| | | | |  | | By Brakkton Booker | With help from Gloria Gonzales, Ella Creamer, Jesse Naranjo, Rishika Dugyala and Teresa Wiltz
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POLITICO illustration/Photo by Daily News via AP | What up, Recast family! President Joe Biden will meet again with the top four congressional leaders at the White House after staff-level talks on debt move in a positive direction. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) taps former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam as national co-chair ahead of his expected presidential campaign launch next week. For now, we focus on the marquee gubernatorial primary race in Kentucky today. The Kentucky Derby has come and gone, but another Bluegrass State race — the contest for the GOP gubernatorial nomination — is in the final sprint to the finish with the frontrunner entering primary day in a comfortable but not insurmountable pole position. Kentucky, along with Louisiana, is one of the GOP’s two best chances to flip a governorship in this off-year election cycle. If successful, Kentucky could provide a blueprint for other conservative candidates running in deep-red states where Democratic incumbents are up for reelection in 2024. It will also test whether former President Donald Trump has regained his kingmaker’s touch after several high profile misses during last year’s midterms. Before any of that happens, Republican primary voters must decide today if its GOP star-in-waiting — Daniel Cameron — will be the one to take out Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who consistently ranks among the most popular governors in the nation, despite leading a state Trump won by roughly 26 points in 2020. Cameron’s running in a crowded field but is the favorite to win the nomination. As Kentucky’s first Black attorney general and the first Republican to occupy the post in seven decades, he enjoys widespread name ID across the state and nationally. He even delivered a prime-time address at the Republican National Convention in 2020.
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Cameron, a former defensive back with the University of Louisville football team, is part of a string of recent successes the GOP has enjoyed in recent cycles electing Black candidates to federal and statewide office, including Reps. Byron Donalds of Florida and John James of Michigan and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is seeking the GOP gubernatorial nomination in North Carolina next year.
While Cameron has rarely leaned into the historic nature of his gubernatorial run, his jockeying for the state’s top office provides an early look at how a Black Republican can do with the majority-white primary voters that make up the GOP’s base. For conservatives, Cameron is a promise of the party’s future, someone who possesses the rare pedigree of being a protege of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell while also securing the coveted endorsement of Trump. Cameron still elicits scorn from liberals for failing to bring charges against the white Louisville police officers who shot and killed Breonna Tayor, a Black EMT, during a botched raid of her apartment in March 2020. Her killing, along with that of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and others, became rallying cries during the height of the racial justice protests three years ago.
|  Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron addresses the media Sept. 23, 2020, following the return of a grand jury investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor. | Timothy D. Easley/AP Photo | Prominent celebrities such as pop singer Rihanna, NBA icon LeBron James and actor Kerry Washington expressed anger over the Taylor incident, directing their ire at Cameron, but so far, none have publicly stated they’d campaign for Beshear. On Sunday, Trump joined the Kentucky attorney general during a Mother's Day tele-rally with Cameron supporters. “I'm hopeful that I will be the Republican nominee for governor come May 16. And one of the folks who has been intimately focused on making sure that I get across the finish line … has been my good friend President Donald J. Trump,” Cameron said on the call. “Everybody needs to get out and vote for Daniel Cameron to be your next governor,” Trump added moments later, going on to disparage Beshear as too radical for Kentucky and pointing to the more than 20 times Cameron filed lawsuits against both Beshear and the Biden administration in his three years as attorney general. Left unsaid in Trump’s pitch: He’s not wavering in his support for Cameron. It’s the clearest swipe aimed at Kelly Craft, Cameron’s chief rival in the gubernatorial nomination who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations during the latter part of his administration. There’s little daylight on policy between Cameron and Craft. The two leading GOP candidates have sparred over education, pitching themselves as leading the resistance to what they warn is indoctrination of children in schools.
