A “no compromise, class struggle message” won Louisville DSA a city council seat this spring according to J.P. Lyninger, the chapter’s candidate. Lyninger’s victory in the District 6 Democratic primary in May leaves him unopposed in the general election.
Lyninger won with 1,169 votes after making over 12,000 voter contacts during the primary campaign. Lyninger is ready to bring democratic socialist politics to Louisville’s City Hall. We spoke with Lyninger, his Louisville DSA mentor Robert LeVertis Bell, and his campaign managers, Nick Condor and Liz Everhart, on choosing to contest the Metro Council seat, running a DSA campaign, canvassing and municipal ownership, and Lyninger’s plans for his time in office.
A District Ready for Democratic Socialism and a Candidate Ready to Fight for It
When the city last redistricted its ward lines in 2021, Louisville DSA knew District 6 would be winnable for a democratic socialist candidate. District 6 is one of the most diverse districts in the Louisville metro in terms of age, race, and income. Lyninger emphasized the visibility of this diversity during his interview and said, “We have big Victorian mansions as single family homes owned by a wealthy retired couple, next door to a similar looking building that got chopped up into tenement housing and apartments.”
The chapter’s Electoral Committee Coordinator, Nick Conder, concurred and cited DSA’s existing presence and past election data as bellwethers. “There’s a high concentration of members that live in that district. Looking at previous election results, the areas that Robert did best in were District 6. During 2020, it was the area Bernie won. The progressive mayoral run in 2018 overlapped with the district and it’s adjacent to the University of Louisville, where lots of students and recent graduates live. We knew immediately there’s a high concentration of young people and left-leaning people who would vote for us.”
Once the chapter identified the favorable terrain, they turned to developing a candidate. “As a chapter, we talked about running someone in this district,” explained Conder, and Lyninger pursued the campaign with the chapter’s approval. “When it came time to make [a decision on who to run], it was J.P. who stepped forward as someone who campaigned and sought the endorsement. The feeling was, if the chapter said no, then we would have dropped out.”
Lyninger joined DSA in 2019 after being recruited by Robert LeVertis Bell, a Louisville DSA member and former Kentucky House of Representatives candidate.
Lyninger said, “Robert was live tweeting the 2019 convention at me and inside baseball is sort of my love language. I got really interested and for the first time saw DSA as a force that was really organizing on the Left.”
LeVertis Bell said, “I was able to give J.P. a really good lay of the land of what the national organization was like, warts and all, and I think he was intrigued by that. It’s a national movement and it is going through growing pains, and he’s someone who likes to know how things work.”
Lyninger then became the campaign manager of LeVertis Bell’s 2020 campaign for State Representative. “Robert’s campaign really changed my life, to get out there and canvass and talk to people to hear people say, ‘my needs aren’t met, no one is listening,’ and to hear them say that they’re ready to organize and fight and sign up for DSA from the doors. It really did change my life,” Lyninger said.
LeVertis Bell also encouraged Lyninger to run for office. He explained how he saw candidate potential in Lyninger. “J.P. was the person to do it: He had the time, know-how and wherewithal, and [we were] building off other campaigns in the city that came just as close if not closer. J.P. is a homeowner in the area, very settled into the neighborhood he lives in, and he’s in it for the long haul. I don’t worry about him changing up politically or getting overwhelmed by the work, or worry about him leaving town.”
An Alternative Vision for Louisville
Housing was one of the many key issues that made it clear to the chapter that District 6’s incumbent Metro Council member was more interested in serving capitalist interests than representing the district residents’ interests. The district seat was not only winnable, but Lyninger’s campaign could provide a meaningful alternative with a democratic vision that served all of the city’s residents and not just real estate, tourism, and police interests.
Lyninger’s own status as a homeowner did not degrade his clarity on the issues with housing, citing his incumbent’s position favoring sweeps over affordable housing as another motivation for his campaign. “Before the primary, the incumbent voted for $14 million earmarked luxury development housing,” Lyninger said. He explained that the incumbent deferred to real estate and preferred sweeps and destroying people’s personal belongings instead of pursuing affordable housing.
Capitalist consolidation of influence on the city’s politics was partially a consequence of the structure of Louisville’s municipal governance. The City of Louisville had merged with its surrounding suburbs into a governing body for the whole county in 2002, creating the Louisville Metro Council. “By the turn of the [21st] century,” Conder explained, “the city had lost a lot of population. People and money moved into the suburbs and Jefferson county.”
This trend is seen in cities across America. LeVertis Bell noted, “Louisville has experienced the same things [smaller cities] have to a lesser degree. Extreme amounts of gentrification, lower amounts of political power for Black and brown people, working people, and because the merger included the suburbs, we have to compete with an economic powerbase that the city didn’t need to compete with pre-merger.”
