Palm Beach County Democratic Chairman Mark Alan Siegel, who earlier this week frowned at the prospect of Delray Beach Democratic state Rep. Kevin Rader running for state Senate, says he’ll back Rader now that the freshman Representative has launched a Senate campaign.

“I’m going to support him. He’s shown himself to be an outstanding legislator and obviously he’ll be very good in the Senate,” Siegel said.

Siegel also spoke glowingly of Rader earlier this week, but said it would be bad for the party if Rader ran for Senate and created a Democratic primary for that seat (Fort Myers attorney Peter Burkert is also running as a Dem) and for Rader’s House seat (several Democrats are likely to run for it now that Rader is leaving).

Rader on Thursday officially announced his plans to run for the seat of Sen. Dave Aronberg, D-Greenacres, who’s running for attorney general. Senate District 27 runs from West Palm Beach to Fort Myers, with roughly equal numbers of voters in Lee and Palm Beach County. In a Democratic primary, however, Palm Beach County has roughly a 2-to-1 advantage.

Rader has announced endorsements from some of Palm Beach County’s big Democratic guns: U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, state Sen. Ted Deutch, County Commissioners Burt Aaronson and Shelley Vana, state Rep. Mark Pafford and Tax Collector Anne Gannon.

Tags: Kevin Rader, Mark Alan Siegel, Peter Burkert

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Dave Aronberg, George Bennett, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.