Kentucky Democrats fight to regain inroads with rural voters. Will it work?

After a lifetime as a Republican, Sandra Music of Johnson County became a Democrat this year.

“I feel like we are almost to a point of no return if we do not have elections in 2026 that go favorably blue in our state and national races,” Music said. “I keep wondering where the line is going to be that people finally wake up in the Republican Party and go, ‘OK, enough is enough,’ like I did in January.”

After watching her neighbors, family members and fellow church congregants vote for President Donald Trump, the 61-year-old retired teacher soon became vice chair for Johnson County Democrats and an active member of the Johnson County Democratic Women’s Club in a flurry of searching for like-minded community members.

Johnson County is a stronghold for Trump. Eighty-five percent of voters there chose him in the 2024 election, and the county’s ruby red hue has only deepened over the past two decades. The last time it voted for a Democratic president was in 1992, when just 55 votes determined its favor for Bill Clinton over George H. W. Bush.

As the Kentucky Democratic Party grapples with the extent to which it has lost support in places like Johnson County, it hopes new initiatives, such as the Rural Listening Tour and the Growing the Blue Dot organizer training, can revitalize its mission throughout small-town Kentucky.

After holding one such town hall in Paintsville in May, KDP county leaders have tracked a growth of 30 more Democrats registered in the months since, giving them hope for change in Johnson County.

Johnson County Democrats Chair Nicholas Hazelett said winning as a local candidate often requires between 4,000 and 4,300 votes in the county of 23,000. Many registered Democrats, he said, either vote for Republicans or skip voting.

“We have 4,800 Democrats, a little bit over, in Johnson County,” Hazelett said. “If you get the majority of Democrats, that flavor of independent that every county has, and some Republicans that just want to see something different, I think it’s possible (for a Democrat to win).”

Kentucky Democrats are desperate to notch more wins.

They hold fewer than 20% of the seats in the Kentucky statehouse. There’s just one Democratic state lawmaker from outside the “Golden Triangle” of Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky, and there are no Democrats representing the western half of the commonwealth.

A Democrat occupies just one of Kentucky’s six seats in the U.S. House. Both Senate seats are controlled by the GOP, and the party’s candidates lost every statewide down ballot race in 2023.

Ten years ago, Democrats led the Republican Party of Kentucky by more than 400,000 registered voters throughout the state. But it has steadily lost its advantage in the years since. Registered Republicans overtook Democrats for the first time in Kentucky history in June 2022.

In 1984, when Sen. Mitch McConnell was first elected, there were 1.3 million registered Democrats to 525,000 registered Republicans. Today, there are nearly 1.6 million Republicans to Democrats’ almost 1.4 million registered voters — a GOP advantage of about 200,000 voters.

But the fastest-growing segment of voters are those registering as independents or with other political parties. These voters — nearly 365,000 of them — make up 11% of Kentucky’s electorate, according to state data. The data mirrors a shrinking Democratic Party nationally.

‘We’ve got to be more authentic’

With the asset of a Democratic governor and a tradition of grassroots organizing, KDP officials say they believe it can build power.

Noting that many voters elected both him in 2023 and Trump in 2024, Gov. Andy Beshear hopes the party’s mission will be central to that campaign strategy.

“We’ve got to be more authentic. We’ve got to share our ‘why,’” Beshear said of Democratic leaders’ need to be vocal about their motivations.

Granted, some Democratic voters and officials, like state Rep. Adam Moore, D-Lexington, were disappointed in their party’s absence from the 145-year-old tradition of the Fancy Farm picnic earlier this month, where just one Democrat took the stage at the West Kentucky event.

“Let people laugh at you and yell at you for a day, but at least go out there and show them you care,” he said.

Moore, who represents a politically purple district, added that skipping out on those traditions runs the risk of losing voters who could be motivated to vote for Democrats in the near future.

Instead of attending Fancy Farm, party leaders spent the weekend in Richmond training more than a hundred Democrats from around the state on campaign strategies. This, they argue, is showing up.

“One-hundred-and-thirty-two Democrats left with more insight and more direction about how to have specific conversations with voters and their communities,” KDP Executive Director Morgan Eaves said of the weekend training.

“Those conversations are the same ones that their Republican elected officials are actively running from.”

When the Rural Listening Tour stopped further east four months ago, a range of voters turned out to the Paintsville town hall. Music says there were Democrats afraid to out themselves publicly as party members but relieved to finally be heard, and Republicans who regretted their Trump vote over his tariff impositions and Medicaid cuts.

As KDP reaches outside its comfort zone to those who don’t vote for them, the team’s priority is to listen to all voters to regain their trust and involve them in their platform, Eaves said.

