Beshear endorsed by Republican state senator who says Bevin ‘failed miserably’
Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear has picked up the endorsement of a sitting Republican state senator in his effort to unseat Gov. Matt Bevin.
Sen. Dan Seum of Fairdale appeared in a video with Beshear, the Democratic nominee for Kentucky governor, in which he criticized the Republican governor and said Beshear has his support in November.
“This is not about partisan politics, this is about who’s going to lead this state in the next four years,” Seum said. “Today, we have a governor who failed miserably on the pension issue and spent the last year running around the state insulting everyone, including the four teachers in my family.”
Bevin’s campaign manager, Davis Paine, ignored Seum’s criticism of the governor and used the endorsement to criticize Beshear on immigration and abortion.
“If Senator Seum wants to support sanctuary cities and abortion up until the moment of birth, that’s his decision to make,” Paine said. “Governor Bevin has been endorsed by President Trump, the NRA, and Kentucky Right to Life.”
Seum, an advocate for legalizing medicinal marijuana, has served in the legislature off and on since 1982. He has held his current seat in the state Senate, where he represents Bullitt County and southern Louisville, since 1995. He was a member of the Senate’s Republican leadership team prior to the 2019 legislative session, serving as Majority Caucus Chair, but lost his leadership position to Sen. Julie Raque Adams, R-Louisville.
In 1999, Seum switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, giving Republicans control of the state Senate.
Bevin has had a love-hate relationship with the legislature in his time as governor. After swiftly enacting several conservative policy goals shortly after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2016, Bevin lost some of his support in the House when he called for the resignation of then-House Speaker Jeff Hoover and three other representatives who had been involved in a secret settlement deal with a staffer who accused them of sexual harassment.
The relationship only got worse as lawmakers tried to take on pension reform. As lawmakers attempted to find enough votes to pass a pension overhaul bill, Bevin’s comments toward teachers aggravated opponents and made finding compromise more difficult. In particular, Bevin received bipartisan condemnation for saying teacher protests in Frankfort for better education funding probably led to the sexual assault of children.
Seum voted for the legislature’s controversial pension bill in the 2018 legislative session, which was later set aside by the Kentucky Supreme Court in a lawsuit spearheaded by Beshear.
On Monday, the senator who sponsored that pension bill, former Sen. Joe Bowen, R-Owensboro, had harsh words for Seum.
“Dan if you weren’t still serving only to pad your pension then maybe this would be a statement,” Bowen wrote on Twitter. “In all due respect you need to go home and save the state some pension money....maybe the savings would go to a worthy state retiree.”
Beshear’s campaign is attempting to win over Republicans who may be angry with the way Bevin has handled the pension issue. His campaign mantra, which he repeated in the endorsement video, is that the race “isn’t about right or left,” but about “right versus wrong.”
This story was originally published July 29, 2019 at 11:19 AM.