"Andy Beshear Considers 2028 Run, Criticizes Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' | Vanity Fair"

The governor was getting to be a dad. For a few hours, anyway. Andy Beshear was at a baseball field in Richmond, Kentucky, watching his 16-year-old son play. But this was last Tuesday, hours after U.S. Senate Republicans had passed the so-called “Big Beautiful” budget bill that would bestow billions in tax breaks on the wealthy while imposing a $1 trillion reduction in Medicaid and slashing food assistance programs for the poor.

Beshear had been, for weeks, one of the leading Democrats in sounding the alarm. So he wasn’t surprised when a fellow baseball parent started talking to him about how the eastern Kentucky hospital where she works would likely be forced to close by the looming federal cuts.

“There’s nothing beautiful about kicking 200,000 Kentuckians off their health care coverage. There’s nothing beautiful about firing 20,000 health care workers, and there’s nothing beautiful about closing 35 rural hospitals,” Beshear tells me, the volume and heat of his words rising.

Beshear had been hoping that stirring up enough awareness and anger could somehow help derail the bill. But he’s a political realist and knew the worst was likely to happen. So on Thursday, when a handful of holdout House Republicans caved and the $3.3-trillion domestic policy bill, pushed by President Donald Trump, was approved by the slimmest of margins, Beshear had already been out front telling voters who to blame for the coming economic damage.

“It just defies logic that many rural members of Congress are voting for something that is just going to devastate their communities,” he says. “They may not think people are paying attention now, but it’s going to be front page local news, it’s going to be first story nightly news, when that five or six story building that employs hundreds or maybe a thousand people closes and you drive past it every day and you see what your Republican member of Congress did to your community.”

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear greets the audience during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 19, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois.

Beshear, 47, is a particularly effective messenger right now not simply because he is passionate and articulate, but because strenuous partisanship is not his natural style. Quite the opposite, in fact. He is the very rare Democrat who has won three statewide races in a deeply red state; Trump, in his three presidential runs, has taken Kentucky by 30, 26, and 31 points. Beshear has triumphed against those headwinds by standing up for core progressive principles like abortion rights (his 2023 reelection campaign included a heartwrenching ad featuring rape victim Hadley Duvall) and union membership while also stressing business development and job growth.

He’s a second-generation politician—Beshear’s father, Steve, was Kentucky’s governor from 2007 to 2015—but he still talks like a civilian. “If Democrats say this bill is going to increase food insecurity, their point’s not going to get through. If they say people are going to go hungry, it will,” he says. “And we have to explain not just what we disagree with in this bill, but why. And my why is my faith. The parable of the fishes and the loaves is in every book of the gospel. My faith teaches me that in a country that grows enough food for everyone that no one should starve.”

This heterogeneous set of skills might make for an attractive Democratic presidential contender. Coming from a small, mid-south state means Beshear starts with a lower profile than fellow governors like California’s Gavin Newsom, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, and Illinois’ JB Pritzker. And Beshear does not possess the scenery-chewing personality of, say, New Jersey senator Cory Booker: when the two men recently appeared at a Florida state Democratic event, Booker ended his speech standing on a table. But after losses by two female presidential nominees and after four exhausting years of Trump, a mild-mannered white guy might be in considerable demand.

Beshear says he is committed to serving his full current term, which runs until December 2027. And then? “Two years ago, I wouldn’t have considered [running for president],” he says. “But if I’m somebody who could maybe heal and bring the country back together, I’ll think about it after next year.”

For now, Beshear has seized the opportunity provided by the federal budget battle to raise his national name recognition. One sign of progress is that lately, Beshear is being included in polls measuring prospective 2028 Democratic candidates. Meanwhile, he’s trying to prepare Kentucky for the human and economic costs of what Washington Republicans are unleashing.

“What the Republican majority is getting wrong is that the American people don’t view health care in a partisan way. They want to be able to see their doctor when they need to, and they want their neighbor to be able to see their doctor,” Beshear says. “No state will be able to compensate for the level of devastation that this bill would cause. What they’re doing is immoral, and it’s certainly not Christian.”

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