“We define ourselves as the party of working-class values, the only party who’s working for working families, the only party who’s talking about lowering the cost of living, making health care affordable and accessible for every family, and making sure every family has a job that can put food on the table and provide a good life for their family,” Eaves said.

Civic engagement is a good thing for Kentuckians, regardless of their party, says Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican.

Though he feels the state has a way to go on such issues as educational outcomes and lowering domestic violence rates, he’s noticed that rural voters tend to be motivated by cultural values over economic interests.

“The cultural change in this country recently has convinced rural voters that there’s a much bigger threat to their way of life from shifts in values on cultural issues than there is from a cut to this or that government program,” Adams said.

Johnson County is no exception from that feeling, Music says. She laments how Trump tapped into those values to gain voters.

“Trump uses the Christian faith,” Music said. “I’m not so sure it’s his faith as much as it is a political dynamic, and that runs from the national level to the state level to the local level.”

Johnson County has consistently voted Republican, but just as consistently, its quality of life has decreased, Hazelett says.

“Our roads are getting worse. We’re having boil water advisories every single week because of county water infrastructure. Things aren’t going well countywide,” Hazelett said.

“Clearly, the people in those seats aren’t doing their job.”

‘We need to hear their concerns’

In Beshear, Democrats hope they found the messenger they need to reach across the aisle.

“We need to listen to the people that we’ve lost,” said state Rep. Chad Aull, D-Lexington.

“We need to hear their concerns, hear their pain, and understand what matters to them the most. I think Gov. Beshear does a good job of that. That’s why he keeps getting reelected, because he wakes up every day, and he focuses on the bread-and-butter issues that face Kentuckians when they wake up.”

But the state legislature has a Republican supermajority that has continued to grow.

Sen. Robin Webb, R-Grayson, left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party three months ago. Though she’s long held conservative views and voted along Republican lines, she’d registered as a Democrat years ago when she was herself a coal miner and joined her Democrat-aligned union for its workplace safety standards.

Webb pointed to cultural values as the main reason for declining Democratic voters in rural areas.

“Social issues have been a driver for a while, whether it’s abortion or women’s sports,” Webb said. “That has an impact on how people register and how they vote.”

Also taking note of Grayson’s issues is Carter County’s Democratic Party Vice Chair McClain Dyer, who, despite being old friends with Webb, says her concern about transgender athletes is irrelevant to her voters.

“That just simply doesn’t happen in our county, and it doesn’t affect any of her constituents, so it’s almost like she’s dodging a real issue,” Dyer said. “There are social issues in this community that need to be faced. Almost 50% of Carter County residents are enrolled in Medicaid.”

Those enrollees are largely children, so along with a struggling school system, Dyer says Webb is ignoring the actual issues facing her community’s youth. He is disappointed that she joined the majority party.

The premise that social issues has pushed otherwise conservative Democrats into becoming Republicans frustrates some KDP leaders who don’t see them in the same negative light.

For Sen. Keturah Herron, D-Louisville, caring about social issues is just an inclusive approach to governing.

“For me, justice, fairness and equality, and ensuring that every Kentuckian has the things that they need will also always be the bedrock for my fight, whether you’re Black, white, Democrat, Republican, gay, not gay,” Herron said. “And so this ideology ‘social issues’ is just a way to keep people divided.”

As Beshear rises to a national spotlight and considers higher office, Democrats at the state level will continue to compromise and stand for their principles, even if it means taking losses, Aull said.

But he also hopes Beshear’s image can set a precedent for the Democrats at home and at large.

“We need leaders like him to be on the national stage for our party, to help us reconnect with these rural voters, because their issues are no different than the issues I grew up with in very, very rural Kentucky,” Aull said.

Crit Luallen, former lieutenant governor under Steve Beshear, recalls the days when people would pledge to a party and stick with it for a lifetime. But now, individual candidates hold a stronger sway than traditional party lines do.

Since March, “other” voter registrations, those not committed to either side, have been the fastest-growing voter registration group, Adams’ office says. Net new “others” outpaced net new Republicans by a nearly 3-to-1 margin, as Democrats continue to hemorrhage voters.

“We see more and more Kentuckians bucking the two-party system,” Adams said in a news release. “This dynamic could make for an interesting 2026 election.”

Luallen said it can no longer be expected that people vote “blindly” along party lines in 2025.

“Many parts of the state that are now Republican used to just vote for a Democrat no matter who they were,” she said. “And I think we’re way past that.

“That’s not the future of the Democratic Party.”

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—Staff writer Austin Horn contributed reporting to this story.