Alf Landon, the Republican governor of Kansas, suffered the misfortune of running for president in 1936 against a fellow named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic incumbent.
Things did not fare well for old Alf. Roosevelt carried all but two states, Maine and Vermont, collecting almost 61 percent of the popular vote on his way to a second term. Landon headed back to Topeka.
At his headquarters on Election night, surveying the results on a tote board, Landon broke out laughing.
“What are you laughing at, you old fool?’’ asked his wife.
“The totality of it all,’’ Alf responded.
The Kentucky Democratic Party, for those keeping score at home, are in the midst of its own confrontation with totality. After generations of iron-fisted control of state government, the party has essentially collapsed. Gov. Andy Beshear and his lieutenant governor, Jacquline Coleman, are the only Democrats elected and serving statewide. State offices like treasurer, secretary of state, and attorney general are in the hands of Republicans. Both U.S. senators are tied to the GOP.
In July 2022, after waiting what Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams characterized as a century and a half, Republicans finally surpassed Democrats in voter registration. There currently are 1.8 million registered Republicans in the Commonwealth compared to 1.6 million Democrats.
The GOP controls five of the six congressional district seats. Republicans gained control of the state Senate in 1999 and currently hold a 32-6 advantage in the 38-seat chamber. It took a bit longer to grab the reigns in the state House, finally taking control in 2016. It now holds 80 of the 100 seats.
The totality of the situation is even darker than the statistics show. The Bluegrass hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Wendell Ford, of Owensboro, in 1992. Former President Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to earn the Commonwealth’s eight electoral votes in 1996, and he only bested the Republican, Sen. Bob Dole, R-KS, by 13,000 votes. Beshear leaves the governorship at the end of next year and Republicans likely will hold the advantage in choosing his successor.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
That is the bleak, Landon-esque destiny facing whoever survives the May 19 Democratic primary for the chance to replace the retiring U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Louisville. There are four main candidates vying for that dubious honor, only one of whom, state Rep. Pamela Stevenson, D-Lexington, currently holds public office.
Besides Steveson, there is the perceived current frontrunner, Charles Booker, who served a single term in the state House, Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, and horse trainer Dale Romans.
None of them has raised a whole lotta dough, with McGrath pulling in just short of $2 million as of March 30. Compare that to the nearly $8 million raised over the same period by Rep. Andy Barr, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, or the $2 million raised by his GOP primary rival Daniel Cameron. And don’t bet on whoever survives the Dem primary getting a whole lot of financial help from party committees once the time arrives – too many races deemed more competitive will monopolize the cash flow.
There isn’t a whole lot differentiating the candidates other than a lack of previous success. Booker, of Louisville, opposed Sen. Rand Paul in 2022, winning three counties and pulling in a meager 38 percent of the vote. He also ran in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in 2020, losing to, you guessed it, McGrath.
McGrath is a two-time loser in seeking office. She fell to the aforementioned Barr in the race for the Sixth Congressional District seat centered on Lexington in 2018, pulling in 48 percent in what was otherwise a big year for Democrats nationwide. She then fell to McConnell in what was to be his last campaign for office in 2020, receiving 38 percent of the vote, attracting 400,000 fewer votes than McConnell, despite outraising the incumbent by about $32 million.
Stevenson who, interestingly enough, replaced Booker in the Louisville-based state House seat, has also run, unsuccessfully, statewide, losing to Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman in 2023, garnering 42 percent of the vote.
Romans can claim he alone hasn’t lost a statewide election. Of course he has never run one, and he has at least experienced some success on the racetrack. But he’s running in the spirit of former Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WVa, whose name and right-wing politics likely won’t appeal to the few remaining Kentucky Democrats.
Look, let’s be blunt here. Pollyanna couldn’t screw up even a minimal amount of optimism for Democrats winning this year’s U.S. Senate race regardless of the standard bearer. The candidate, and polls show Booker with a slight edge, will be outspent and face an avalanche of Republican votes in a state where, for whatever reason, President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump remains popular.
