In Lexington’s new 93rd KY House District, Lamin Swann faces Kyle Whalen on Nov. 8
Thanks to political redistricting in January, Kentucky’s 93rd House District moved 161 miles west from rural Martin County to the fast-growing suburbs of south-central Lexington.
The new U-shaped district curves from the Nicholasville Road retail corridor outside New Circle Road over to Tates Creek Road, Armstrong Mill Road and Centre Parkway and then down to the Jessamine County line.
And being a new district, the 93rd needs to vote for a new state representative on Nov. 8.
Democrats in the district this year nominated Lamin Swann, 44, a veteran civil-rights advocate and Democratic Party activist. The Republicans selected Kyle Whalen, 64, owner of BACK Construction, a home remodeling firm with about 70 employees, and a longtime volunteer for assorted civic boards and nonprofits.
Swann says he wants Kentucky to provide higher pay for school teachers, a $15 statewide minimum wage, legalized marijuana and sports gambling, a state fairness ordinance extending civil rights to Kentuckians who are LGBTQ+ and legalization of women’s access to abortion.
At a rally in September, Swann said politicians who oppose abortion access “are the people who are going to force a child to have a child and then, nine months later, call her a welfare mom.”
Whalen said he favors letting parents have greater control over their children’s education, simplifying the state tax code so Kentucky is more competitive for jobs and improving the standards for training young people entering the workforce, particularly the skilled trades.
In his campaign materials, Whalen warns that as a businessman he’s “seen what can happen when the heavy hand of government gets in the way.”
Neither man has held elected office, although Swann ran unsuccessfully for the state House, 88th District in 2004 and an at-large seat on the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council in 2010.
Nobody is sure how the district leans politically since it hasn’t yet voted in a general election. One study by the analytics website cnalysis suggests the individual precincts that comprise the 93rd went for Democratic President Joe Biden by a nearly 17-point margin in 2020. If correct, that could be a good sign for Swann.
On the other hand, Whalen has far more campaign money. His most recent finance report shows $82,119 raised for the year, much of it from political action committees or friends and colleagues in the construction industry. Swann has reported just $12,540.
Lamin Swann
Swann’s lifelong interest in social-justice activism comes naturally. One of his grandfathers was William Parker, a vice chancellor of minority affairs at the University of Kentucky from 1984 to 1990 and a founder of the Kentucky Association of Blacks in Higher Education.
For years, Swann worked on Democrats’ political campaigns and participated in civil-rights protests in Kentucky and elsewhere. Early this year, he said, while he was on a Zoom call with the Fayette County Democratic Party Executive Committee, someone mentioned the newly created 93rd House District and the need for a candidate.
“I didn’t really have an interest originally. But when nobody else said they were going to run, I took a second look and said, ‘Wait, I can win this,’” said Swann, who runs a fashion and product design studio just off North Limestone Street. “I know this district. I grew up here.”
Swann has a campaign platform heavy on specific details of how he believes the General Assembly could improve people’s lives. He wants more state funding for public schools, including teacher pay and professional development; fully funded universal pre-K for 4 year olds; more higher education funding, to curb tuition increases; and a repeal of “right to work” laws that made labor union organizing more difficult in recent years.
Parts of the 93rd House District are prosperous while other parts struggle with the high cost of housing and a lack of good jobs, Swann said.
On a recent weeknight, he canvassed in the Centre Parkway neighborhood with Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Charles Booker, who is also an unapologetic political progressive.
“Centre Parkway — those are hardworking people,” Swann said. “But they’re also, a lot of them, in very precarious situations. If they lose their jobs, then it’s not going to be long before they lose their homes. And they live close to some of our wealthiest ZIP codes. You can really see the disparities.
“That’s in my heart, it’s my reason for going to Frankfort, to help these people,” Swann said.
Swann said he understands that if he’s elected, he’ll be a member of the small Democratic minority in the General Assembly, surrounded — and largely ignored — by the Republican super-majority.
“I definitely know that I’m not going to come in and say, ‘Hi, here’s all the legislation that I want to file,’” he said, chuckling.
“If nothing else, I’m going to have to reach across the aisle on a lot of bills,” he said. “And on other stuff, I guess I’ll have to try to shift some of what’s getting passed from the really bad to just the bad.”
Kyle Whalen
Kyle Whalen has followed Kentucky politics, serving as a leader in the local and state home builders associations. Last winter, he saw his chance to get directly involved when Lexington gained a new state House seat that didn’t have an incumbent already filling it.
Politically, Whalen is a conservative who says he opposes abortion and deficit spending and supports what the GOP-majority legislature is doing to lower individual and corporate income taxes while broadening the taxes on goods and services.
He also likes the recent trend of lawmakers paying the state’s full public pension obligations each year for state workers and teachers. But he says until the massive multi-billion-dollar pension debt is paid off, any talk of a state budget “surplus” is illusory.
He describes himself as an advocate for “school choice,” but he doesn’t want to be seen as critical of the schools.
“I think we need to support our parents and our teachers and our students,” Whalen said. “I think we need to have school choice, but I also think we need to fund our public schools, too. But we need to fund at the classroom level.”
Speaking of education, Whalen said, he worries that students are generally all placed “on the college track, and I don’t think that everyone necessarily needs to be on the college track.”
Kentucky has only 58 percent workforce participation, lower than the national average, and employers like him struggle to find skilled workers, he said. More vocational training at lower grade levels can expose students to the career opportunities that are available in skilled trades, he said.
“We need to start that at least in middle school,” he said.
Concerning the opioid crisis, Whalen said he wants to see the state’s Medicaid program spend more on addiction treatment by paying for six months to a year of “sober living” recovery, with the understanding that relapses are common. Funds invested reducing addiction are more than repaid by less crime and demand for social-welfare spending down the road, he said.
Whalen said he’s trying to convince Lexington voters that his would be a calm, steadying voice in Frankfort.
“I get out every night and I’m knocking on doors. I’m hoping they’ll see that I’m a civil person that’s going to provide common sense,” he said. “And I listen, and I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”
This story was originally published October 25, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
