County Read No. 11 · Bullitt County
Bullitt County's Democratic vote hasn't moved in sixteen years
Louisville's southern exurb swings 37 points between a Trump ballot and a Beshear ballot — the widest in the series so far — and none of it is Democrats. About 10,000 people vote for the Democrat in Bullitt County every time, in every kind of year. The Republican vote goes from 14,000 to 32,000. Four legislative seats, four Republicans, four with no opponent.
LOUISVILLE — Eleventh of twenty, and the first county of the back half. Same five questions: the paper, the ballots, the turnout, the map, the money. Bullitt answers all five with the same number.
What the paper says. Bullitt County has 65,077 registered voters on the August file: 21,254 Democrats, 36,099 Republicans, 7,724 in neither column. That's 32.7% Democratic, 55.5% Republican, 11.9% no-party — the first county in the series where the Republican column is an outright majority of the file. In 2010 it was 55.6% Democratic and 36.9% Republican. Same inheritance as Warren and Daviess, corrected faster: the Republican column has nearly doubled, 18,495 to 36,099, and the Democratic column lost 6,600 people in a county that grew by 14,900. The purge since Election Day 2024 was light here — 218 names net — but the columns kept moving underneath it: Democrats down 1,065, Republicans up 532, no-party up 315.
What the ballots say. Read the Democratic number across the bottom of this chart, and then read the Republican one.
Trump carried Bullitt County by 51 points in 2024, 32,299 to 10,280 — a 22,019-vote margin, fourteen points wider than Boone and the widest presidential margin of the eleven counties so far. Daniel Cameron carried it by 14 in 2023, 14,235 to 10,723. That's a 36.9-point swing between consecutive Novembers, the widest of the eleven counties so far, past Madison's 34.3 — and it's a different kind of swing from Madison's, because look at what moved. The Democratic vote didn't. Obama got 10,177 here in 2008 and 9,971 in 2012. Clinton got 8,255, Biden 10,551, Harris 10,280. Beshear got 11,275 in 2019 and 10,723 in 2023 — more votes, on an off-year ballot, than Harris got on a presidential one. Bullitt is also one of two counties in the twenty where Beshear did worse in 2023 than in 2019, by two points; Christian is the other. There is a Democratic vote in Bullitt County and it's ten thousand people, give or take, whoever's running and whatever the year.
The Republican vote is the swing. Cameron got 14,235. Trump got 32,299 twelve months later. Eighteen thousand Bullitt County Republicans vote for president and don't vote for governor, and the ones who do vote for governor split closer than the ones who don't. Beshear's 43% here isn't persuasion on the scale Madison or Daviess shows; it's a fixed Democratic floor against a Republican column that only half shows up.
Who's turning out. The numbers underneath that.
In 2023, 41.0% of Bullitt's registered Democrats voted and 42.2% of its Republicans did — a point apart. In 2024, 62.4% of the Democrats and 72.5% of the Republicans — ten points, one of the widest presidential-year gaps in the series. That ten-point gap on a 36,000-voter Republican column is the whole story of the swing: an off-year loses 11,000 Republican votes and 1,100 Democratic ones. The no-party column, 7,724 voters, turned out at 50.5% in 2024 — high for that column — and 21.5% in 2023.
Bullitt County's Democratic vote is 10,000 people in every year since 2008. Its Republican vote is 14,000 in a governor's year and 32,000 in a presidential one. The 37-point swing is entirely the second number.
Where it happens. Forty-five of 47 precincts with both years, and the three-election test barely finds anything to color.
No precinct in Bullitt County voted for Harris. Five voted for Trump and then for Beshear — 3,765 votes, Trump by 1,533, Beshear by 76. Forty voted for Trump and for Cameron: 38,065 votes, Trump by 19,819, Cameron by 3,536. That's the county. There's no Democratic core here the way there is in Owensboro or Richmond, and the flip precincts are five small ones that Beshear carried by a combined 76 votes. Bullitt is Louisville's exurb, and it votes like the far side of the exurb everywhere: Beshear loses it by fourteen and calls that a good night, because he lost the state's eleventh-largest county by 3,500 votes where Harris lost it by 22,000.
Across the 49th's 21 Bullitt precincts, Cameron won by 2,073 and Trump by 11,902. Across the 26th's 22, Cameron by 1,378 and Trump by 8,639. The 37th has two precincts here and the rest of it is in Jefferson.
What's on the ballot, and who's paying. Three House districts and one Senate district touch Bullitt County. All four are Republican. All four are unopposed. It's Warren again, at half the money.
Mike Nemes in Senate District 38 has $68,071 and no opponent. Thomas Huff in the 49th — Shepherdsville and the middle of the county — $21,003, no opponent. Peyton Griffee in the 26th, the north end and over into Hardin, $27,844, no opponent. Emily Myers Callaway in the 37th, two precincts here and the rest in southern Jefferson, $21,348, no opponent. A hundred thirty-eight thousand dollars across four accounts, in a county where the governor's race was 57–43, and nobody filed.
I'll say what I said about Warren, shorter: the 49th is a district Cameron carried by 2,073 votes in its Bullitt precincts, in a county he carried by fourteen, and the last time anybody measured a Democrat in it was before the current lines. That's not a seat anyone was going to win this year. It's a seat where nobody will learn anything, either.
The read. Bullitt is the swing county that isn't. It has the widest Trump-to-Beshear gap in the series and the least persuasion behind it: a 10,000-vote Democratic floor that doesn't rise for Beshear and doesn't fall for Harris, and a Republican column that decides the margin by how many of its 36,000 bother. That's the exurban pattern in its purest form — the county is 55% Republican on paper and 75% Republican in a presidential year, and the difference between a 14-point loss and a 51-point loss is the other side's turnout, not yours. Nothing on this ballot tests any of that, because nothing on this ballot is contested. The 37-point swing here is real. It just doesn't belong to anyone who filed.
What I'm watching in November: the Republican turnout rate against 2022's 43.5%. If it comes in near 2024's 72, the county's on a presidential footing in a midterm and every Republican in the state should take note. If it comes in near 2022, Bullitt is a 14-point county in an off-year with nobody on the ballot to make it one.
Monday: McCracken.
Disclosure: I work in Kentucky Democratic politics. I'm not paid by, and don't advise, any candidate named above. I read this county the same way whether or not it's good news for my side — that's the job.