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On a cool Kentucky Monday in April, an Axiom Strategies staffer stood outside Mokka on Monmouth Street in Newport, waiting to usher Kentucky Gubernatorial Candidate Kelly Craft and former University of Kentucky Swimmer Riley Gaines to their next two campaign events, one in Louisville and one in Bowling Green.

Craft, a former United Nations Ambassador in the Trump administration, has so far forked out more than $5.3 million to Axiom Strategies — a Missouri-based political consulting agency — and its media buying division, AxMedia, to help bolster her gubernatorial hopes ahead of the May 16 Republican primary.

Of the $5.3 million, more than $3.7 million went to AxMedia for “media placement.” Just under $1 million went to Axiom Strategies for printing, direct mail, equipment, airfare, and other services. Just a bit more than $150,000 went to Axiom Strategies for consulting.

Craft and Gaines traveled the state that day campaigning on an “anti-trans” message, or what their campaign calls a “pro-women” message.

The new rhetoric and messaging around education and transgender issues are what some Democrats are calling a new “culture war” rallying cry for conservatives in the wake of their major win when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Northern Kentucky Rep. Rachel Roberts (D-Newport) said recently the new “an-

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ti-trans” legislation in Kentucky is a political move in a gubernatorial election year as Republicans try to oust Beshear from the governor’s office.

“I think the push for this is coming from a purely political vantage point,” Roberts said. “It’s a calculated messaging strategy on the majority party side that they think is going to help them win elections this year and the constitutional seats that are up for election, and that will be part of their messaging.”

Roberts further argued that the “anti-trans” message is the one that will replace the abortion message — after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 triggered a law that banned the procedure in Kentucky.

“They needed the latest shiny penny thing that they could try and rally voters around, and tragically that seems to be them targeting some of the most vulnerable children in our community,” Roberts said.

Another rhetorical strategy around the “anti-trans” message is what the GOP calls “parental rights” — a messaging strategy used by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin when he scored an upset victory in 2021.

The group that worked on Youngkin’s campaign? Axiom Strategies.

Kristin Davison, vice president and general consultant for Axiom Strategies, said they are a large firm, and that campaigns across the country — not just their firm — are tapping into the organic movement of education and parental rights that started as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the start of 2021, the Virginia governor’s race had just begun, parents were attending school board meetings for the first time, and this movement started to gain steam, according to Davison.

“They were actually sitting with their kids in their living rooms, participating in their everyday class, and so it awoke an entire generation of parents from what was happening in their schools,” Davison said, noting that Democrats were slow to the punch and didn’t realize the movement that was happening.

“This was bigger than just Virginia,” Davison said. “This spread to Texas. It spread to Florida. It spread to Connecticut. It spread to Michigan. It spread to Nevada.”

The issue also isn’t monolithic, according to Davison.

“It’s not just school choice. It’s not just teacher pay,” Davison said. “It’s all the above, and so it all really was able to umbrella around this philosophy that parents should be involved in their child’s school.”

Now the movement, messaging, and strategy are in Kentucky.

The culture war strategy is one that University of Kentucky Political Science Professor Dr. Stephen Voss thinks works in the Commonwealth because Kentuckians lean conservative on social and cultural issues compared to voters nationwide.

“Republican campaigns benefit when Kentucky voters think nationally about the progressive cultural agenda that Democratic politicians embrace, whereas Democratic campaigns profit from pivoting the election toward family financial struggles or community health,” Voss said. “Craft’s aggressive Culture War campaign might keep Gov. Beshear against the ropes, as he fends off claims that he caters to ‘woke’ cultural progressives.”

Axiom’s first foray in Kentucky politics came in 2022 while working on Northern Kentucky Sen. Gex Williams’ (R-Verona) campaign — Davison said it wasn’t the firm testing the waters of Kentucky politics. Instead, it was Williams’ connections.

Williams’ campaign spent over $25,500 on the Kansas City, Mo. political consultant. His campaign manager was Matt Wolking, who worked on the 2020 Trump campaign and is now the strategic communications director for the super PAC Never Back Down, which is supporting the presidential hopes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — an outspoken governor when it comes to messaging around transgender women in women’s sports and education.

In the Kentucky state Senate, Williams played a key role in helping move through “anti-trans” legislation — Williams calls it “parental rights”— after introducing amendments similar to a law in South Dakota that bans puberty blockers, gender-affirming surgery, and cross-sex hormones.

The bill — Senate Bill 150 — that ultimately passed during the 2023 Kentucky General Assembly also prohibits schools from teaching sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms and forces transgender students to use the bathroom that aligns with the gender assigned at birth.

