides called the YouTuber (410 million subscribers) and asked him to build some houses in storm-ravaged Kentucky. And MrBeast edited Beshear into the resulting video. A viral win.
Beshear loves this story because it was Will’s idea. Watching Will pitch a baseball game, or Lila, an equestrienne, compete in eventing, gives him joy. I spoke to several of his friends who all lauded his parenting. As a family, the Beshears unwind to TV, and haggle over how much time the kids can spend on Snapchat. They’ve played laser tag in the mansion, also hide and seek. Britainy had her book club shortly after our interview (Clay’s Quilt by Silas House). There’s a basketball hoop in the driveway. Crocs in the entry.
So good, so relatable. But Beshear can be larger than life too. I saw it at a church in West Louisville, when Beshear took to the pulpit in front of Black ministers and churchgoers and apologized for being early. Some were dressed in dark suits and Sunday best (an extravagantly feathered hat floated in the pews); others wore simple purple T-shirts that read “Just Jesus.” Beshear spoke to them in a minister’s rhythm, his cadences gently sweeping the crowd from murmurings of assent, to called-out amens, to cheers. He spoke about how Jesus chose to be the prince of peace, not the prince of power. “And I wish that way was followed by some other people right now.” He acknowledged that he’d never feel “the pressed weight of racism” but that he was committed to making life better for everyone. He quoted Dr. King, boasted about making Juneteenth a state holiday, tallied up the jobs he’d brought to Black communities. Beshear looked as calm as ever as he said these things, dressed in his preppy blue blazer, oxford shirt, no tie. But he was also electric with something—faith, happiness, a spirit of fight. “If you feel like the current president is against you, I want you to know you have a governor who is with you. We’re going to continue to speak up, we’re going to push back.” He finished over cheers: “This is our chance.”
And then Beshear ceded the pulpit to Bishop Daran Mitchell, who let the congregation quiet down and then gathered himself, and said that he was proud to have a governor in his church. Mitchell let the moment hang. “But the way he’s talking,” he said, “he can go much higher than that.”
In this story: grooming, Andrea Ahl; tailor, Albert Lukonga. Produced by Boom Productions Inc.