Merging the city and its suburbs was intended to reduce inefficiencies, consolidate resources, and improve coordination across the county, but Louisville DSA doesn’t see this merger as a positive development for the working class. Conder believes the consolidation has primarily benefited the suburbs. “Essentially, a deal was made that tax dollars in the suburbs could support the needs of an aging urban core, in exchange for a lot of political power granted to the suburbs. Our mayor represents that political base outside the urban core and the majority of the metro council probably answers to that base. It has caused a lot of tension… Rather than using the expanded resources of a merged resource mostly just shoveled the money into the cops and real estate developers.”
The capitalists exploiting the district saw the Lyninger campaign as a clear threat. Conder explained, “We heard property management saying outright, ‘We support the incumbent and we gotta stop J.P.’ Property management companies are the biggest class enemy in the district. District 6 has the highest concentration of renters in Louisville and real estate developers get huge tax breaks from the local and state government.”
The municipal government’s deference to real estate extends to the mayor’s office, and many individuals in government are heavily invested in tourism and the wealth it generates, often at the expense of the health and well-being of the city’s residents. Lyninger said, “The mayor is a downtown real estate developer who’s built a lot of hotels. He’s all about tourism, or Bourbonism, the name we give to people who visit for tours and tastings. That’s what the mayor sees as an economic driver, but that’s not how I see the future of employment in the city.”
The distilleries are a prime example of putting profits over people. They have a negative environmental impact and are often close to residential areas. Campaign Field Director, Liz Everhart said, “In the west end, there’s lots of contamination from the large industrial parks. Mildew whiskey fungus from the distilleries infect people’s homes. There’s quite a few EPA sacrifice zones that are close to people’s housing.”
The city does spend half of its budget on “public safety” in the form of a bloated police budget that displaces resources for other city services. Lyninger said, “Most of the budget is spent on police and jails.” Conder noted. “The metro council has increased the police budget every single year, even in years with recession and budget slashing, not just as a percentage increase but in real dollars. When you do the math, to maintain the increase of police budgeting, the budget for everything else has gone down. Amenities we had twenty years ago no longer exist, and as you might imagine this makes Louisville worse for everyone and makes everyone less safe. That has been the big failure of the Metro Council.”
Lyninger wanted to bring DSA’s vision of democratic control to fight against real-estate, tourism, and police interests that have promoted private control of Louisville.
DSA at the Doors
Louisville DSA was integral to running, and winning, a campaign that threatened these existing entrenched interests. Lyninger said, “Every single member of the campaign staff was DSA cadre.” The chapter beat record spending by building relationships with voters.
The Louisville Metro Council primaries were surprisingly expensive this year. “We spent around $29,000 on the campaign,” Lyninger said. “We were in the middle range. We were outspent by the incumbent and another Metro Council candidate spent $130,000 – especially when you throw in the PAC spending.” Real estate took a special interest in this race and was a prime contributor to opposing campaigns. Conder said, “The real estate industry dumped so much money into these campaigns, with direct PAC contributions from Grow Louisville Together.”
Conder emphasized that the chapter had to rely on people power to combat the money behind the other campaigns. “The chapter cannot spend money on electoral work; in Kentucky, non-profit corporate contributions are not allowed. But endorsement is allowed. We can publicize the endorsement, send updates to members, [and] discuss how to direct volunteers to the campaign. We reported on the campaign at chapter meetings and electoral meetings with updates and soliciting advice.”
Canvassing also played a crucial role in winning the election. Field manager Liz Everhart summed it up: “We knocked a lot, we listened to people when we knocked, we had a lot of volunteers who cared a lot.”
The campaign planned an expansive door to door canvassing strategy. She said, “I think our goal was 10,000 doors. We got to about 12,000 doors and did five passes… J.P. knocked 7000 doors himself.”
Everhart explained how the campaign needed to target different voters to different canvassers. “J.P. was canvassing so much that we could do bifurcated passes, where J.P. would hit a population and the volunteers would hit another one in the same day.” Canvassers would rank the voters they spoke to on a scale from one to five in terms of their level of support. Undecided voters, ranked “three”, would get a follow-up visit from Lyninger. The canvassing script emphasized listening to voters. Everhart said, “We kept the script simple, not a ton of questions, with plenty of time to listen to people built into it. It was meant to be conversational.”
The campaign had the capacity to knock doors across the district for months leading up to the campaign. Once there were two weeks left, the campaign gave canvassers lists to contact during the week, which increased contact with people who weren’t home on the weekend. “Most canvassing is done on the weekend, but doing 30 doors after work gets a new population,” Everhart said.
The campaign also used social media to reach voters. Lyninger explained, “We also did a lot of digital advertising and had a campaign video shot by one of our members that got such a positive response on social media that we used the extra money at the end of the campaign to get the video out with digital advertising.”