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Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, left, and gubernatorial candidate Kelly Craft get ready for the start of the Kentucky GOP gubernatorial primary debate May 1 in Lexington, Ky. | Timothy D. Easley/AP Photo | One ad from Craft warning against “woke bureaucrats parachuting in to hijack our children’s future.” Cameron leaned into this, too, particularly in a Twitter thread in March where he said, “‘woke’ is deeply un-American and it's being taught to our kids every day in our schools as gospel. As Governor, I'll end this nonsense in Kentucky.” (She received a last-minute endorsement from Florida Gov. and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.) But in spite of the heavy spending and intraparty attacks, the GOP primary contest has always been Cameron’s to lose. There’s scant public polling in the race, but of the handful of surveys available, Cameron never trailed. In the final Emerson College poll of GOP primary voters in the state, Cameron the presumptive frontrunner regained his command in the race with 33 percent support. With Craft at 18 percent — this despite her dropping tremendous sums in the primary: more than $6.5 million, compared to just over a million for Cameron, according to an analysis of Ad Impact. “It looks, in our data, that Cameron's numbers improved, particularly amongst older voters,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, tells The Recast. He noted that while Craft notched a 6 point drop in between the April and May surveys, Cameron himself only saw a rise by 3 percentage points. “A fair assessment, at this point, is that Cameron has a bit of a ceiling, at least in our numbers,” Kimball says.
|  Kentucky Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron speaks with supporters during a May 3 campaign stop in Richmond, Ky. | Timothy D. Easley/AP Photo | That potential ceiling is what Tres Watson, a Republican strategist in Lexington, is hearing from folks throughout the state that has some in the state concerned, particularly when the contest flips to the general election. “I think there's a lot of trepidation,” Watson says. “I think a lot of people were outwardly [saying they’re excited], but I think when you talk to people behind closed doors, I think there's a lot of concern.” Watson says he expects the Democratic Governors Association to empty its coffers to protect Beshear. And if Cameron does get the nomination, he says, wealthy liberal celebrities, still angered over Cameron’s handling of the Breonna Taylor case, may begin flooding the Democratic governor with donations. “This is the ballgame,” Watson says. “Especially if Cameron's the nominee, and you got, like, LeBron and Rihanna raising money for [Beshear] … what's the pain threshold for the RGA to really heavily engage here and compete on equal footing?” Officials with the Republican Governors Association said they were not concerned about outside celebrity influence playing a factor in the general election. They add that Beshear only narrowly defeated the wildly unpopular Republican Gov. Matt Bevin by roughly 5,000 votes in 2019. Republican officials also point out that Cameron received 122,000 more votes than Beshear that year, according to results from the Kentucky State Board of Elections.
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Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, left, speaks before Daniel Cameron, right, is sworn in as Kentucky’s attorney general, Dec. 17, 2019, in Frankfort, Ky. | Bruce Schreiner/AP Photo | Bob Babbage, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state, says Kentucky’s off-year election will provide insights and strategies for how other red-state incumbent Democrats up for reelection in 2024, like Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana, can run successful campaigns. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, another endangered red-state Democrat, has not yet announced his reelection plans. Whatever the outcome of the general in the fall, Babbage says, Kentucky will be "a predictor or a harbinger in the future, [and] although we always read too much into it,” this year will be no different. Make no mistake, we’ll be watching to see how all of this plays out. All the best,
The Recast Team
| | | PUERTO RICO’S POWER PLAY
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People remove downed trees on Sept. 20, 2022, in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona. | Jose Jimenez/Getty Images | The federal government has directed billions of dollars to repairing Puerto Rico’s troubled energy grid. But not everyone’s happy with how it’s being spent, reports POLITICO’s Gloria Gonzalez. New Progressive Party Gov. Pedro Pierluisi’s plan to allow middle-class residents to access solar incentives is sparking fears that the move would eat up funds designed to help lower-income residents join in the territory’s renewable energy transition. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has come under legal fire for what critics say is a focus on fossil fuel infrastructure at the expense of the territory’s green goals — and in direct contradiction to President Joe Biden’s environmental justice decrees. Prolonged fights over the spending could leave Puerto Ricans vulnerable to a new spate of power disruptions as its hurricane-battered grid struggles to keep the lights on after years of underinvestment and poor maintenance. Environmental and community groups sued FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security last month over two grid projects, accusing them of violating the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to consider environmental harms that resulted in the rebuilding of “outdated, inefficient, and centralized fossil fuel-based electricity infrastructure.” Congress allocated about $14 billion to federal agencies including FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for Puerto Rico to address the unprecedented destruction caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017, when it roared ashore, killing almost 3,000 people and triggering blackouts that lasted nearly a year. Last September, Hurricane Fiona left thousands of residents without power for 12 days and caused intermittent outages for many others.
