The running mates in Kentucky's contentious Republican primary for governor tested their candidates' messages before a statewide television audience Monday night in the first of two pivotal debates ahead of the May 19 election.
The debate was overshadowed early by tensions between the campaigns of James Comer and Hal Heiner. Chris McDaniel, Comer's running mate, attacked Heiner running mate KC Crosbie for her and her husband's contact with a blogger that has accused Comer of committing a crime while in college. The allegation is unproven and Comer has denied it. McDaniel took the contact personally, noting that the same blogger has made threatening comments online toward his children in the past.
"Frankly, KC, I've been appalled with what I have seen over the past several weeks related to this," McDaniel said at the start of the hour long program broadcast on Kentucky Educational Television.
Crosbie told reporters after the debate that she had no contact with the blogger other than being copied on a few emails. She told McDaniel during the debate that she and Heiner have been running a positive campaign and noted that Heiner apologized — which McDaniel quickly rejected as "a conditional response."
It was the first public confrontation between the campaigns since the Heiner campaign's connections to the blogger first surfaced in the Lexington Herald-Leader last week. Although the Heiner campaign has not aired negative ads, it has benefited from attack ads from the nonprofit Citizens for a Sound Government, which employs Heiner's former campaign manager as an adviser. Comer's campaign has paid for a website and some direct mail pieces attacking Heiner.
Many voters are just now starting to tune in to a campaign that has been months in the making but has lacked the saturation of the recently completed 2014 U.S. Senate race, where stratospheric spending dominated the airwaves and mailboxes of Kentucky voters for months. Monday's lieutenant governor debate was a dress rehearsal of sorts for next week's scheduled debate between the four Republican gubernatorial candidates, their only joint appearance on statewide TV before the primary.
All four lieutenant governor candidates have political experience, to varying degrees. McDaniel is a Kentucky state senator and chairman of the Senate budget committee. Crosbie is a former councilwoman for the Lexington-Fayette Urban County government and the Republican national committeewoman for Kentucky. Will T. Scott's running mate, Rodney Coffey, is the elected sheriff of Menifee County and past president of the Kentucky Sheriff's Association. Matt Bevin's running mate, Jenean Hampton, has never held public office. But Hampton, an Air Force veteran, ran unsuccessfully for state representative in 2014.
The candidates mostly repeated their campaigns' talking points. Crosbie touted Heiner as a Frankfort outsider who has the experience in the private sector to create badly needed jobs in Kentucky. McDaniel praised Comer as a battle-tested legislative leader who knows how to maneuver the minefields of Kentucky's legislature to pass pivotal legislation.
Hampton also highlighted Bevin's private sector experience but made repeated references to her time in Detroit working for General Motors, at one point saying the next governor needs to make some policy changes or risk Kentucky "going the way of Detroit," the largest American city to file for bankruptcy.
Coffey said he and Scott would have a "veterans friendly administration" and pledged to tackle the drug addiction problem in the state.
But the candidates also showed their inexperience on a question about Kentucky's complex funding formula for public education. Hampton, Crosbie and Coffey sidestepped the question and used it as an opportunity to pledge they would repeal the Common Core educational standards. McDaniel, however, said the formula must be changed so it does not double count the state's public school students, an error he says costs the state $16 million annually.