Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman surprised some in the crowd when she didn’t announce a running mate at her gubernatorial campaign rollout in Frankfort Monday morning.
“I am giving a lot of thought to who I would like to choose,” she told Forward Kentucky Monday afternoon in Paducah, her first campaign stop.
“I’m vetting a lot of different folks, and I can tell you that just like [Gov.] Andy [Beshear] choosing me as a teacher sent a message, the person I pick as my running mate will send a message as well about the priorities of my administration.”
Coleman didn’t say when she would announce her selection. But she said she knows “there’s value in having a partner in a campaign because I’ve been through the process.”
Paducah, population about 27,000, is 250 miles west of the state capital in the largely rural, small town Jackson Purchase, Kentucky’s westernmost region. Once dubbed the “Gibraltar of Democracy” for its fealty to Coleman’s party, the region is mostly Republican territory now.
Bowling Green, in south-central Kentucky, was scheduled for her next stop.
Coleman, a former public school teacher, girls’ basketball coach, and administrator, grew up on a farm in Burgin in rural Mercer County. “We have 1,000 people and a four-way stop,” she said.
Coleman said this week she plans to visit “every single part of the state because I’m from one of the smallest towns in Kentucky. I know what it means when you don’t show up.”
She delivered her inaugural stump speech on the road to a large crowd at the Freight House, a farm-to-table restaurant.
She told the gathering that Paducah was her initial campaign stop. “This whole thing has been a really surreal experience for me,” she said, meaning her tenure as lieutenant governor.
Coleman recalled when candidate Beshear, then attorney general, asked her to be his running mate. She was assistant principal at Nelson County High School in Bardstown.
“I was in a parking lot doing bus duty back in the spring of 2018 when I got a phone call from this guy named Andy Beshear. He wanted me to meet him, but I had to wait until after the last bus left the parking lot because I had bus duty.”
Coleman said that when they met, Beshear “could tell that I was genuinely surprised that he had just asked me to run as his lieutenant governor. He said, ‘Well, did you not think that was what we were going to talk about today?’ I said, ‘No, Andy, I just left bus duty.’ The rest is history.”
She called the two term Beshear-Coleman administration “historic. It’s been groundbreaking, and we have built a wonderful foundation for us to know exactly how to move forward and to push ahead in ways that we haven’t been able to before.”
Coleman spoke on several topics but stressed economics. She said the administration has “broken every single economic record on the books” in job creation and in attracting billions of dollars in private sector investment to the state.
“We’ve done all of this while also lowering the temperature in this supercharged political era,” she said. “It has actually helped us get more good things done.”
Coleman said it “is imperative for the next governor, whoever she may be, to build on the economic and workforce development progress that we’ve made but also now turn our sights on a newfound commitment to people development.” She said that meant “removing barriers for families and creating opportunities where they don’t exist.”
Before traveling 150 miles east to Bowling Green, she met with wellwishers and posed for photos and selfies.
(from upper left) Coleman addressing the crowd; talking with two locals afterward; visiting with Rene Kreps; with Roxie Toon, the chair of the Carlisle County Democratic Executive Committee (all photos by Berry Craig)
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