Joe Biden will not win Kentucky next November. No Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state since 1996, and Biden’s most recent public approval number there, an anemic 22%, doesn’t exactly suggest he is primed to break the streak. Yet the president’s campaign team believes that Kentucky may have just provided Biden with a roadmap to reelection. Not simply because in early November, Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat in a deep red state, won a second term by five points. Certainly that’s encouraging, generally. “The Republicans spent $30 million, most of it on negative ads, mostly aimed at Biden and his record, to make it a proxy war clash in a red state,” a presidential ally says. “And it didn’t work. That is a good sign.”

It is the specifics of Beshear’s playbook, though, that have Biden’s camp intrigued, because it believes those tactics can be replicated nationally in 2024. What drew the most attention during the Kentucky contest, at least from the media, was the way Beshear played offense on abortion. When the Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade, it triggered a Kentucky law banning nearly all abortions in the state, including in cases of rape or incest. Daniel Cameron, the Republican nominee for governor, said he supported that law—and Beshear’s campaign made Cameron pay for that position. “For years, Democrats in red states would often be hiding in a corner when someone said the word abortion,” says Eric Hyers, who was Beshear’s campaign manager. “Post-Dobbs, I think the ground has totally shifted, and what is on the table are the real-world implications.” Beshear’s campaign made those consequences vivid with a harrowing and effective ad featuring Hadley Duvall, who at the age of 12 had been raped and impregnated by her stepfather.

Abortion will again be a central subject in 2024. But Beshear won in Kentucky because he also paid close attention to less dramatic topics—and many of them are ripe for Biden to exploit too. Instead of only talking about employment statistics or millions in government spending, Beshear made sure to illustrate who was working and which roads had been repaired. “We got hypergranular with our messaging,” Hyers says. “It wasn’t just, ‘Infrastructure is important to me.’ It was, ‘Hey, you see that bridge in your community? We’re fixing it.’”

Hyers believes that that kind of attention to detail is transferable to the president’s 2024 campaign—and he has some extra credibility in making that assessment. In 2020, Hyers was the Biden campaign’s state director for Michigan, where he helped deliver a crucial swing state that Donald Trump had won in 2016, and one of the battleground states where recent polls show Trump ahead again. “Certainly a race for governor in one state is very different than running in 50 states,” Hyers says. “But Biden and Beshear both know it isn’t about signing ceremonies in the Rose Garden or the state capitol. It’s the real-world impact that resonates.”

Biden’s campaign is indeed studying what worked for Beshear, especially in the suburban counties bordering Cincinnati, the kind of districts that will be up for grabs in other states in a Trump-Biden rematch. Beshear outperformed his results in those areas from four years ago by hammering Cameron as an extremist. “It’s the kind of thing you’re seeing us do this week by talking about Trump’s America in 2025,” the Biden ally says, “all the things he’s actually proposing, like mass detention centers for immigrants—and nothing to curb gun violence.”

Beshear also outspent Cameron, and he started with a few strengths that don’t look as if they will be available to Biden. The governor remained popular during his first term, even as Republicans increased their dominance of other state offices, a standing boosted by his responses to a series of natural disasters. Perhaps most important, Beshear was able to position himself as a moderate who was focused on competent governance rather than ideological wars, but one who could turn cultural issues to his advantage when necessary. “The way Andy talked about abortion or transgender questions, the issue became about empathy, not labels,” Hyers says. “I hope Democrats look at it as a model for how to deal with these attacks.”

Scott Jennings spent years as a top adviser to Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s powerful senior US senator, and is now a Republican commentator and consultant. He gives credit to Beshear’s campaign, but is skeptical it provides much of an example for Biden. “Any incumbent race is a question of whether this person has committed a firing offense—and inflation may be a firing offense for voters, nationally,” Jennings says. “Beshear was able to distance himself from the president. Biden can’t not be Biden.”