Deep in Trump Country, Democrats Take Aim at Three Governors’ Seats

CLEVELAND, Miss. — Jim Hood, the Mississippi state attorney general, is a ruddy-faced man with a deep drawl and a vintage country-music hairdo — an anti-abortion, deer-hunting Baptist from the northeast Mississippi hill country. He is also a Democratic candidate for governor.

On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon in the small Delta city of Cleveland, Miss., Mr. Hood, 57, bragged to a crowd about his chummy relations with state legislators down in Jackson.

“A lot of Republicans come up,” Mr. Hood said, “and they put their arm on my shoulder and get real close: ‘Me and my family are for you. Don’t you tell it.’”

The anecdote, conveniently impossible to fact-check, riffs on the stark political reality that any Democrat is a long shot in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic governor this century. But that reality seems a little less stark than usual in 2019, as people in both parties acknowledge.

This year’s three elections for governor are all in states — Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky — that President Trump won easily in 2016. And in all three, the Democratic candidate is unusually competitive.

In Louisiana, the Democrat, Gov. John Bel Edwards, is running for re-election, having already proven that a candidate tailored to a red-state electorate — even one with a “D” after his name — can win if the stars are aligned just so.

In Kentucky, Andy Beshear, the Democratic state attorney general, is running against the incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin, who was found in a recent poll to be the least popular governor in the country.

The laws of political gravity still generally favor Republicans in these states, where Mr. Trump, guns and Sunday school are popular and the Democratic brand on immigration, abortion and taxes are not. Amelia Chassé Alcivar, a spokeswoman for the Republican Governors Association, called the Democratic presidential field “the millstone around the neck of each of these candidates”: In all three races, Mr. Trump could eventually fly in, rail against left-wing Democrats and help seal the deal for Republicans.

But races for governor can be unpredictable, often turning as much on personalities and local matters as tribal and political alliances. Two of the most popular governors in the country are Republicans in the navy blue redoubts of Massachusetts and Maryland.

And this year, Trump-country Democrats are hoping to pull off that sort of partisan switch-up by winning personality contests against Republicans who have struggled with likability, or by winning policy contests with the argument that government need not be so small as to be painful.

Republicans do not deny the risks.

“Without question, this is a real race,” Austin Barbour, a Republican strategist and nephew of the former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, said of his home-state contest.

Mr. Barbour still believes that the Republican candidate, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, holds the upper hand. A former state treasurer, Mr. Reeves, 45, is skilled at wielding wonkish minutiae in defense of the pro-business, low-tax legacy of uninterrupted Republican leadership that began with the election of Haley Barbour in 2003. He notably opposes the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Hood champions the expansion.

Mr. Reeves was endorsed by the current governor, Phil Bryant, but other Republicans have bristled at what they describe as his high-handed leadership style. In last month’s primary runoff, 46 percent of the voters backed Mr. Reeves’s opponent, Bill Waller, who declined to endorse Mr. Reeves in the aftermath.

In Louisiana, Mr. Edwards, an even-keeled and notably non-spicy flavor of Louisiana politician, has benefited from a little proximity to gridiron glamour, appearing in a video with the New Orleans Saints star Drew Brees, and at a fund-raiser with the beloved Louisiana State University football coach Ed Orgeron. After a number of higher-profile Republicans chose not to challenge him, Mr. Edwards now finds himself facing two Republican contenders, Representative Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone, a businessman who is casting himself as a Trumpian outsider.

It was Mr. Edwards, an anti-abortion West Point graduate, who set a template for winning a red-state personality contest with his 2015 race against Senator David Vitter, who was burdened with a prostitution scandal. Mr. Edwards also constantly reminds voters that he helped close a $2 billion deficit he inherited from his Republican predecessor, Bobby Jindal, who had signed a “no tax” pledge.

Health care is a signature issue for Mr. Edwards, who expanded Medicaid soon after taking office in 2016. On Wednesday, he was at Baton Rouge General Medical Center, celebrating a planned expansion of a burn center, the kind of progress that he said was only possible after he and lawmakers were able to correct the deficit.

In an interview, Mr. Edwards, 53, said that the Democrats running elsewhere might benefit from a similar “common sense” style. He added that it was common sense to not alienate Mr. Trump, particularly in a state in regular need of federal disaster relief.

