Andy Beshear, a Democratic governor in a state Trump won by 30 points, tests a 2028 message in South Carolina

NBC News

17-07-2025

GREENVILLE, S.C. — In an early preview of a potential 2028 presidential campaign, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear hit the road across South Carolina this week, testing a message focused on how to grow the Democratic coalition.
'The actions of the Trump administration are providing a huge opportunity for Democrats to go out and regain the trust of the American people to be the party of common sense, common ground and getting things done,' Beshear, 47, told union members gathered at the South Carolina AFL-CIO convention in Greenville on Wednesday.
'When we deliver and make people's lives better, they're willing to vote in different ways. They're willing to support different people, and that's where we've got to be,' the Kentucky governor, who is serving his second term in a deep-red state, added.
Throughout his remarks to voters in Greenville and at small gatherings of local Democratic officials from Columbia to Charleston, Beshear laid out a blueprint for Democrats to win back rural voters, union voters, independent voters and even Republicans — music to the ears of Democratic voters still feeling the sting of 2024's losses and eager to hear about how the party can rise again.
Though he insisted that his travel to South Carolina came about partly because of his son's baseball tournament near Charleston, Beshear hasn't been coy about his presidential aspirations before arriving in the state that voted first in last year's Democratic presidential primaries. And his pitch sounded very much like something he could sell to voters selecting the party's next national leader in a few years' time.
In an interview with NBC News' 'Meet the Press' just days before he arrived in South Carolina, Beshear said he would ' take a look ' at launching a presidential campaign in 2028. He's at least the fourth Democratic elected official to publicly visit the state this year, arriving just a week after California Gov. Gavin Newsom and several weeks after Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland and Tim Walz of Minnesota. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., also has an event planned in the state later this week.
Winning back 'everyday' voters
At stop after stop, Beshear notes that he knows how to win voters in traditionally Republican areas. After all, he's done it twice.
The first time was in 2019, when he won his first gubernatorial election by less than half a percentage point, beating incumbent GOP Gov. Matt Bevin. In 2023, Beshear improved his margins, beating then-state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican, by five percentage points.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump won Kentucky by almost 26 percentage points in 2020 and by over 30 percentage points in 2024.
'We have a huge opportunity right now. Donald Trump is tearing apart our democratic norms,' Beshear told union members at the Greenville event. 'He's gutting the social safety net. He's weaponizing our national guards. He's fraying our international alliances, and he is decimating our intelligence community and our public health expertise.'
All of that, Beshear explained, makes it a prime opportunity for Democrats to 'win back voters who have been increasingly skeptical of that Democratic brand. But it's going to take focus, and it's going to take discipline. We've got to talk to people and not at them, and we have to explain our why.'
That last piece — 'explain our why' — was Beshear's main task for Democrats across the state.
'The Democrats are real good at the 'what,'' Beshear told Democratic strategists and elected officials gathered Wednesday in Columbia. 'I mean, our policy positions are 10 times longer than anybody else's.'
'But what we rarely talk about is why we're for that policy,' the governor added. 'For me, my 'why' is my faith. I'm guided by the golden rule that says I love my neighbor as myself and the parable of The Good Samaritan that says, 'Everyone is my neighbor.' And when you explain your 'why,' even when you make tough decisions, even in states like mine and yours, it creates the grace and the space for people to disagree.'
The governor, in Greenville, added, 'this is how I won areas in eastern Kentucky — Appalachia — that normally vote for Republicans by large margins.'
Beshear's cross-party appeal in a deep-red state is attractive to South Carolina Democrats, who work under Republican supermajorities in the state House and Senate and haven't controlled the governor's mansion since former Gov. Jim Hodges finished his tenure in 2003.
'One thing I like about Gov. Beshear, especially for this state, is that track record of being able to appeal to the everyday person across party lines,' state Sen. Tameika Isaac Devine told NBC News. 'I think we're going to have to have somebody who can not only excite people but actually has a track record of getting elected and getting stuff done.'
At the Columbia event, Hodges introduced Beshear, telling the assembled Democrats to laughter and applause that, 'One of the reasons we want him here today is … to talk about something that I think we lose sight of sometimes as Democrats, and that's winning. Hodges added that he was asked, 'If a certain governor would consider running for president, what would be the most important attribute that he might bring to the table?'
'And I said, 'Well, he knows how to win.' That's a great place to start,' the former governor said.
A prescription for the Democratic Party
