Kentucky GOP redistricting maps go public, and the losers are quick to see problems
Maps of Republican-drawn political districts got their first hard look on Wednesday at Kentucky’s Capitol after months of work in private.
Among the remarked-on changes: Central Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District would skew more Republican by losing heavily Democratic Franklin County; urban Jefferson and Fayette counties, where one-fourth of Kentuckians live, would see much of their legislative districts spread across suburban counties and outlying rural areas; and in some of this year’s races, declared candidates no longer have homes in the district where they’ve already filed.
For example, this year promised an exciting race to replace the retiring longtime Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr, R-Lexington, in southern Fayette County’s 12th Senate District.
As of Monday, four people — three Republicans and a Democrat who came within 772 votes of beating Kerr in 2018 — had declared their candidacy for the seat.
Then, on Tuesday, Senate GOP leaders shared their chamber’s political redistricting plan with the public.
And the newly redrawn 12th Senate District ain’t what it used to be. Much of it would slide to the west along the Jessamine County line, and it would lose a section of south Lexington suburbs while picking up the counties of Woodford, Mercer and Boyle.
The new 12th Senate District now appears to exclude the homes of three of the four declared candidates: Democrat Paula Setser-Kissick and Republicans Andrew Cooperrider and Ross Mann, all of whom live in the suburbs of south Lexington.
Only Amanda Mays Bledsoe, a Republican and a member of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council, would seem to remain a viable candidate for that Senate seat.
Bledsoe on Wednesday said she did not ask for the changes, adding that she feels “terrible” for the other three candidates.
“I honestly don’t know what to say,” Bledsoe said. “I had nothing to do with it. I was as surprised as everyone else.”
Setser-Kissick, a retired educator and education consultant, said Senate Republican leaders deliberately targeted her home address during redistricting because of how well she did against Kerr in the 2018 election.
“They absolutely knew that I was going to win the currently drawn 12th District,” said Setser-Kissick. “I literally have zero doubt that we were going to win the 12th District as it currently stands.”
The office of Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the district map.
Mann, a lawyer, said he was “disappointed and disgusted” to see himself and two other candidates bumped out of the Senate district.
“These types of political games and chicanery are the reason that people like me, who are not entrenched in the political system, are not involved,” Mann said.
Mann said he has not ruled out a legal challenge.
“Everything is on the table. Nothing is off the table. At the same time, if you are up against the system, when the leadership has anointed and selected their candidate, I don’t know what you can do about it,” he said.
The other Republican who would be removed from the district, Cooperrider, is a Lexington coffee shop owner who made news last year by resisting Gov. Andy Beshear’s COVID-19 restrictions.
In a Facebook Live broadcast on Wednesday, Cooperrider said he would reserve comment on the district map changes for the moment.
“We don’t want to talk about it yet,” Cooperrider said. “Let’s see what sort of amendments get proposed as far as my race.”
Fayette loses a Senate seat
Despite some objections, mostly from the legislature’s Democratic minority, House and Senate committees on Wednesday passed the bills containing the political redistricting maps and sent them to their respective chambers for further action this week.
The General Assembly hopes to be finished with this task — and with postponing the 2022 candidate filing deadline from Friday to Jan. 25 — by Saturday.
Not everyone who objected was a Democrat, though. Sen. Adrienne Southworth, R-Lawrenceberg, asked why Fayette County — with about 323,000 people — would only get one Senate district of its own, but it would share pie wedges of six more Senate district with outlying counties.
At present, Lexington’s Fayette County has two Senate districts within its borders, Southworth said.
“Fayette County, by the math, is large enough for two districts,” she told the Senate Committee on State and Local Government.
Stivers, the Senate president, said giving more districts entirely to Fayette County would have meant splitting up more counties elsewhere, something that lawmakers hoped to avoid.
Her own district, Southworth said, was radically changed and lost around 100,000 people; it kept only Anderson County. The rest of the district shifted to Shelby and Henry Counties, as well as part of Jefferson County.
Southworth also said she was disappointed to see the redrawn 1st Congressional District stretch all the way from Fulton County on the Mississippi River to her current state Senate district in Anderson and Franklin counties in the Bluegrass region.
She also shared over Twitter an alternative map that featured a much less prominent tail on District 1.
That district’s tail has been criticized by several observers, including Southworth who referred to it as an instance of possible gerrymandering. Comer’s primary opponent David Sharp said that the district was drawn to include Frankfort, where he says Comer lives. Comer and his wife do own a house in Franklin County, but he also owns several properties and a house with his wife in Monroe County where he is from according to local property value administrators.
“The First District now might have a representative that lives 5+ hours from them in a totally different section of the state,” Sharp wrote. “We deserve better.”
Comer’s camp responded sharply, making note of Comer’s recent tour of tornado-ravaged areas in West Kentucky.
“Congressman Comer was in Hopkins County all day yesterday,” Comer communications director Matt Smith said. “Considering nobody there has ever heard of Mr. Sharp, he has no response to his ramblings.”
Southworth joined Senate Majority Leader Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville, who objected to the short timeline for passage, in voting against the bill in committee.
The committee also voted to pass a new map for the Kentucky Supreme Court, which has not changed in many years. Nemes co-sponsored the bill and said that changes were needed to conform with population shifts; under the current map, Eastern Kentucky’s 7th District has around 476,000 people while Central Kentucky’s 5th District serves 738,000 people. The new map would accordingly shift boundaries to bring districts closer to parity.
Covington split three ways
Meanwhile, a House committee passed bills containing that chamber’s district maps, plus a map for the new Kentucky Supreme Court districts and the candidate filing deadline extension.
The House redistricting sponsor, Rep. Jerry Miller, R-Eastwood, touted Republicans’ efforts to split few counties with new district lines, saying that the 23 counties split was the “fewest possible.”
However, Rep. Buddy Wheatley, D-Covington, complained the Northern Kentucky city of Covington would be split three ways in the new House map. Wheatley said there has been a “Covington-centric” legislator in Frankfort for nearly 200 years, focused on that city’s concerns, but that no longer would be true.
Miller replied that a population boom in the outlying suburban areas made the change necessary.
“The south end of your county grew astronomically,” Miller said. “… the people that used to live in Covington don’t live in Covington anymore.”
Rep. Attica Scott, D-Louisville, complained during the House committee hearing that only one person from the West End of Louisville, an NAACP leader, was consulted by legislative leaders when the districts were drawn.
“My issue is … the people that I represent were not included in this decision making,” Scott said. “One person does not speak for tens of thousands in the West End of Louisville and in District 41.”
The League of Women Voters offered a statement after the committee vote expressing disappointment that the map appeared to explicitly protect incumbents.
Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Louisville, went on offense by citing district maps previously drawn by House Democrats that he thought were unfair. As a private attorney, Nemes represented Rep. Joseph Fischer, R-Ft. Thomas, in a legal challenge to those maps a decade ago.
“It was about clinging to power,” Nemes said. “Because we don’t have to cling to power, we have super-majorities, we didn’t do that.”
This story was originally published January 5, 2022 at 4:07 PM.
