With their only face-to-face debate and Election Day looming, Kentucky’s U.S. Senate candidates were at the same event Thursday night for the first time in two months.
Incumbent Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Democratic candidate Jim Gray both attended an open-air Red, White and Blue forum in Owensboro, trying to drum up votes on a chilly Thursday evening.
Gray, the mayor of Lexington, criticized Paul for not supporting a bill that would shore up the ailing pensions of United Mine Workers of America members using money from the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund.
“Wendell Ford would have been with these mine workers that are losing their pensions and their benefits,” Gray said of Kentucky’s former long-term Democratic Senator from Owensboro. “Now I’ll tell you, I’m going to be a senator like Wendell Ford.”
Paul indicated last month he wouldn’t vote for the bill, saying that he was in favor of the concept but thought that a solution should help all miner pensions, not just those of the UMWA union.
The union’s pension fund has dwindled as the number of coal miners employed in the country and represented by the union has declined. The last UMWA mine in Kentucky closed in 2014.
During his speech on Thursday evening, Paul said the solution to the problem is to “stop hurting the coal miner.”
“The war on coal has killed the coal industry,” Paul said. “Why are the pension funds short? Why is this miner suffering because his pension is short? It’s because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama killed the coal industry. They can’t contribute to the pension because of the war on coal.”
Paul and Gray will meet in their first and only in-person debate on Monday night. The event will be televised live on KET.
Public polling on Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race has been scarce this year. A Babbage Cofounder Pulse poll from mid-October showed Paul leading Gray 33 percent to 26.5 percent with 40 percent of would-be voters undecided.
