When statewide candidates stop in Warren County, they often take shots at their opponents and outline their priorities.

The message that Jeff Coleman, seeking the GOP nod for lieutenant governor, brought was different.

“Our politics has been all about broadcasting,” he said during a Thursday night stop in Spring Creek where he met with first responders.

That has “created kind of a toxic environment” where we are “reducing complex people… into just the sum total of your profile picture.”

Coleman didn’t lay out a series of policy positions or campaign promises during the discussion. His message was one of civility.

“I’m fighting to be heard, not for my position,” he said. “If we could in our culture begin to have a conversation about things that matter, we could change things.”

Armstrong’s parents were missionaries and he himself is a Liberty University graduate. He was elected to the state House in the heavily-Democratic 60th District in 2000, making him the youngest member of the House at the time. He stressed he didn’t run a negative campaign in that race.

But he served for just two terms, retiring voluntarily in advance of the 2004 election.

That decision “saved my marriage” and his “relationship with my kids.”

He then worked as a GOP consultant, founding Churchill Strategies and wrote a book in 2016 entitled “With All Due Respect: Recovering the Manners and Civility of Political Combat.”

Flash forward 18 years and the decision to run for lieutenant governor is one where he and his family had to “weigh the impact.”

He and his wife, Rebecca, have four kids and live in Lemoyne, Pa., in Cumberland County.

“We made the decision based on that, (that) lieutenant governor was the job; I thought if there was any place we could restart the conversation on things that matter, it would be this one.”

Coleman said the role of lieutenant governor — presiding over the state Senate — will bring all of the major issues percolating in Harrisburg through his office.

“Right now we have a lot of essentially theater,” he said, with the governor, state House and state Senate taking action; but “none of it is coordinated.

“You have to be no drama,” he stressed. “There is no room for showmanship. The next governor has a little over 1,600 days to get whatever they had promised done. Very little conversation yet has happened about small towns and local communities.

“When you’re not in community with each other, you don’t know what the needs are,” he added. “We’re using this campaign to try to reconnect people to their communities and think about what it would actually mean if we looked at institutions on life support and breathe new life into them.”

County Commissioner Ben Kafferlin said he’s been friends with Coleman for eight or nine years and has been “kind of pressuring him… to get back in the game.”

He said they share a view of public service – that “it is a noble and righteous calling” and said he was “very excited about the prospect” of his campaign.

“I told him he can’t lose,” Kafferlin said. “Even if he gets less votes than someone else in the primary, what he has done is restarted a narrative about civility in politics that I think has died off in the last 10 years and we need to revive it if we are going to succeed as an American democracy.”

He said Coleman would “be an exceptional lieutenant governor” with a “message that is timely and necessary.”

“This is an impossible campaign,” Coleman, with “no big TV ads” but rather “just having conversations one-on-one with people.

“We’re not going to do strategy. The strategy is love the people in front of you, let God kind of tee-up opportunities for that message to be amplified. I really do view this job as an opportunity to put the spotlight on other people.”