Craft’s running mate, Sen. Max Wise (R-Campbellsville), sponsored SB150 and, upon its introduction, gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor attacking the “woke ideologies” of the Kentucky Department of Education — the speech set the tone of the legislative session, with Kentucky’s Republican legislature now mirroring the rhetoric of Youngkin in Virginia and DeSantis in Florida.

On the campaign trail in April, Craft appeared with Gaines, who tied with transgender woman Lia Thomas during an NCAA swim meet. Thomas, a former boys swimmer, placed above girls that Gaines argued worked their whole life to be usurped by a “man” competing in girls’ sports.

Gaines has gained notoriety for being outspoken in favor of banning transgender women from women’s sports, often appearing on conservative news networks and supporting legislation to ban transgender women from women’s sports.

“I can wholeheartedly attest to the extreme discomfort in the locker room when you turn around, and there’s a six-foot-four male dropping his pants, fully equipped with and exposing male genitalia and watching other girls undress,” Gaines said in Newport.

Craft spoke in favor of Kentucky’s newly enacted law.

“What I’m really concerned about as a mother and grandmother, I can’t imagine one of my granddaughters being in the girls’ bathroom in school and having a junior high or high school male coming into their bathroom or into their locker room,” Craft said.

Craft’s statewide message has also hit on education — another winning formula for Virginia Gov. Youngkin.

Craft said she would “dismantle” the Department of Education and remove “wokeness” from Kentucky’s schools, which mirrors similar messaging used by Youngkin.

Davison argues this messaging is used across the country, and the similarities between Youngkin’s and Craft’s campaigns are coincidental.

Craft’s and Youngkin’s campaign also used the “Kitchen Table” theme that hits on the nerve of issues average Americans discuss at their kitchen tables. Davison said this similarity between the two campaigns is unrelated.

“I think Republicans are becoming the party of America’s kitchen tables,” Davison said. “It’s not singular to one person, and even Joe Biden has tried stealing some of that verbiage.”

A few days after appearing in Newport, Craft’s campaign released a TV ad that featured “woke bureaucrats” parachuting into a school to teach critical race theory. Further, a teacher with a nose ring requests a student to use her pronouns.

“Our schools are under attack,” Craft says in the ad. “Woke bureaucrats parachuting in to hijack our children’s future, forcing woke ideology into the classroom — it’s immoral. I’m Kelly Craft, and as governor, I’ll dismantle the Department of Education and start fresh.”

The strategy could be working, with Craft gaining significant ground on Republican frontrunner Attorney General Daniel Cameron in the latest public poll.

Craft now sits just six points behind Cameron, who polled at 30%, and Craft at 24%. In a previous public poll conducted by Mason-Dixon, Cameron led the Republican pack at 39%, with Craft sitting second at 13%.

Voss said the Emerson poll findings show Craft likely improved her name recognition and consequently softened Cameron’s support, and the poll probably caught some of that expected drift.

“This Emerson poll does not inspire the same confidence that it represents actual change from the Mason-Dixon poll, rather than just the normal noise that comes from different samples collected using different approaches,” Voss said.

When it comes to the ideological blows

from Craft’s campaign, Voss said the biggest issue is that she’s employing it in a Republican primary where her leading opponent, Cameron, has strong conservative credentials that includes an endorsement from former President Donald Trump.

“Craft has little basis for ideological attacks on her rivals, which leaves her stuck arguing that she’d be a better right-wing warrior later on,” Voss said. “Craft’s stuck selling herself in the primary based on personal traits — claims of competence or toughness — which is a messaging approach that rarely succeeds and does not appear to be hurting the favorability of her opponents.”

In the general election, if Craft were to win the Republican nomination and face Beshear, the incumbent Democrat would have an advantage, Voss said, because of the legislation passed by the Republican-dominated legislature.

“Beshear would have an advantage fending off Craft’s ideological blows, compared to Democrats in earlier elections, because of the slew of right-wing policies that Kentucky and other conservative states have marched into the legal code, especially in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned,” Voss said.

An example would be Kentucky voters’ rejection of the anti-abortion constitutional amendment in the fall of 2022.

“Nothing hurts a movement more than success because their opponents mobilize enthusiastically, their supporters grow complacent, and independents tilt against them to counterbalance their excesses,” Voss said. “Kentucky’s rejection of an anti-abortion constitutional amendment embodies the blue undertow that has followed Kentucky’s red wave, and Gov. Beshear appears likely to benefit from that leftward tug as well.”

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Paul Shanley, the owner of Molly Malone’s Irish Pub and Restaurant in Covington, said that he began to consider instituting a smoking ban in his business even before Kenton county's partial ban was enacted.

“It made more sense with kids coming in,” he said. “I think a lot of restaurants were already nonsmoking before the ban. It was getting to that point where things change.”

