Republican Russell Coleman, a former U.S. attorney, is elected KY attorney general

Kentuckians on Tuesday elected Russell Coleman, a Republican lawyer and lobbyist from Louisville, as the state’s next attorney general.

He defeated Pamela Stevenson, a Democratic state representative from Louisville. The Associated Press and several other news organizations called the race by around 9 p.m. Tuesday.

“Voters selected a proven conservative who will protect Kentucky from the lawlessness brought on by the soft-on-crime, big-government policies of liberal Democrats,” the Republican Attorneys General Association said in a congratulatory statement late Tuesday.

Coleman will succeed Daniel Cameron, who served a single term as the state’s top lawyer before running this year as the Republican nominee for governor.

Kentucky’s attorney general is its top prosecutor on criminal matters, working with locally elected county attorneys and commonwealth’s attorneys. The office also is the commonwealth’s primary lawyer, advising state agencies and the legislature on the law.

The attorney general also investigates consumer-protection complaints and represents the interests of utility ratepayers before the state’s Public Service Commission.

The current salary is just under $150,000.

A Western Kentucky native, Coleman is a former FBI special agent who served from 2017 to 2021 as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, appointed by President Donald Trump. Earlier in his career, he was legal counsel for U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

He’s a partner with the mega-firm of Frost Brown Todd, practicing white-collar criminal defense law and assisting with internal investigations, and he has lobbied in Washington and elsewhere for the firm’s CivicPoint government relations subsidiary.

Campaigning as “a law and order conservative,” Coleman won the endorsements of the Kentucky State Fraternal Order of Police, the National Rifle Association and the anti-abortion group Kentucky Right to Life.

He said his office would crack down on illegal drug sales and violent criminals.

“When I served as U.S. attorney,” Coleman told the Herald-Leader recently, ”I brought every local, state and federal law enforcement agency together around a single mission: taking criminals off the streets and putting them behind bars where they belong. That’s exactly what I’ll do again as attorney general.”

Coleman also pledged to “stand up to the Biden administration,” featuring images of Democratic President Joe Biden — an unpopular figure in Kentucky — in his commercials.

Cameron, the outgoing attorney general, made a point of criticizing and sometimes suing the Biden administration and Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear when he disagreed with them on policy matters, such as immigration, COVID-19 public health restrictions and abortion.

That model could continue under Coleman, who told the Herald-Leader he would prioritize “protecting Kentucky from Washington’s overreach.”

On the other hand, Coleman sometimes has been the voice for “criminal-justice reform,” or finding a way to help people back into society after they are convicted of crimes rather than simply packing the prisons.

As a lobbyist, his clients have included reform groups urging earlier parole, better re-entry programs for former inmates and more addiction treatment in certain “common sense” cases, as he calls them.

Coleman and an outside Republican group supporting him, the Kentucky Freedom Fund, attacked his Democratic opponent, Stevenson, as “a radical liberal” who would have been soft on street criminals as attorney general.

Coleman’s campaign also frequently noted that Stevenson — who opened a law firm in southern Indiana after retiring as a military attorney from the U.S. Air Force in 2011 — was not authorized by the Kentucky Bar Association to practice law in Kentucky until this year, whereas he has been a Kentucky lawyer for about 20 years.

In their most recent campaign-finance disclosures, in late October, Coleman reported a large fundraising advantage over Stevenson, with $1.1 million in receipts to her $287,012.

Some of Coleman’s support came from the network of Washington and Frankfort lobbyists and political action committees that typically back former McConnell aides when they seek elected office.

Some PACs donating to Coleman represent industries, like utilities and health care, that he would be required to watchdog as attorney general.

Separately, the candidates got a lot of outside assistance from two national partisan groups.

According to Medium Buying, a political ad buying and tracking firm, the Republican Attorneys General Association’s Kentucky Freedom Fund planned to spend $1.12 million to help Coleman in the final weeks of the campaign, and the Democratic Attorneys General Association’s People’s Lawyer Project expected to spend $756,000 on Stevenson’s behalf.

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