Gov. Andy Beshear, a Kentucky Democrat who has enjoyed electoral success in a Republican-friendly state, told a Dartmouth audience that lawmakers “ought to be focused on what is good for everyone,” rather than maneuvering only on behalf of party.
The divisions the United States is now experiencing are unnatural and have been thrust upon the American people by both parties and also by what Beshear termed the oversimplifications of the media, he said at the March 7 talk, part of the Law and Democracy: The United States at 250 lecture series co-sponsored by Dartmouth Dialogues and the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy.
“I am a two-term governor, but have won three straight races in bright red Kentucky, and I haven’t run from my convictions or my values. I believe we win by staying true to our values of compassion and empathy, and by always looking out for our neighbors,” Beshear said.
Russell Muirhead, a professor of government and co-director of the Political Economy Project, and Bea Reichman ’26, president of the Dartmouth Democrats, moderated the event, which was attended by 250 people in a packed Filene Auditorium, with more than 150 others also watching by livestream.
The son of a former governor and a graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia Law School, Beshear first won the governorship in 2019. He discussed his role in turning his home state from a “flyover state,” one “that people used to look down on,” to a place where, he said, businesses are investing, health care for all is expanding, and more affordable housing is being built.
“Last year’s average wage for a new job in Kentucky was almost $30 an hour,” Beshear said.
He also supports the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes, and “Pre-K for All,” an initiative to make all children in the state “kindergarten ready.”
Beshear is one of several high-profile Democrats to visit New Hampshire, with its prominent presidential primary, recently, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who also spoke in the Dartmouth series.
The Kentucky governor also was in New Hampshire over the weekend to help fundraise for Democrats, He is the author of the forthcoming book Go and Do Likewise, which will be released in September and whose title refers to the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan.
Describing himself as a devout Christian, Beshear said he hoped that faith could be used as a “bridge to heal a divided country. And we desperately need that. I’ll just say that the job of whoever succeeds Donald Trump—whoever that might be—is not only to get immediate help and relief to the American people who are struggling to reignite the flame that is the American Dream, but also to heal a divided, maybe even a broken country. My kids deserve better than what they’re seeing right now, as does everybody else’s.”
In answer to questions from Reichman about abortion policy nationwide and in Kentucky, which Beshear said has one of the most restrictive laws in the country, with an exception only for the life of the mother, Beshear said that Democrats have not made much progress in red states in preserving or restoring a legal right to an abortion because it is such a contentious subject.
“There are issues out there that just become red lines if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, that people don’t cross,” Beshear said. As a subject guaranteed to elicit strong opinions, “what we’re seeing across the country is we’re electing people oftentimes that are much more extreme than the actual people in our state,” he added.
Although it may sound old-fashioned in such a divisive era, Beshear said, “If we viewed ourselves less as two groups that are battling, and more as problem solvers” intent on creating more jobs and better health care, more might get done.
The media bears some responsibility for emphasizing the country’s divisions, he said. “One of the challenges in dealing with the media is they want to oversimplify all of us when I don’t think anyone has the exact same views as someone else. Because we’ve all been through different experiences that have molded and changed us. And so we’re all a little more complicated than how people want to describe us.”
Muirhead, who also serves as a Democratic representative in the New Hampshire House, asked whether the government should reform military spending.
Beshear replied that “military spending is about to become a big question because this president is going to have to come to a Congress he did not consult before launching attacks on Iran and ask for a lot of money—and they should not agree unless they are included in the process.”
Every president “has to level with the public and with the Congress. And this president hasn’t done any of those,” Beshear said.
In the Q&A session that followed, a student asked how Democrats could win in more conservative, rural states.
“If Democrats want to win in rural America, they’ve got to start by showing up,” Beshear said. “You have to go to places that other people might not. And guess what? People still want to talk to you. You’ve got to listen as much as you speak. Especially right now, when people are struggling to pay the grocery bill, when they can’t take their kids on the same vacation that their parents took them on, when the average age of new home ownership is 40.”
Another student asked how both the U.S. and the government could go about rebuilding fragile bonds of trust when Trump is no longer president.
Beshear said he traveled in January to the 56th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to encourage investment in Kentucky and came away with the realization that the “damage to our international reputation is more severe than I could have ever imagined. We’ve gone from the leader of the free world to the bully on the playground.”
The impact on American allies is not only political, Beshear observed, but also emotional. “A lot of the world has looked up to the United States in special ways–our economy, our government, as flawed as it is, or at least how it worked before. And so we are going to have a lot of work to do.”
After the talk, Owen Courcey ’29, from Barnard, Vt., said that Beshear struck him as “the kind of politician we need more of.”
Ryantony Exuma ’26, a government major modified with philosophy and economics who is from New York City, said that Beshear’s recommendation to listen more to people, particularly in rural areas, “would bring the country together. Now more than ever, we have to do that.”
Barbara H. Jones, who lives in Grantham, N.H., and previously served on the Lebanon, N.H., City Council, also attended a talk at Dartmouth this month by U.S. Rep Ro Khanna, D-Calif. She said she was encouraged “to see all these young people listening to these messages.”
Beshear’s talk was also co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences.
