Andy Beshear
Andrew Graham Beshear is an American politician and attorney serving since 2019 as the 63rd governor of Kentucky. A member of the Democratic Party, he served from 2016 to 2019 as the 50th attorney general of Kentucky. He is the son of former Kentucky governor Steve Beshear, who served from 2007 to 2015.
As attorney general, Beshear filed multiple lawsuits against Republican Governor Matt Bevin, including over issues such as pension reform. He ran in the 2019 gubernatorial election and defeated Bevin by approximately 0.4%. Beshear was reelected to a second term in 2023 by a wider margin of 5%, defeating Republican attorney general Daniel Cameron. As of 2025, Beshear and Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman are Kentucky's only Democratic officials elected statewide.
Beshear has expressed interest in running for president in the 2028 United States presidential election.
Early life and education
Andrew Graham Beshear was born on November 29, 1977, in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of Jane Beshear and Steve Beshear. He was raised in Lexington and graduated from Henry Clay High School. His father, an attorney and politician, was the governor of Kentucky from 2007 to 2015.After high school, Beshear studied political science and anthropology at Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. He earned a bachelor of arts, magna cum laude in 2000. He then attended the University of Virginia School of Law, receiving a Juris Doctor in 2003.
Legal career
Beshear was a 2001 summer associate at White & Case LLP in New York, the same law firm where his father started his law career. Beshear worked at White & Case in Washington D.C. for two years after his graduation from UVA law. In 2005, he was hired by the law firm Stites & Harbison, where his father was a partner. He represented the developers of the Bluegrass Pipeline, which would have transported natural gas liquid through Kentucky. The project was controversial; critics voiced environmental concerns and objections to the use of eminent domain for the pipeline. His father's office maintained that there was no conflict of interest with the son's representation. Beshear also represented the Indian company UFlex, which sought $20 million in tax breaks from his father's administration, drawing criticism from ethics watchdogs over a potential conflict of interest. In 2013, while he was working at Stites & Harbison, Lawyer Monthly named Beshear its "Consumer Lawyer of the Year – USA".Kentucky Attorney General (2016–2019)
2015 election
In November 2013, Beshear announced his candidacy in the 2015 election for Attorney General of Kentucky, to succeed Democrat Jack Conway, who could not run for reelection, due to term limits.Beshear defeated Republican Whitney Westerfield with 50.1% of the vote to Westerfield's 49.9%. a margin of 2,194 votes.
Tenure
Beshear sued Governor Matt Bevin several times over what he argued was Bevin's abuse of executive powers during Beshear's tenure as attorney general and while he was campaigning against Bevin for governor. Beshear won some cases and lost others. In April 2016, he sued Bevin over his mid-cycle budget cuts to the state university system. The Kentucky Supreme Court issued a 5–2 ruling agreeing with Beshear that Bevin lacked the authority to make mid-cycle budget cuts without the Kentucky General Assembly's approval. Also in 2016, the Kentucky Supreme Court unanimously sided with Bevin when Beshear sued him on the grounds that Bevin lacked the authority to overhaul the University of Louisville's board of trustees. In 2017, the Kentucky Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit Beshear brought against Bevin, holding that Bevin had the power to temporarily reshape boards while the legislature is out of session; Bevin called Beshear's lawsuit a "shameful waste of taxpayer resources". In April 2018, Beshear successfully sued Bevin for signing Senate Bill 151, a controversial plan to reform teacher pensions, with the Kentucky Supreme Court ruling the bill unconstitutional. Bevin said Beshear "never sues on behalf of the people of Kentucky. He does it on behalf of his own political career".In October 2019, Beshear filed nine lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies for their alleged involvement in fueling Kentucky's opioid epidemic.
Beshear forwent a run for a second term as attorney general to run for governor against Bevin. He resigned from the attorney general's office on December 10, 2019, before his inauguration as governor the same day. By executive order, Beshear appointed Attorney General-elect Daniel Cameron to serve the remainder of his term. Cameron was Kentucky's first African-American attorney general and unsuccessfully ran for governor against Beshear in 2023.
Governor of Kentucky (2019–present)
Elections
2019
On July 9, 2018, Beshear declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor of Kentucky in the 2019 election. He chose Jacqueline Coleman, a nonprofit president, assistant principal, and former state house candidate, as his running mate. Beshear said he would make public education a priority. In May 2019, he won the Democratic nomination with 37.9% of the vote in a three-way contest.Beshear faced incumbent Governor Matt Bevin, the nation's least popular governor, in the November 5 general election. He defeated Bevin with 49.20% of the vote to Bevin's 48.83%. It was the closest Kentucky gubernatorial election ever by percentage, and the closest race of the 2019 gubernatorial election cycle.