Just across the river in nearby Cincinnati, restaurants were making such changes. After Ohio approved a ban on indoor smoking, all businesses went smoke-free, putting pressure on Northern Kentucky to decide if they would do the same.

Will Kentucky ever follow Ohio’s footsteps?

When Addyson Stansel worked as a bartender at Saddle Club in Fort Mitchell, some patrons were unaware that the bar had instituted a smoking ban more than a decade ago.

“I had people show up who hadn’t been there for 10 or 20 years, and they would pull out a pack of cigarettes and try to light one,” she said.

So Stansel – who worked at Saddle Club in 2022 – had to intervene.

“There were definitely complaints,” she said.

She told patrons to take their smoking outside before their cigarette was lit. And, more often than not, those customers would be “surprised.”

“Oh really,” she recalled hearing, “it didn’t used to be like that.” And when Stansel would inform the patron that the smoking policy had been in place for years, she would hear: “Oh whatever, that’s just stupid.”

But “worst case, they would just sit outside and take their drinks outside,” she said.

Stansel now works at The Post in Fort Thomas, which also doesn’t allow customers to smoke indoors. And she said if that were to change, she would likely leave and work someplace where smoking isn’t allowed – like nearby Ohio.

In November 2006, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning smoking in indoor public spaces and places of employment, providing a standard of protection from the health hazards associated with secondhand smoke exposure. Nearly 60% of Ohio residents voted in favor of the ban.

Ohio’s law does include exemptions: Nursing homes can allow smoking in individual patient rooms and in designated areas that meet certain criteria; hotels, motels and lodging facilities may designate as many as 20% of sleeping rooms for smoking; family business can allow smoking indoors as long as all employees are relatives of the owner, enclosed areas are not open to the public, smoke cannot migrate into no-smoking areas and its the only business located in a free-standing structure; and retail tobacco stores can annually request exemptions.

But enacting a statewide ban in Kentucky is more complicated.

In 2015, Kentucky Democrats introduced a bill that would have banned smoking in workplaces and indoor public places. It passed the House 51-46, with the support of some Republicans, after the addition of an amendment exempting cigar bars and private clubs. But the legislation would eventually die in the Senate.

“I deplore smoking,” former state Rep. Brian Linder, (R - Dry Ridge), who voted against the legislation in 2015, told the Louisville Courier Journal. “But my love for liberty is greater.”

Similar legislation has been introduced in recent years but hasn’t picked up steam.

Smoking status is protected from workplace discrimination in Kentucky, along with race, religion, sex, age and disability, among other things.

In 1990, the tobacco industry pushed for anti-discrimination laws that would protect smokers in the workplace, and Kentucky became one of the first out of 29 states to make smoking a civil right.

“Kentucky bourbon drinkers aren’t in a protected class,” said Sen. John Schickel (R-Union). “Someone with diabetes isn’t in a protected class. Why in the world would we have smokers in a protected class?”

Kentucky is one of the country’s top tobacco producers, with products used in cigarettes and cigars for its nicotine. Its production has been intertwined with Kentucky history for decades, acting as a pillar for the agriculture economy – it provided nearly 50% of farm income in 1964, and continues to contribute high numbers today – tobacco sales brought in an estimated $258 million in 2021.

And it has come at a cost. As of 2019, the state of Kentucky had the highest cancer rate – and lung cancer rate – in the country.

“Northern Kentucky has one of the higher rates of smoking in the region,” Stephanie Vogel, who works with the Northern Kentucky Health Department, told Spectrum News.

According to Breathe Easy, 24% of adults in the Northern Kentucky region are smokers, compared to 19% in Greater Cincinnati and 14% nationally.

“Tobacco use is deeply rooted in Kentucky culture and so we believe that continues to play a part in our higher rates,” Vogel added.

What’s next?

Still, polls show that Northern Kentuckians overwhelmingly support smoking bans. According to Live Well Florence, 81% of registered voters in Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties support passing smokefree laws in cities and counties in Kentucky.

Kaplan, for one, went as far as to say that “if you’re a bar only, and you want to allow people to smoke, I’m still not coming to your bar.”

Kaplan thinks “most people are going to be OK” with a smoking ban, especially with the prevalence of families in Northern Kentucky.

“I would be mad if I brought my child somewhere and they allowed smoking,” she said. “I mean, we already know it kills you.”

This story was done in collaboration with the University of Cincinnati. Students Andrea Oberto, Brianna Connock, Brooke Bethel, Hayley Garr, Hunter Kaesemeyer, Jared Dettmer, Maeve Hamlet, Maria Osnaya, Stephanie Scarbrough, and Sydney Asher contributed to this report.