The Patriot Post® · Kentucky Derby Goes to GOP

Could the gubernatorial race in Kentucky be a harbinger for the 2016 election? Riding the same momentum that has propelled Donald Trump and Ben Carson to the forefront of the GOP presidential primary, Republican Matt Bevin, also a political outsider, won Kentucky’s governor’s race Tuesday. Confounding pollsters who expected Bevin’s Democrat challenger to prevail, Bevin won by about nine percentage points. This turns Kentucky, a traditionally Democrat stronghold dating back 44 years, into a red state because Democrats now control only the state’s House, and weakly at that. Furthermore, as National Review’s John Fund points out, Bevin’s lieutenant governor-elect is Jenean Hampton, a self-made woman who worked herself up from poverty, retired from the Air Force at the rank of Captain, and is a Tea Party candidate endorsed by Rand Paul. Oh, did we mention she is the first black woman to be elected to a Kentucky statewide office? Let the Left ponder that one.

This was just one of the conservative victories across the nation, and it shows a voter dissatisfaction with the top-down leftist policies coming out of Washington. For example, many Kentucky voters threw their support behind Bevin because their health care premiums spiked thanks to ObamaCare. Who says local politics don’t matter?