Days later, Bevin had not yet conceded the race, claiming large-scale voting irregularities. Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes's office nevertheless declared Beshear the winner. On November 14, Bevin conceded the election after a recanvass was performed at his request that resulted in just a single change, an additional vote for a write-in candidate.
Beshear defeated Bevin largely by winning the state's two most populous counties, Jefferson and Fayette, by an overwhelming margin, taking over 65% of the vote in each. He also narrowly carried the historically heavily Republican suburban counties of Campbell and Kenton in Northern Kentucky, as well as several historically Democratic rural counties in Eastern Kentucky that had swung heavily Republican in recent elections.
2023
On October 1, 2021, Beshear declared his candidacy for reelection as governor in the 2023 election. He defeated perennial candidates Peppy Martin and Geoff Young in the Democratic primary election, receiving over 90% of the vote.On November 7, 2023, Beshear defeated Republican nominee Daniel Cameron 53% to 47% in the 2023 Kentucky gubernatorial election, winning reelection to a second term. Beshear became the third two-consecutive-term governor in Kentucky history.
Beshear's victory has been attributed to his broad popularity among Democrats and independents, as well as approximately half of Republicans in the state. Compared to 2019, Beshear most improved his performance in suburban precincts; he increased his margins by nearly six percentage points in suburban areas, compared to 4.5 percentage points in urban and rural precincts. In addition, Republican leadership credited a viral ad featuring Hadley Duvall, whose stepfather raped and impregnated her when she was 12, for contributing to Beshear's victory, as they noted that Republicans won the down-ballot races. Kentucky was one of 12 states that had anti-abortion laws that allowed no exceptions for rape or incest, which Cameron initially supported before saying he was open to exceptions.
Tenure
Beshear was inaugurated as governor on December 10, 2019. In his inaugural address, he called on Republicans, who had a supermajority in both houses of the Kentucky General Assembly, to reach across the aisle and solve Kentucky's issues in a bipartisan way.Upon taking office, Beshear replaced all 11 members of the Kentucky Board of Education before the end of their two-year terms. The firing of the board members fulfilled a campaign pledge and was an unprecedented use of the governor's power to reorganize state boards while the legislature was not in session. Beshear's critics suggested that the appointments undermined the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, which sought to insulate the board from political influence; the Board had increasingly been the focus of political battles in the years preceding 2019.
On December 12, 2019, Beshear signed an executive order restoring voting rights to 180,315 Kentuckians, who he said were disproportionately African American who had been convicted of nonviolent felonies.
In April 2020, Beshear ordered Kentucky state troopers to record the license plate numbers of churchgoers who violated the state's COVID-19 stay-at-home order to attend in-person Easter Sunday church services. The order led to contentious debate.
File:Britainy_and_Andy_Beshear_2021.webp|thumb|Beshear and his wife Britainy visit Mayfield, which was severely damaged by tornadoes in December 2021.
In June 2020, Beshear promised to provide free health care to all African-American residents of Kentucky who need it in an attempt to resolve health care inequities that came to light during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On November 18, 2020, as the state's COVID-19 cases continued to increase, Beshear ordered Kentucky's public and private schools to halt in-person learning on November 23 with in-person classes to resume in January 2021. This marked the first time Beshear ordered, rather than recommended, schools to cease in-person instruction. Danville Christian Academy, joined by Attorney General Daniel Cameron, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, claiming that Beshear's order violated the First Amendment by prohibiting religious organizations to educate children in accordance with their faith. A group of Republican U.S. senators supported the challenge. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Beshear's order.
In March 2021, Beshear vetoed all or part of 27 bills that the Kentucky legislature had passed. The legislature overrode his vetoes.
In September 2021, the BlueOval SK Battery Park was announced. Beshear called it the "single largest investment in the history" of Kentucky.
File:P20220808ES-0655.jpg|thumb|Beshear and President Joe Biden discuss the government response to severe flooding in Kentucky in July 2022.
Beshear's tenure in office has been marked by several natural disasters. In December 2021, Beshear led the emergency response to a tornado outbreak in western Kentucky, which devastated the town of Mayfield and killed more than 70 people, making it the deadliest in the state's history. In July 2022, torrential rain caused severe flooding across Kentucky's Appalachia region and led to the deaths of over 25 people; Beshear worked with the federal government to coordinate search and rescue missions as President Biden declared a federal disaster to direct relief money to the state.
On January 4, 2023, Beshear was selected by fellow Appalachian governors to serve as states' co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission for 2023, succeeding Maryland governor Larry Hogan. During his tenure as co-chair, the commission put $322 million into financing 701 projects. His father, Steve Beshear, served in the role in 2015.
In 2024, Beshear created a political action committee to raise money for candidates in the 2024 United States elections who "push back against this national trend of anger politics and division".