Amid Atlanta DNC backlash, Andy Beshear says Democrats can’t take Black voters or the South for granted

Beshear acknowledges the party has historically “underfunded” the South but says recent Democratic gains show progress.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear reacted to the Atlanta mayor’s recent callout of the Democratic National Committee’s decision not to select Atlanta as a finalist to host the 2028 DNC convention.

As theGrio previously reported, Mayor Andre Dickens blasted the national party and DNC Chairman Ken Martin, accusing them of “abandoning” Black voters and the South. The DNC instead selected northeastern cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and Denver.

“At a time when Trump and the Supreme Court are minimizing Black electoral power, we need a party that would come to Atlanta and galvanize the Southeast for 2028 and beyond,” Dickens said in a fiery letter.

During a recent interview with theGrio, Governor Beshear said that while he does not “know the process” of how the DNC selects its host city for its convention, where Democratic delegates will nominate the 2028 presidential nominee, he recognizes that the party has generally “underfunded,” “left out,” and, at times, “even looked down on the South.”

“I see that in Kentucky, but we have scraped our way back to having a seat at the table,” Beshear told theGrio.

The Kentucky governor and potential 2028 presidential candidate said that, criticisms aside, the DNC did recently vote to keep South Carolina as the leading state to hold its primary election, a nod to the state’s sizable population of Black voters.

“I was proud to support South Carolina in being that first state,” he asserted.

Beshear acknowledged that despite the party’s underfunding of the South, a lot of progress has been made as it relates to Democratic success in the region, from there now being three southern Democratic governors to two Democratic U.S. senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, all “thanks to Georgia.”

As the current chair of the Democratic Governors Association, Beshear said, “My goal is to make sure that those numbers continue to increase.”

“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure Keisha Lance Bottoms is the next governor of the state of Georgia,” he said of Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, who, if elected in November, would become the first Black woman elected governor of Georgia and the first ever in U.S. history.

When asked if he thought the Democratic Party is sufficiently meeting the needs of Black voters, particularly in the South, Governor Beshear told theGrio that every Democrat must demonstrate they have a plan to help Black Americans “build generational wealth” and address “hundreds of years of the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation.”

He added, “I don’t think the Democratic Party or any person running ought to ever take a single vote from anyone for granted.”