The real question is, how did we get here? Kentucky remained a Democratic stronghold throughout the 20th Century with a few minor blips, mostly as a result of infighting. The GOP often had problems getting candidates to run, settling on Rep. John Harper, R-Shepherdsville, to run for governor in 1987 when everyone else opted out.
Then, seemingly overnight, the pancake got flipped in the griddle, and now the Republican Party is seemingly more powerful in 2026 than the Democrats ever were.
Multiple factors are, of course, involved, ranging from the crash of the coal economy to the perception that Democrats had become the party of urban America. Voter devotion to former Republican President Ronald Reagan, the emergence of Reagan Democrats in a state that gave him 60 percent of the vote in 1984 at a time when Democrats maintained a wide voter registration advantage, provided many with an opportunity to make the switcheroo. And on the other side, the general distaste for Democratic President Barack Obama, for whatever reason, although certainly some of it had something to do with him being a Big City Black man, just seemed to be the coup de grace.
The star of the show is McConnell, whose ceaseless efforts to build a moribund Republican Party into a political dynamo can’t be overstated. Whatever you might think of McConnell, and I’ve had plenty to say in that regard, he displayed an innate ability to build a party in his image. It’s that simple.
McConnell’s election in 1984 over Sen. Walter “Dee’’ Huddleston, D-Elizabethtown, is often cited as a turning point. And, while it certainly merits attention in that regard, it should be noted that Kentucky has a history of diverging from the norm and sending Republicans to the upper chamber – John Sherman Cooper of Somerset and Thruston Morton, of Louisville, served together for much of the 1960s. Marlow Cook, of Louisville, entered the Senate upon Morton’s retirement.
The real shock to the system came in 1994 and was sparked by, symbolically, perhaps, a death.
The Second Congressional District in Western Kentucky was as much of a Yellow Dog Democrat region as you’d find anywhere for much of the 20th Century. It was represented in Congress by Bill Natcher, of Bowling Green, for 41 years. Natcher was the one-time chair of the House Appropriations Committee who set the record for casting 18,401 consecutive floor votes from his 1953 swearing to his last appearance on the House floor on March 3, 1994.
Natcher was considered unbeatable. Fate was the only thing that stopped him – he died on March 29, 1994. A special election was called to fill out the remainder of his term. Democrats chose Joe Prather, a former state Senate majority floor leader and lieutenant governor candidate. Republicans looked to be stuck with Ron Lewis, an ordained Baptist preacher who operated a religious bookstore in Elizabethtown.
Lewis had filed to seek the GOP nomination to run against Natcher and now he was in the special election against Prather, with many viewing him as a sacrificial lamb. But McConnell, to his credit, saw an opportunity, got national GOP organizations involved and Lewis won by 10 points in a low turnout election.
It didn’t stop there. Lewis defeated the popular Democratic mayor of Owensboro, David Adkisson, in the regular election for a full two-year term in November 1994, beating him by almost 30,000 votes and taking Adkisson’s home region in Daviess County. He followed that up by bettering another former Senate Democratic Leader, Joe Wright, of Harned, by 35,000 votes in 1996.
In three elections beginning in 1994, a Republican Bible salesman who never served in elected office defeated three well-known Democrats in a congressional district that had sent nothing but Democrats to Washington beginning in 1865.
Something was happening. Lewis proved to be anything but a powerhouse, Daniel Webster-type lawmaker and he even went back on his promise to serve only four full terms. But the voters kept returning him to Washington, moved, apparently by his socially conservative views that reflected the district.
In that same 1994 election, voters in the First Congressional District, who likewise were in the habit of sending Democrats to D.C., elected Ed Whitfield, of Hopkinsville, a Democrat turned Republican, over incumbent Democrat Tom Barlow, of Paducah.
Some things, known and unknown, sparked a political revolution in Western Kentucky that is having an impact and growing to this day. It will continue to thrive at least until a shattered Democratic Party finds its Reagan and its McConnell.
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Written by Bill Straub, a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. Cross-posted from the NKY Tribune.
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