Kentucky Bill to Move Gubernatorial Elections to Presidential Years Passes Committee Unanimously

http://ballot-access.org/2020/01/16...sidential-years-passes-committee-unanimously/

For information, the Kentucky (State) Senate has 38 seats and the current balance of power is: R 28 (73.7%) / D 9 (26.3%), R +47.4% = R hypermajority

I made a thread about this for a number of reasons.

1.) It is, in this bitterly divided partisan-age, very rare that ANY national or state chamber passes anything unanimously. That alone makes this (currently) small piece of news very newsworthy.

2.) Currently, KY is one of only 5 states total that do off-year gubernatorial elections. The other states are: Louisiana and Mississipi (both, with Kentucky in the off-year BEFORE a presidential cycle), New Jersey and Virginia (both in the off year AFTER a presidential cycle).

3.) Whether or not you think that off-year gubernatorial elections can or cannot function as "canaries in the coal-mine" vis-a-vis any current presidential administration, the fact of the matter is that off-year elections cost the respective states more money for an election where relatively few things are on the ballot, things that could just as easily be on the ballot in a presidential or mid-term cycle. So, put aside the fact that Republicans in Kentucky are upset that Beshear (D) won the gubernatorial in 2019 and their argument that voter turnout in an off-year is generally far less than in a presidential cycles is indeed very solid, alone the cost of holding an election in an off-year cycle should make people want to think whether it is even worth it to continue having off-year GUB elections. That being said, VT in 2019 in KY went absolutely through the roof: 1.4 million votes were cast in 2019 for Governor, vastly more than all other KY GUB elections.

4.) I've been tracking the results of off-year gubernatorial elections for quite a while now and cannot ascertain any real "canary-in-the-coal mine pattern". In other words, people who try to read the tea-leaves based on an off-year election are fooling themselves. Beshear comes from a dynasty-family in Kentucky politics, a family with practically 100% name recognition, his father, Steve Beshear was very beloved and was elected Governor TWICE by huge landslides in spite of a national Republican administration in his first election in 2007. Bevin was a troubled Governor who encouraged radical legislation and he was a problematic candidate. Considering the overall tilt of this state since the 2000 presidential election, I think the election would have gone differently had it occured now, in 2020, rather than in 2019.

But that doesn't mean I'm against moving the Gub election to a presidential cycle. I am actually for ALL Gubernatorial election being moved to presidential cycles. I am also in favor of scrapping the staggered elections in the Senate, but rather, I think the ENTIRE Senate should be up for grabs in a Presidential cycle. Regardless of which party is favored in a presidential election year, a presidential nominee should have the right to help sweep into power as many people who are of like mind as possible so that he or she has a broad base of support for the agenda he or she wants to have enacted.

Considering that the entire KY State Senate passed this unanimously, it seems to me that this measure has a good chance of getting passing on the ballot in 2020. Wait and see.

-Stat

 

:shrugs: whatever floats their boat.

 

I'm glad I read most of that post before posting this, but we need an update anyway.
Does anyone remember the thread: Chances are your next Governor will be a Democrat? Has anyone been tracking that? Remember the Governors reelected since that post are not the next Governor. I looked closely enough to determine the thread is neither false nor true after the 2018 elections and could not become false or true after the 2019 elections. Someone can confirm my suspicion it can not become true after this year's Governor elections.
That's why I thought this was an effort to delay the verdict as long as possible, but it isn't.