Q&A: ‘Different kind of Democrat.’ Can a more conservative branch slow party’s losses in KY?

Greg Stumbo is a lot of things. A politician for nearly 40 years, he served as Democratic House majority leader for most of his 12 terms before being elected attorney general in 2003. He later rejoined the House in 2008 to become the next house speaker, and if you spend enough time around Republicans in Frankfort you’ll hear quite a few complaints stemming from his time in the House.

Before being defeated in 2016, he was Kentucky’s last Democratic speaker of the house.

Stumbo’s Democratic House Majority was the last left in the now-staunchly Republican American South until a wave in 2016, where former president Donald Trump topped the ticket, finished the party’s 95-year grip on the House.

Democrats from Stumbo’s home region, Eastern Kentucky, played a central role in keeping the majority intact in those final years. Several of them, himself included, fell in 2016 and more seats once considered Democratic locks have flipped Republican since.

The kind of Democrat Stumbo represents is no longer the norm within the Democratic party. Stumbo is a pro-life social conservative. He’s from rural Kentucky.

But can that brand of Democrat be the one that saves the party in Eastern Kentucky and other rural parts of the state? That’s essentially what Stumbo thinks.

The veteran politico believes Kentucky Democrats’ best chance at advancing key platform items – strong public schools, workers rights, social safety nets – is for the party to take a rightward turn. Stumbo calls for Democrats to create an official designation within the party that allows for those running in more rural areas to openly signal to voters that they’re every bit as conservative as their constituencies on the social issues of the day.

Stumbo details his reasoning in the Q&A below. Content is condensed and edited for clarity.

Could you walk me through your personal history with Democratic party and why you’re a Democrat?

The county that I grew up in, Floyd County, is still a predominantly Democratic county. We’ve got about 21,000 registered Democrats and 6,000 registered Republicans and my family has been in politics there literally for over 100 years.

Some would say, ‘well, is that why you’re a Democrat?’ The truth of the matter is that Hal Rogers is a good friend of mine, and we often kid each other where I tell Hal he would have been a Democrat if he’d have been born in Floyd County and he’ll say I’d have been a Republican if I had been born in Pulaski County. There’s probably truth to that because many times in rural Kentucky we just follow what our families registration was in rural Kentucky.

And there wasn’t this divide then. When I first got to the legislature, in 1980, the Democrats were in the house and had about 75 (of the 100 members). It was pretty dominant, but you couldn’t tell us apart on our votes from our Republican colleagues in Eastern Kentucky or southeastern Kentucky. We were never far apart in what our basic beliefs were. That’s grown over the years to this great divide that we have, not only in Kentucky but in America.

You said that Eastern Kentucky Democrats and Republicans were never far apart in terms of what they voted on. If that’s the case, then why have Democrats in the region lost so much ground in the last 10 years?

You have to look at what happened within the historical perspective of what was happening everywhere. Obviously, the Democratic Party had lost its foothold and what was traditionally known as the solid south. In 2016, when I was still speaker, we were the last legislative chamber south of the Mason Dixon Line controlled by the Democrats. So it was a national trend, not just a Kentucky trend.

(Eastern Kentucky Democrats) were rural, conservative and Christian. In our philosophy, we’re pro-gun and pro-life, but the Republicans were very good at making us something that we really weren’t by tying us to the national Democratic Party. They defined us and we didn’t fight back hard enough to defend ourselves. Unfortunately, because many of our urban colleagues agree with the national party to some extent, it was very difficult to convince them in the House that a lot of our rural Democrats needed to be for things that their constituents were for. You can’t hardly represent people if you don’t follow what they want.

I don’t believe that was the sole reason, though, because the House Democratic majority was actually able to survive in ‘12 and ‘14. I believe we would have held that time had it not been for Donald Trump.

I remember seeing the poll at the Democratic headquarters in the summer of 2016. In Eastern Kentucky, Donald Trump was up 40 points in our poll there. I remember saying to Governor Beshear, ‘I don’t know if anybody can survive that.’ Well, nobody did survive it.

You’re familiar with Harlan County, where the switch between predominantly supporting local Republicans happened only recently, after Trump left office. (Every Democratic local elected official switched from Democrat to Republican shortly after judge-executive Dan Mosley did so in early 2021). What does that situation tell us?

The decline of the unions in Eastern Kentucky, for one. When I first got elected in 1980, the UMWA (United Mine Workers Association) was very strong in my county. And then, in 2000 and beyond, and particularly the latter part of my public service, there wasn’t a union mine in the county. That became part of the crumbling of the Democratic Party, because we did rely so much on our friends in organized labor. Harlan County reflects that.

So with social issues and the decline of unions leading the shift, along the latest sort of Trump bump, is there any hope?