The governor used his events, which included several meet-and-greets with local Democratic leaders and elected officials, to offer his party a way to move forward through the second Trump term and into a post-Trump era.
'We've got to be more than just against someone. We've got to be for something, and that overall 'something' has to be a better life for the American people,' Beshear told NBC News in an interview in Greenville.
Later, during the Columbia meet-and-greet event, Jeremy Jones, the chair of Young Democrats of Central Midlands, told NBC News that he's 'been an Andy fan for a long time.'
Asked to describe what he hopes to see in a potential future Democratic presidential nominee, Jones said, 'Someone who is a good leader, very aggressive, knows how to fight back and be unapologetically Democrat, even if it's not popular.'
Minutes later, Beshear, in a brief speech to attendees, said, 'We've got to speak out, even in places where we might be in the super-minority. We've got to be unapologetically the Democrats that we are. And we have to show people that when you elect us, we lift up Democrats, Republicans and independents.'
After facing steep losses in the 2024 presidential election, prominent Democratic officials started pointing fingers, blaming Democrats' problems on the insistence that supporters use inclusive language or on the aging party officials who refused to step aside. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., told POLITICO that instead of the term 'oligarchy,' Democrats should rail against 'kings.' And former Democratic National Committee Vice Chair David Hogg earned a rebuke from DNC Chair Ken Martin after he announced his plans to boost primary challengers against aging Democratic elected officials.
On Wednesday, during the event in Columbia, Beshear appeared to take Slotkin's side on the language argument, 'Every Kentuckian, including myself, knows about a dozen people that are no longer with us. A child of God taken far too soon. I didn't lose one of my friends to substance use disorder. I lost them all to addiction.'
'Another example,' Beshear added, invoking the massive GOP-backed domestic policy package that President Donald Trump signed earlier this month called the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act.' 'That big, ugly bill is not only going to gut rural health care and hit our rural economies, it's going to decrease food assistance all over this country. We're not going to be able to change and push back on that if we say it's going to increase food insecurity; what it's going to do is make people go hungry.'
Both comments earned nods and sounds of approval from the dozens of Democrats gathered around the room.
Democrats have been grappling with questions about age and experience since before former President Joe Biden, 82, dropped out of the 2024 presidential race amid widespread concerns about his debate performance and whether he was up to the job. Beshear called on his party to 'empower' young leaders and encouraged young Democrats to 'embrace' leadership positions.
'For me, I hate this phrase 'young leader' because, if you're leading, you're already a leader, and making sure that we don't have pejorative terms for those that we ought to be lifting up and listening to,' the governor told NBC News.
The first test: 2026
Beshear will chair the Democratic Governors Association in the 2026 midterm elections, helping direct attention, votes and money to 36 gubernatorial races across the nation.
In an interview, he said that he plans to use his position to express his fierce opposition to the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act,' which, in part, imposed massive funding cuts to Medicaid and nutritional assistance programs.
'Democrats can and should get out there to make sure that we're telling the American people what this bill is going to do, and who is doing it to them, because the midterms could be a strong rebuke to ripping health care away from so many people, to firing so many health care workers, and hopefully give us the opportunity to undo a lot of this damage,' Beshear said.
Longer term, the governor said, he hopes that his call for Democrats to focus on the issues most important to American families will appeal to voters on both sides of the aisle.
'I want to move — to the degree my voice can help this country — just past the constant 'R versus D' and even, and even past, maybe the term bipartisan to nonpartisan,' Beshear said in an interview. 'Because a lot of these things — creating new jobs, improving roads and bridges — they're not red or blue and, and they lift everybody up.'
Beshear even credited his state's two Republican senators for, at times, 'doing the right thing.'
'If we're going to get to that place where we treat issues that shouldn't be partisan as nonpartisan, then we've got to be willing not only to work together, but to give credit where credit's due when somebody does the right thing,' he said. '[GOP Sens.] Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell are against tariffs. That's a good thing.'
In Charleston on Thursday morning, his message seemed to please some attendees.
'I think he made a really good point, which is his 'why,' is his faith, he treats everybody the same. He used the parable of The Good Samaritan,' Towner Magill, 37, told NBC News after hearing Beshear speak at a meet-and-greet event. 'I'm sort of tired of seeing people on the Democratic side vilifying people on the right, whether we have disagreements or not.'
'We're not getting together with community members anymore,' Magill added. 'I want somebody at the top who is going to make that easier, the climate and this country easier.'