FRANKFORT, Ky. — Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday he spoke with Vice President Kamala Harris soon after she became the prohibitive favorite to lead the Democratic ticket, and said his state’s progress “should be a model for the country” as speculation swirled around whether he’s in the running to join the slate.
Beshear took a more aggressive tone in criticizing Republican Donald Trump’s four years in the Oval Office. The second-term governor said his fellow Democrats should focus on everyday concerns of Americans and he blistered Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the newly christened running mate to Trump, as a less than authentic representative of working-class Americans.
Beshear — just back from an economic development trip to Japan and South Korea — said Harris called him Sunday, a couple hours after President Joe Biden announced he would drop his reelection campaign. Beshear on Monday joined the parade of Democrats endorsing Harris for president.
“That meant a lot to me, to reach out to me personally and ask for my support,” the governor said. “I pledged my support to her. The rest of that conversation I said would stay between us. We have a trust in where we’re able to exchange ideas and give advice.”
Their interactions have been limited mostly to several meetings in the past few years, but Harris has become familiar with his family, Beshear said.
“She’s gotten to know my kids and always asks about them by name, which is an easy way to get to my heart,” Beshear said during a sit-down interview with The Associated Press in the Kentucky governor’s mansion.
Asked if he’s interested in a vice presidential bid, Beshear stuck to his usual script that he loves his job as governor and that his plan is to serve out his second term.
“The only way that wouldn’t happen is if I have an opportunity to help Kentuckians in a different way that would bring additional value,” he said.
But the 46-year-old governor sounded like someone auditioning for the role. He touted the Bluegrass State’s record-setting pace of economic development projects during his time in the governor’s office.
“I certainly think what we’ve done here in Kentucky is something that should be a model for the country,” Beshear said. “Not just in winning but in governing. How at a time when the country is at a boiling point, with neighbors yelling at neighbors, we’ve turned down the temperature here.”
Republicans dominate Kentucky’s legislature, and they say Beshear takes credit for economic gains they claim are the result of their business-friendly policies.
In winning reelection last year, Beshear carried a number of rural counties that are Trump strongholds. Beshear said Monday that Democrats should focus on core issues that hit home for Americans — including jobs, health care, schools and public safety — to improve their standing in rural America.
“What Democrats have to do is focus on people’s concerns when they wake up in the morning,” he said. “Concerns that really aren’t partisan, though everything is made partisan right now.”
During his tenure as governor, Beshear mostly avoided criticizing Trump, who easily carried the Bluegrass State in 2016 and 2020 and is a prohibitive favorite to do so again in November.
Asked Monday to sum up Trump’s legacy as president, Beshear said it was one of stoking division.
“Listen, I worked with him and I was able to work with him,” the governor said. “He and his administration took my calls and I’m grateful for that. But turning people against each other is wrong. It violates my faith, which espouses the Golden Rule that we love our neighbor as ourself. And the parable of the Good Samaritan says everyone is our neighbor. But the leadership we saw during former President Trump’s four years were all about pitting an ‘us versus a them’ inside our own country.”
Beshear gave a blistering review of Vance, who built his recent speech to the Republican National Convention around his own Appalachian roots.
“You don’t get to just come in eastern Kentucky a couple of times in the summer and then maybe for weddings and a funeral and cast judgment on us,” Beshear said Monday. “It’s offensive.”
Long before he was a U.S. senator, Vance rose to prominence on the wings of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a bestselling memoir that many thought captured the essence of Trump’s political resonance in a rural white America ravaged by joblessness, opioid addiction and poverty.
The 2016 book set off a debate in the region. Many Appalachian scholars thought it trafficked in stereotypes and blamed working-class people for their own struggles, without giving enough weight to decades of exploitation by coal and pharmaceutical companies that figure prominently in Appalachia’s story.
Vance was raised by his grandparents in Middletown, in southwestern Ohio, while his mother, whom he introduced during his speech last week, battled an addiction he said she put behind her 10 years ago. He spent a significant amount of time traveling to Kentucky with his grandparents to visit family and said he hoped to be buried in a small mountain cemetery there.
Beshear, the son of a former Kentucky governor, scoffed at that biographical sketch.
“He ain’t from here,” Beshear said.