Alan Cornett

Lexington, KentuckyIt wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not that Amy McGrath wasn’t supposed to win Kentucky’s delayed primary for the US Senate seat held by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The problem was she was supposed to win in a cakewalk. Instead, she eked out a victory over State Representative Charles Booker, who made a late charge from the impoverished West Side of Louisville during a wave of racial unrest and deadly protests that have wracked Kentucky’s largest city for weeks.McGrath is a former Marine bomber pilot who lost a high profile bid to unseat Rep. Andy Barr two years ago. It wasn’t long before Chuck Schumer tapped her to run against his Republican counterpart in the Senate.

Everyone in Kentucky knows what five o’clock means. It means it’s time for Andy.Andy, of course, is Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a mild mannered Democrat who defeated incumbent Matt Bevin in November by only 5,000 votes in a heavily red state. At the time, I wrote in The Spectator why that happened, but it certainly didn’t hurt that his father was the two-term governor before Bevin.Likely no governor in the nation has thrived the way Andy Beshear has during this time of pandemic lockdowns. Every day, seven days a week, Beshear speaks to Kentuckians from the state Capitol at 5 o’clock. His presentations have been compared to fireside chats and he to Mister Rogers.

On election eve, surrounded by 20,000 enthusiastic Trump supporters in Rupp Arena, Kentucky’s temple to college basketball, Gov. Matt Bevin exclaimed, ‘This is better than the Final Four!’The entire arena paused. It was an attempt to connect with the crowd that fell horribly flat, the sort of thing no native Kentuckian would have said. To a Kentucky basketball fan nothing is better than the Final Four. Despite winning the governorship by nine points in 2015, Bevin has never quite clicked with Kentucky. Born in Colorado and raised in New Hampshire, Bevin moved to Louisville after making a fortune in investments. Riding the Tea Party wave, he tried to primary Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2014.