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A downed electricity pole is seen Sept. 20, 2022, in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona, which left over 1 million without power. | Jose Jimenez/Getty Images | | Climate advocates want FEMA to spend those billions on rooftop solar, storage and other forms of distributed renewable energy for communities at risk of losing power — rather than the centralized power system that was largely wiped out in 2017. Augusta Wilson, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the organizations involved in the lawsuit, said FEMA is on the cusp of spending billions of dollars on permanent work to rebuild Puerto Rico’s “highly unreliable” electricity grid, rather than investing in resilient projects as a viable alternative, which it “just hasn’t considered as part of its NEPA analysis.” “FEMA’s current plans really fly in the face of the will of the people of Puerto Rico,” Wilson said. A FEMA spokesperson declined to comment, citing a policy against speaking about active litigation. But the agency has allocated $11.4 billion to Puerto Rico’s government-owned utility, including the largest single allocation in FEMA’s history of about $9.4 billion in emergency spending after Maria to restore damaged substations, buildings, distribution lines and transmission system. As of April 20, FEMA has approved about 120 projects under the program, representing about $1.5 billion. Republican Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress, acknowledged the complexity of dealing with multi-agency processes, coordinating participants and responsibly handling such a large pot of money. “But the reality is the people do not see it is happening fast enough,” she said. Read more here.
| | | ICYMI @ POLITICO
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Former Gov. Bill Haslam has been named a national co-chair of Sen. Tim Scott's expected presidential campaign. | John Amis/AP Photo | Tim Scott Makes Key Addition — Ahead of his scheduled official White House bid announcement next week, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) brings on Bill Haslam, the former GOP governor of Tennessee, as his national co-chair. POLITICO’s Natalie Allison breaks down who else Scott is bringing on to his nascent campaign. The Flip Flop of Betrayal — Check out this incredibly fun read from POLITICO Magazine on public figures — in their own words — who said one thing about Trump only to reverse course later. The ‘Good Samaritan’ Play — POLITICO’s Danielle Muoio Dunn examines why the GOP is rallying behind Daniel Penny, the white man facing second-degree manslaughter charges for the chokehold death of Jordan Neely, who was Black. She writes: “Penny’s case has quickly become their latest cudgel heading into the 2024 elections.”
| | | THE RECAST RECOMMENDS Barack Obama investigates the meaning of the 9-5 in a new documentary, “Working: What We Do All Day,” premiering tomorrow on Netflix.
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| In “Yellowface,” by R. F. Kuang, a white writer steals the manuscript of her recently deceased Asian friend and passes it off as her own. Meet “The Mother,” in which Jennifer Lopez plays a military assassin who comes out of hiding to save her daughter.
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| On Durand Jones’ debut solo album, “Wait Til I Get Over,” the artist reflects on his hometown of Hillaryville, La., which was originally established as a form of reparations to previously enslaved Black Americans. New Yorker writer and author of the Pulitzer-winning memoir “Stay True,” Hua Hsu, is the latest guest on the Longform podcast. Shakira’s latest collab partners? Her kids. The star makes music with them in a tender, emotional video for “Acróstico.”
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| TikTok of the Day: A lot of knowing
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