I think that if you give an Eastern Kentucky voter the type of candidate that they want, the type of candidate they’re comfortable with, I think you’ll see them vote that way. That’s what the party has to do, we have to give them the kind of candidate that they want to vote for. They don’t want to vote for Bernie Sanders or Nancy Pelosi, but they’ll vote for (former House minority leader) Rocky Adkins and they’ll vote for (representative) Ashley Tackett Laferty, and they’ll vote for people like that – people that they’re comfortable with – because they reflect the values of their communities, and the community accepts them because they know them. The Democratic Party is a big tent. We’ve got people who don’t think anybody ought to own a gun and we’ve got people who think everybody ought to. We’re diverse, but on the core issues of education and protecting working families we all agree on those. It’s just that we don’t agree on some of the social issues. Well, that’s okay… Our party that exists in the urban areas, which are obviously the last remaining strongholds, they have to understand that there’s ideological binding we can have on most issues but not every issue.

You’ve floated an idea for an official designation for conservative Democrats within the party. Can you explain?

Julian (Carroll) and I have talked a lot about having something within the Democratic Party that you could join to delineate yourself as a different kind of Democrat, not aligned necessarily with the views totally of the national party. It’s easy to do. You just say, okay I want to be called a ‘Faith in My Father Democrat.’ You’d say ‘I’m a Democrat, like my father was and I believe in the faith and the values that he had.’ Name it what you will, it’s just something to say ‘I’m not that kind of a Democrat, like you see on television from California.’ We have to recognize that there are people who just absolutely are appalled when Speaker Pelosi gets up there, and that’s not conducive to helping us win elections in Kentucky. So we have to separate ourselves.

We all agree on things like equal educational opportunities for kids all over the state of Kentucky, better jobs, living wages for people, non-discrimination in the public and the private sector. We believe in those things, but if you don’t get elected you can’t have a chance to prove what you really do believe. And we need to recruit those candidates because they can still win – I’m convinced they can still win. And once the Trump phenomena blows over, I think you’ll see a difference.

What do you say to people who would critique the idea of a more conservative Democrat running because the voters might be able to see through that?

If you want to run and lose, you can run on that progressive platform in rural Kentucky. But if you want to run and win, you’ve got to go back and reflect on what the people that you’re asked to represent, what are their values? What are their morals? Rocky gave us the prototype of how to run in rural Kentucky. Rocky was a conservative, pro-life, pro-gun candidate. Well, once you get over that, then then what are you willing for decent jobs, competitive wages, decent living, public education, all those things that we’re traditionally for.

Can you run statewide as a progressive candidate? Ask Adam Edelen, and I’m afraid my friend Charles Booker is going to learn the same thing. The political reality is that in Kentucky it’s probably not going to work. I think you have to be more of an Andy Beshear type candidate. He didn’t really talk about the social issues. He talked about education and teachers and jobs, and he made some inroads in Eastern Kentucky and places like Northern Kentucky. He got those social issues out of the way real quick.

(Former Democratic governor) Julian Caroll gives a great speech about that. Julian says in only the way that Julian Caroll can speak: “They define me, I don’t want to be defined by them. Here’s what I am.’ And he says it’s so forceful. ‘I’m pro, I’m pro gun, I’m a real conservative Democrat, I’m a Christian and I’m a preacher.” So you get that out of the way, and then you talk about the issues that really are different in our party. That’s public education and how you deal with charter schools, those types of things. I think most people agree with the Democratic Party on those type of issues. The problem is the rhetoric gets them off track.

In terms of Frankfort representation for Eastern Kentucky, obviously you’ve only got three ... Eastern Kentucky Democrats. Do you see a future in which there are no Democrats?

A lot of people do (long pause). That’s a yes and no. The political reality is that that could happen. I don’t think it will because I don’t think the Republicans need those seats. Why would they want to spend $100,000 to beat Robin or Angie?

I think the brighter picture from a Democratic perspective is to look at them and figure out what they did. And then try to teach other candidates to use them as the prototype. Because they do reflect what their constituents want.

Quite a few Eastern Kentucky counties remain governed locally by Democrats, but the number is dwindling pretty quickly. Is it an inevitability that those switch over to Republican?

I don’t think so. I think if the party bounces back and gets back to the basics of politics, I think that that’s less likely. If they don’t, then it becomes more likely.

You get down in Western and even Central Kentucky, you run into elected officials who had run as Democrats and gotten beat, then suddenly just switch their registration and all of a sudden they get elected. That tells you something. That tells you that you’ve got an image problem with your party .It’s like cancer; if you don’t address it, it’s not gonna get better. So the party needs to wake it up. And unfortunately, I don’t see us doing that at this time.