“I make sure we have a good relationship with the folks in Washington, including the president,” he said. “I’ve been there to visit with him nine times over the course of the last three years.”

Republicans have knocked Mr. Edwards for raising taxes and have accused him of creating an unfriendly business climate. Dr. Abraham, a family medical practitioner, has also run an ad declaring that there are only “two genders,” perhaps foreshadowing an attack on Mr. Edwards’s efforts to expand L.G.B.T. rights.

Mr. Edwards’s supporters are hoping he can benefit from a Republican house divided. Under Louisiana’s “jungle primary” system, all of the candidates will be on one Oct. 12 ballot, with the top two vote-getters going on to a November runoff if no candidate gets 50 percent in the first round. Mr. Rispone, who has been running third in the polls, recently unveiled an ad raising questions about Dr. Abraham’s fealty to Mr. Trump.

In Mississippi, Mr. Hood will have his hands full cobbling together a coalition of African-Americans, liberal white city dwellers and exurban moderates. His superpower is a full immunity to charges that he is anything close to a latte-sipping urban elite; his first TV ad shows him packing shell casings, fixing machinery next to an American flag, heading to church, sitting in his truck and riding a tractor.

The attorney general also boasts of the $3 billion he delivered to taxpayers by going after “big insurance and scam artists.” Indeed, as Mr. Hood toured the Delta on Tuesday, he mixed country-boy licks (he referred to one piece of legislation as “one of these goat-roping deals”) with an old-school populist tune.

“They tell you every time, ‘Don’t you worry, we’re going to give these tax cuts to these large corporations, and they will reinvest,’” said Mr. Hood, straddling a stool and addressing a room full of voters as he sweated through the top half of his collar. He added: “It never happens. It ain’t nothing but just corporate welfare, is what they’re doing.”

The next day, outside of Jackson, Mr. Reeves was touring a heavy machinery company, sporting thick glasses and pull-on work boots. He told reporters that businesses like this had benefited from a reduction in inventory taxes that Republicans championed. And he warned that Mr. Hood and his trial lawyer allies would undo a 2004 “tort reform” law restricting medical lawsuits, and allow frivolous suits that would increase health care costs.

In Kentucky, Mr. Bevin is running on his fiscal discipline and the state’s humming economy, but the race keeps coming back to the long list of people who say they have been insulted by him. This includes his fellow Republicans, members of his own administration, and, most notably, schoolteachers.

“I voted for Bevin,” said Mary Brewer, a retiree who was eating lunch on a recent afternoon in Lawrenceburg, Ky. “Then he started talking all this crap about the teachers.”

Turning people off, however, is not the same thing as turning them on to someone else. “There’s nobody to vote for,” Ms. Brewer said.

The earnest Mr. Beshear, 41, is more of a mainstream Democrat than the candidates in Louisiana and Mississippi. He is the son of Mr. Bevin’s Democratic predecessor in the governor’s office, Steve Beshear, and he is for abortion rights, not that he emphasizes this often on the trail. What he does focus on is Medicaid expansion, put in place by his father, and more than anything, public education.

Strategists in both parties see Mr. Beshear ahead by a margin somewhere in the single digits, an advantage that narrowed after a summer of Republican attack ads and the first of what many assume will be multiple Trump visits.

Mr. Bevin’s mission has been to remind voters that Mr. Beshear is a Democrat — that, in the words of Davis Paine, the governor’s campaign manager, Mr. Beshear’s views on various issues “make him the most liberal nominee for governor in Kentucky history.”

Mr. Beshear’s mission is to remind voters that the Republican in the race is Matt Bevin.

“For the last four years, teachers have been called names, they’ve been bullied,” Mr. Beshear said at an event in Frankfort, Ky., where he proposed a pay raise for teachers.

He pledged to unify Kentuckians, who, he insisted in an interview afterward, “have so much more in common with each other than we have with any national party platform.”

Maybe.

South of Frankfort sits Lawrenceburg, the seat of the majority-Democratic but socially conservative Anderson County. Support in the county swung from Steve Beshear in 2011 to Mr. Bevin in 2015.

“I’d say the majority of people in Anderson County think he’s done a fairly poor job,” Sandy Goodlett, a former Lawrenceburg mayor, said of Mr. Bevin.

“But,” he added, “that doesn’t mean they won’t vote for him.”