Photo credit: thegatewaypundit.com

Not to temper the excitement about this historic development, but in the Old Confederacy and border states like Kentucky, voter registration is very often a lagging indicator and not necessarily a leading indicator. Kentucky, like most of the South, started accelerating to the right at the ballot box during the Gingrich Revolution of the mid-1990s but it has taken years, even decades, for party registration to catch up.

Most southern states don't even have party registration, but ones which do (Louisiana and Oklahoma for example) have been showing the same thing as Kentucky for years: they were voting for Republicans -- first nationally, then statewide, then locally -- even when voter registration was still overwhelmingly Democrat.

To illustrate how much this "news" lags behind reality, consider that Kentucky has already been voting reliably Republican for President since 1980 (with the exception of Perot handing a couple of narrow wins to Clinton); they began totally voting GOP for Senate in the early 1990s; they first elected Republicans to lower statewide offices in 2003 and currently have nothing but Republicans holding those offices; their state Senate flipped from D to R as of 2000 but the state House only flipped as of 2016. That's a normal progression for a Southern state, and the fact that voter registration stats are finally catching up really doesn't mean a whole lot though it is nice to see.