For months before the election, many Kentucky voters talked of feeling politically homeless: They did not like Mr. Bevin, but they found it hard to vote for a candidate like Mr. Beshear, who supports abortion rights. Some of these voters ended up punishing Mr. Bevin by opposing both major party nominees: John Hicks, the Libertarian nominee, received over 28,000 votes, more than five times the size of Mr. Beshear’s statewide margin.
The Beshear campaign was not oblivious to the partisan math and, for the most part, spoke accordingly.
“There is nothing partisan about our kitchen table agenda,” Jacqueline Coleman, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, declared after she took the stage on Tuesday night.
On the stump, Mr. Beshear focused relentlessly on public education and health care — which in many rural areas are the twin economic pillars — and talked of “our Kentucky values,” apolitical things like respect and neighborliness. Emphasizing Mr. Beshear’s childhood in western Kentucky, his campaign also reminded voters that Mr. Bevin is a wealthy businessman who moved into the state from the northeast. “It’s time to send him back to New Hampshire,” Mr. Beshear’s father, former Gov. Steve Beshear, told voters on Monday.
And this, in a state that is otherwise comfortably conservative, might have made a difference.
“I’m more likely to vote Republican,” said Ann-Jeanette Dale, 57, a retired elementary school librarian, who on Tuesday was wearing both her red teacher solidarity shirt and her “I Voted” sticker. That is, she said, until Mr. Bevin — what he did, how he talked, who he was — broke old habits.
“A lot of people,” she said, “see him as an outsider.”
Richard Fausset and Ellen Ann Fentress contributed reporting.