For the first time in the Republican gubernatorial campaign, the top two candidates appeared on stage together, allowing Kentucky voters to hear from both in the same setting outside of their respective campaign events.
Former United Nations Ambassador Kelly Craft and Attorney General Daniel Cameron — polling at 24% and 30%, respectively — took the stage at KET in Lexington, as host Renee Shaw asked questions to the two candidates.
Cameron and Craft were joined by other top candidates: Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles, Somerset Mayor Alan Keck, and former Northern Kentucky attorney Eric Deters.
The 90-minute debate proved how nasty the GOP gubernatorial race has become at times, with both Cameron and Craft spending exorbitant amounts of money on negative TV ads against each other.
Cameron and Craft took the nastiness into the studio and on live TV on Monday night.
While Shaw asked the candidates questions about policy — guns, COVID-19 mandates, abortion, education — she spent the first 20 minutes of the debate asking tough questions about the campaigns of Craft, Cameron, and Deters — the latter whose inclusion surprised those involved in Kentucky politics.
But Deters, who polled in fourth at 6%, met the threshold of participating in the debate.
Shaw started with Cameron. She asked him why he is running for governor, despite leveling claims against former attorney generals — including current Gov. Andy Beshear, who was the former AG — that they used the seat to run for another office.
“I didn’t know that Andy Beshear was going to shut down our entire state for nearly two years,” Cameron said on why he decided to change his mind and run for governor.
Shaw then dug into why she is bringing national issues, such as Critical Race Theory and culture war issues, to Kentucky — and questioning why she’s feeding into this division instead of not addressing issues important to Kentuckians.
Craft, a former United Nations Ambassador, has forked out more than $5.3 million to Axiom Strategies — a Missouri-based GOP political consulting agency — and its media buying division, AxMedia, which has used similar messaging in other gubernatorial campaigns, including Gov. Glenn Youngkin in Virginia.
“Parents are very concerned that they don’t have the right to be engaged in their child’s education,” Craft said.
Before moving on to more policy-based questions, Shaw turned to Deters’ legal issues, including his pleading guilty to menacing his nephew and a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling that determined Deters was unfit to practice law.
“The Kentucky Bar Association sided with KBA and determined that you do not possess the requisite character fitness and moral qualification to practice law,” Shaw said. “The opinion’s conclusion states, ‘Deters practice of law is not governed by the constitution, rule of law or procedure. It is anarchy.’ Given that decision by the state’s highest court, Why should voters trust you as governor of Kentucky?”
“The reality is that people trust me because I fought that battle,” Deters said in response.
Deters filed a lawsuit challenging Kelly Craft’s residency earlier in the day that questions whether Craft meets the residency required for Kentucky gubernatorial candidates. The Kentucky Constitution requires that gubernatorial candidates be Kentucky residents at least six years before the election.
“That is absolutely not true,” Craft said. “I was born in Kentucky. I was raised in Kentucky. I graduated from public high school and the University of Kentucky.”
It seemed the tough part of the debate was over — it wasn’t, though Quarles, who sits in third at 15%, and Keck wished it were, with both candidates not divulging into the heated arguments between Craft, Deters, and Cameron.
Cameron and Craft were seated next to each other, and the first testy exchange between them came over the support of law enforcement.
Craft accused Cameron of allowing the Department of Justice to enter the state and weigh in on the Breonna Taylor murder. United States Attorney General Merrick Garland found that the Louisville Metro Police Department violated the constitutional right of its citizens.
Cameron fired back that he can’t stop the DOJ from coming into the state and investigating, before saying Craft doesn’t understand how it works, before saying she only has one law enforcement agency supporting her.
“I’m going to continue to fight for them (law enforcement) whether Kelly Craft spends $10 million attacking me or not,” Cameron said, boasting that more than 100 law enforcement officers have endorsed him.
Craft then brought up an ethics complaint filed by Northern Kentucky Attorney Steve Megerle over an alleged conflict of interest involving a legal challenge over slot-style “gray machines.”
Email records from the attorney general’s office show Cameron recused himself from the case on March 31.
“I had someone approach me with the information, and they were uncomfortable filing the complaint themselves or having me file it on their behalf because of the fact that it was alleging an ethical complaint against the attorney general,” Megerle recently said, noting that he could not share the details of the “someone.”
Cameron then turned his attention to Megerle, a former Covington City Commissioner who resigned over ethics issues.
In 2019, while running for Cincinnati School Board, Megerle used a stock image of a black family behind an “Elect Megerle” slogan in a political ad. Megerle himself was not pictured in the ad. Mike Moroski of the Cincinnati School Board accused Megerle of “pretending to be black to get votes.”
“She got somebody who lacks credibility to file a complaint,” Cameron said. “He has his own campaign finance violations. On top of that, when he ran for school board, he’s a white guy pretending to be black.”
Craft and Cameron’s campaigns have taken extensive jabs at each other in recent weeks, primarily through TV ads. Total ad spend as of April 27 has been $8.43 million, according to Medium Buying.
For Craft, most of her campaign money has come via a $7 million personal loan. Her billionaire coal magnate husband gave $1.5 million to the Commonwealth PAC that is spending to attack Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
Recent reports show that Craft’s $1.5 million donation to the PAC might have violated state election finance law.
“The head of the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance said, ‘It certainly raises concerns about potential coordination between your campaign and the PAC, which is a violation of state law.’ Your response?” Shaw asked.
“I was not aware of my husband’s contributions,” Craft said.
Deters also lobbed a significant number of attacks at Craft and said that the former U.N. Ambassador is trying to buy the governorship.
“We need to protect Kentuckians from an Oklahamian trying to buy the governorship,” Deters said.
At times, the debate seemed unruly, with Shaw trying to get the debate back on track. Keck and Quarles, who have stayed out of the negative parts of the campaign, spent much less time on screen because of their civility.
“The last 10 minutes or so are why people are sick of politics in America,” Keck said. “It’s ‘he said, she said, we’re going to spend a pile of money to tear each other down.'”