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CHARLESTON, S.C. — At each stop on his two-day tour of South Carolina, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear asked the same question, one designed to confuse his audience.
“The phrase is ‘justice-involved population,’” Beshear said. “Anybody know what that is?” His query was met with raised eyebrows and embarrassed murmurs at a house party in Greenville, an alumni center at the University of South Carolina, and a law firm in Charleston.
“Those are inmates,” Beshear answered. “You know what our inmates call themselves? Inmates! We’ve got to get back to talking to people like we talk to our friends, like we talk each and every day in our life.”
The latest high-profile Democrat to tour the first southern primary state has given this advice all year. His podcast, launched in April, started with a promise that he and his guests would “talk like real human beings.” After Donald Trump won a second term — Beshear was considered as a possible running mate for Kamala Harris — he got asked more often how he won over voters who hated every other Democrat.
In South Carolina this week, Beshear’s advice was to “govern for everybody,” to fight against Medicaid cuts, and to portray Republicans as the culture-war aggressors. He warned that “advocacy language,” even when shared with good intentions, made it easier for the GOP to convince people that Democrats didn’t work for them, and didn’t even talk to people like them.
If Democrats dropped the erudite terminology, he said, they would find conservative voters who could agree with them.
“The president is trying to erase our history and tell you that diversity is a dirty word,” he said in Greenville, touting his removal of a Jefferson Davis statue from the state Capitol and his executive order that made Juneteenth a holiday — all before he won re-election by running on economic growth.
“We have got to spend 80% of our time focusing on people’s everyday needs,” Beshear added. “When people wake up in the morning, they’re not thinking about politics.”
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Beshear, who will lead the Democratic Governors Association into next year’s midterm elections, was introduced at most stops as the “most popular Democratic governor in America.”
He had not been able to stop his party’s decline down the ballot. Democrats lost their 70-year grip on the state attorney general’s office when he left it to run for governor; he also benefited from the state’s off-year elections, which meant he never shared a ballot with Trump.
But South Carolina’s Democrats were in worse shape than Kentucky’s. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom toured the state with a robust defense of his state and its progressive pluralism. Beshear traveled a different route, quoting from the Bible (“the Parable of the Good Samaritan says everyone is our neighbor”) and saying he knew how to win when outnumbered.
“What we’re seeing out of Washington DC is incompetence, and it is cruelty,” Beshear said in Greenville. “It’s putting all of those things that people care about at risk. The tariff policy is going to hurt jobs. The big, ugly bill is going to devastate rural health care in your state and in mine.”
In each city, as Beshear delivered short stump speeches in a button-down blue shirt and khakis, he was joined by ghosts of the Democratic Party’s past. Former Gov. Richard Riley sat in at the Greenville house party; former Rep. Joe Cunningham attended the event in Charleston.
“The Democratic Party brand’s become toxic across the country,” Cunningham told Semafor. “Democrats have done a terrible job, not only speaking above people, but also talking down to folks who don’t know or don’t care to understand what those terms mean. I don’t know what they mean!”
In Columbia, former Gov. Jim Hodges was particularly enthusiastic about Beshear’s advice on speaking to voters in “normal” language.
“I’ve been saying that for a long time, and I’m glad to hear him say it,” said Hodges. “We talk down to people and we use words that people don’t use in their everyday lives.
“We need a grocery store, but we Dems have to call it a ‘food desert.’ What’s that term for moms we use — ‘birthing persons?’ It’s hard to connect with voters when you use language in a way that creates barriers,” Hodges added.
Beshear’s riff on “normal” language focused on three areas that aren’t controversial with Democrats: How to talk about prisoners, how to talk about drug addiction (“addiction,” not “substance use”), and how to talk about hunger (not “food insecurity”).
He agreed that Hodges’s example of “birthing people” — a gender-neutral term, reflecting that transgender men can also get pregnant — was needlessly alienating.
“For an individual that’s in that situation, I want to show them as much kindness as I can,” he said. “But for 99.9% of the American population, they can’t understand what it is that you’re saying.”
Beshear still criticized how the Trump administration had gone after the rights and health care access of transgender people. The administration’s shutdown of a trans suicide help line was “ridiculous,” he said, and its orders restricting gender-affirming care for minors went too far.
“I’m against surgeries on minors, okay?” he said. “But when you look at the other gender-affirming care, there’s a lot of research out there that suggests that parents ought to have the opportunity to consider: What is the best health care for their kids?”
Room for Disagreement
Beshear is currently the only potential Democratic presidential hopeful in a deep-red state, facing a GOP legislature that can override his vetoes.
The governor’s skeptics credit that, not his language use, for his popularity.
Republicans tend to roll their eyes at the idea that he has cracked the code on how to talk about gender identity, for example. One reason for that: While he did win re-election after vetoing an omnibus anti-trans bill, Republicans passed another version over Beshear’s protests.
David’s view
It’s been popular, rightly or wrongly, to identify “lanes” for presidential candidates and assess who’s winning them. And Beshear’s lane happens to look hand-picked for him.
In this select audience of influential and curious Democrats, I found party members who identified Beshear with nonpartisan, successful disaster relief, and with escaping the language games that they blamed for screwing up their brand.
In Charleston, a former DNC member named Waring Howe, Jr. was so impressed by Beshear’s pitch that he compared him to Bill Clinton.
“Your persona, region from which you serve and live, your education, your views – one could have some memories about 1992,” Howe told the governor. “I’ve got a few friends from Arkansas here who might agree with me.”
As Beshear worked the room, Howe explained to Semafor that he was focused on “electability,” and that the 47-year-old Kentuckian — who often sprinkles in references to his young children — seemed to have it.
“We want to win,” Howe said. “We need to win.”
Notable
- For NBC News, Alexandra Marquez highlights how much Beshear talked about his popularity in Appalachia, where Democrats have declined from dominance to near-extinction. “A lot of these things — creating new jobs, improving roads and bridges — they’re not red or blue and, and they lift everybody up.”
- In the Post and Courier, Seth Taylor covers Beshear’s trip to an AFL-CIO event and his pitch to labor. “If we’ve increased union participation in a state like Kentucky, we can do it nationally. We can do it everywhere.′