The chapter’s existing work built meaningful foundations for the campaign long before the campaign had begun. For instance, a lesson learned over multiple campaign seasons was sending mailers as close to election day as possible. Lyninger said, “We deliberately set up our mailer schedule to be near the backend of the campaign.”
Previous campaigns had also built an existing relationship with voters and had primed them to DSA’s message. “People at the doors already knew of us, and they knew what we were going to say and they liked it,” LeVertis Bell said. “People understood what we meant to be democratic socialists to some degree.”
All four campaign leaders mentioned the chapter’s annual Campaign School as a helpful scaffolding for this campaign and identifying new leaders. For a weekend each year, the chapter invited those interested in electoral organizing to workshops and presentations on leading and volunteering on campaigns. “We divided into two tracks, one for candidates and one for campaign staff over two Saturdays,” said Conder, “and discussed public speaking, fundraising, communications, field planning and turf cutting, and treasurer training.”
He encourages chapters to start their own campaign schools: “I think the main thing to do is sit down and think about a curriculum, then identify the people who have those skills and can teach them. There might be things people in your chapter don’t know how to do, but if you know people in other chapters and [they] can get involved and can teach people. Chapters can reach out to the NEC and ask to see if there’s people who can help advise or recommend and DSA’s electoral staffer.”
Inspiring Voters with Municipal Ownership
Talking to voters was only the beginning of the work. Voter contact works best with a resonant message. “The other challengers also knocked a lot of doors but got different results.” Lyninger said. “We said we are running to represent the working class and that’s what people responded to. We did not say that [the incumbent] wasn’t a Democrat, or that he was different. We said we were different and what we can offer people.”
A proposed municipal grocery store resonated with voters. The campaign proposed a store owned by the city that doesn’t need to make profit to make it easier for buying food. Other cities like Chicago, Jacksonville in Florida, and cities across Kansas are experimenting with municipally owned grocery stores.
“I think something that excited people was the store would be ours. We didn’t have to wait to start, this is something the people decided that this is something we need and something we need to address,” Lyninger said.
After months of high utility bills from Louisville Gas & Electric, the privately owned power subsidiary of Pennsylvania Power & Light, the campaign proposed taking steps toward a municipally owned power company. Lyninger said, “There’s a section of Kentucky state law that states if a city wants to build or purchase their utilities, there will be a vote, and that’s what’s gonna happen.”
The campaign also called out the loss of public housing as the driver of Louisville’s housing crisis. Lyninger said, “Right now, Louisville is in a building boom. We’re giving away money with TIFs [tax increment financing] to build high end luxury units. What we need is low-income housing, subsidized housing, and clean, safe affordable housing.”
The short term priority in office is reinvesting in existing public housing. Conder said, “Existing, older style, housing projects are neglected. There’s no funding for them. The housing authority is not paying attention to the needs of the people who live there. Investing money in the public housing that already exists, making it safe, inhabitable, and a beautiful clean place to live for the people who live in public housing, is the first step. We also have to stop tearing public housing down.”
The campaign discussed how municipal ownership and city investment could empower Louisville’s working class. “We talked about radical solutions to policy,” Lyninger said.
Preparing for Office
Lyninger is running unopposed in the general election this November. He already has plans for his time in office. He said, “On that first budget cycle, I will not vote for an increase in the police budget or a new jail. I think no one is going to listen and we’re going to lose that first fight, but that’s okay. Because then we can go to those other districts and say this is what we proposed and this is what we ran on and what do we need to do about it to make your councilmember listen?”
DSA leaders are hopeful that the board will align on shared policy interests. LeVertis Bell said, “The question is will the other council members buck the majority leadership to support these things. How will they respond to J.P.’s level of agitation and his level of willingness to follow the caucus rules?”
Conder sees the path to change outside board meetings and at the doors of voters. “I think the main thing is organizing. There’s popular support for our policy… Board members are politicians, and people can organize and pressure them to vote. The way it usually works is that donations buy their loyalty.”
The campaign leaders identified one key ally on the board. Shameka Parrish-Wright, a protest leader during the Breonna Taylor protests. Lyninger said, “Shameka is going to be a person right off the bat who will be listening and ready.”
DSA leaders are hopeful that the council can change the two decades of neoliberal privatization with the support of city residents. Everhart said, “I hope we elect more DSA candidates and I hope that leads to people being more involved in local politics. It is actually the form of politics that is most responsive to a small group of people.”
From his DSA experience, Lyninger sees his role as an organizer in office. “I’m just some guy. I don’t have a magic wand. Real change is going to be about organizing and we need to keep fighting and talk to constituents outside the district. Real change will take years. We want to take the people who were excited by the campaign and turn the volunteers into organizers. I told people at the doors, ‘I am an organizer now, and on May 22 I will still be an organizer. I want to use this council seat for organizing.’”