This story in the Washington Post makes clear that Republican Governor Matt Bevin list because of his mean-spirited attacks on teachers, who are respected members of their communities. It was no accident that Bevin’s Democratic opponent Andy Beshear selected a teacher as his running mate.

When they marched on the statehouse in Frankfort, Ky., in the midst of a spring snowstorm and a political firestorm last year, teachers warned the governor: “We’ll remember in November.”

Nearly 20 months later, they appeared to have delivered on that promise, helping Democrat Andy Beshear receive about 5,100 more votes than Republican incumbent Matt Bevin in the Kentucky governor’s race. It is a state President Trump carried by 30 points in 2016.

Beshear’s apparent victory comes amid a national teacher uprising in which educators have staged walkouts in more than a dozen states — and some of the nation’s largest school systems — including conservative states like Kentucky.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Beshear gave credit to teachers.

“Your courage to stand up and fight against all of the bullying and name-calling helped galvanize our entire state,” said Beshear, who chose a teacher as his running mate. “To our educators, this is your victory.”

As attorney general, Beshear sued Bevin over his attempt to overhaul the teacher pension plan and prevailed. When Bevin sought educators’ records to investigate them for missing school to attend walkouts, Beshear sued to block the subpoena.

Educators in Kentucky — Republicans and Democrats — harnessed the momentum of those walkouts to try to propel Beshear to the governor’s office, with teacher volunteers proving key to the campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, said David Turner, spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association.

Teachers had walked out of their classrooms over a middle-of-the-night amendment the governor pushed through to alter teacher pensions. Teachers ultimately prevailed, but not before Bevin lashed out, calling them “thuggish.” He suggested without evidence that children were being sexually assaulted and were using drugs while teachers protested, and later blamed the shooting of a 7-year-old girl on the walkout.

“We used Matt Bevin’s words against him,” Turner said. His comments “really incensed not just teachers, but the folks who are friends of families of the teachers, the neighbors of teachers…”

Ashlee Kinney, a special-education teacher at West Jessamine High in Nicholasville, Ky., is a lifelong Republican who had never voted for a Democrat for governor before Tuesday. A devout Christian, she is antiabortion, a position that puts her at odds with Beshear. But she said she worried more about the damage Bevin could do to schools than she did about how much Beshear could advance abortion rights.

Beshear, she said, is “a Kentucky boy and I feel like everywhere he goes he’s very polite and he’s very kind.”

“I feel like he cares for the poor and the less fortunate, and in my job, those are the kids I am teaching,” Kinney said.