“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.
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