In WEKU's Reporter's notebook series, public radio journalists sit down with others in media, policy and more to offer an in-depth analysis of issues for Central and Eastern Kentucky.
This year’s election season is an important one for Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government.
Six urban county council seats are guaranteed to see turnover, alongside a mayoral race that is being defined, in part, by candidate experience. Incumbent Linda Gorton is seeking her third and final term against first-time candidate and realtor Raquel Carter.
In a Wednesday interview at the Medialex studio, Shepherd Snyder sat down with Adrian Paul Bryant, former city government reporter for the Lexington Herald-Header and CivicLex, to discuss the race.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Snyder: Jumping in, I'm gonna have you just explain who the two candidates are: the incumbent Linda Gorton and also her challenger Raquel Carter. Just who are they? What are their backgrounds and credentials?
Bryant: So Linda Gorton has been Lexington's mayor since 2018. She's seeking a third term for the highest seat in Lexington. Lexington has term limits for mayors, but they're three terms, and so she's seeking her third and final term. She has been on the city council before being mayor in some form or fashion since, I believe, 1996 or 1998. She's been a staple of Lexington politics for a long time. And before becoming mayor, she was the city's vice mayor, which is kind of a deceptive title because really, what the vice mayor is is the council president. It's not anything equivalent to what the vice president or the lieutenant governor do at the federal and state levels. So she's been around for a while and is looking for one last go to cap off her decades-long career in city government.
Raquel Carter is her opponent. Carter, this is the first political campaign she's ever run as a candidate for. She's a realtor. She owns a company called Guide Realty that is a real estate firm for Lexington and Central Kentucky broadly. She was affiliated with a group called Lexington for Everyone that started around 2021 or 2022 or so. They were a group that was formed by a lot of the business leaders and kind of the Chamber of Commerce folks. Initially, their main goal was to push to get the city's urban service boundary expansion approved, and that happened. And since then, they've been doing different campaigns mostly focused around housing policy in the city, and encourage more housing construction through city development. And so her background comes from you know real estate and in the development world.
And that is sort of one of the interesting things about this race, is that in Lexington there are many different political actors in the city. But a sort of easy shorthand to think about how politics works in Lexington is that there are two very large, and typically opposing, interests in the city. One is agriculture, horse farmers, and Linda Gorton has generally been very supportive of the interests of the agricultural community, whether preserving the urban service boundary or fighting hard against solar panels on rural farmland. She's sort of in that wing of things. And Raquel Carter obviously comes from what I would frame as the, often — not always, but often — opposing group, which (is) real estate agents, developers, housing construction people, people who typically want more land added to the city's boundary to build more housing, to build more shopping malls, and things like that. And it's actually, I would say, that at least in terms of when Linda Gorton's been running, it's the first time that we've had two mayoral candidates who both distinctly represent one of those groups.
Snyder: You mentioned earlier Gorton has been this player in Lexington city politics for decades, and this is Carter's first time running for office. How much has that played a part in debates, and how this race is being framed?
Bryant: I think it's pretty essential because Gorton is, I think her tagline is like, ‘Experience matters, especially when it's leading the city,’ or something. A lot of her print materials have some sentence to that effect. And her kind of basic argument is that Lexington has been doing very well since she became mayor, with the exception of — well, she wouldn't frame this as necessarily an exception — but COVID-19 happened when she was mayor, and she has argued that she led Lexington successfully through the pandemic, kept the economy intact as much as anyone could, and has led a strong recovery since then. And so the premise of the Gorton campaign is that the city is doing well and she should be reelected to continue its status as a city that's doing well economically.
And of course, Carter's pitch is kind of the inverse of that, of Linda Gorton's been around too darn long, and the city needs a change and needs a new person and a new vision to sort of push Lexington in a new or different direction. And I think that it's interesting to watch these two campaigns unfold. I personally have questions about what Carter's full vision for what Lexington's next steps could be are that, I don’t know that they've been fully answered. But if you look back at the May primary election results for the mayoral seat, there were multiple candidates, and so there was a primary that narrowed it down to Gorton and Carter — Linda Gordon didn't get 50% of the vote. She got 46 to 47% if I remember correctly, but it was less than half, and she's been around for a very long time. And Raquel Carter was really the only major challenger in that race.
Snyder: You are touching on something that I do want to elaborate on, that in 2022, with the Gorton-Kloiber race, Gorton won that with more than 70% of the vote. This looks like it could potentially be much more close comparatively. This is speculation, but how does this race differ from other mayoral races in the past? Are we seeing a different strategy from Gorton as the incumbent?
Bryant: I don't know that I would say that the strategy is remarkably different for Gorton. I do think if you're comparing this election cycle to 2022, there are a few different things. One is that it's Linda Gorton seeking a third term. She's been around for eight years. And this isn't even about her specifically, but when you have an incumbent that's around for eight years, that's kind of like the max of what most people are used to, at least for like one specific office, because presidents only have two terms, governors only have two terms, you have legislators that can last a longer time. But in terms of an executive office, in most places, two terms is what people are used to.
And I think that, especially in the political climate we are in now, over the last three or four years, incumbents are, across the country, in many different races, are kind of shaking in their boots. Like voters are really mad at just about every incumbent in every kind of office because the economy is in tough shape for many, many people, and there's just a lot of frustration amongst American voters in politics. And again, that's not even something specific to Linda Gorton.
One of the surprise issues in this election has been the winter weather response, and the primary happened fairly soon after the troubled response to the big snow and ice storm at the end of January and February, and then there was that flash freeze event in March that also upset a lot of people. And so there's an argument to be made that that maybe hurt more in the primary than it may in the general. But people are still talking about that. It's been asked about in the mayors' debates and forums and people are bringing it up on their own in conversations. It's certainly been a big issue that I think has been like a challenging one for her campaign.
Snyder: Well, I was just going to say it's something that I know Carter's been attacking Gorton over, and Gorton released her snow plan just, as we're recording this, yesterday. So it's still very much a top of mind issue.
Bryant: Yeah, Carter says that she's going to release her own version of the snow plan tomorrow, as we're recording. So I don't know what that's going to look like. But no, the winter weather response has been a big deal.
I think another thing, too, that was true in 2022, but I think is a bigger issue in 2026, for a variety of reasons, is housing costs in Lexington. Housing costs have increased just like they have everywhere in the country, but Lexington's rent and home prices have increased at a higher rate than many, many American cities, and when you take cities that you know government people talk about, like a Madison, Wisconsin, or even a Cincinnati or Raleigh, North Carolina, a lot of these cities are building more housing per capita than Lexington is by a long shot.
And there's a study in 2024 that said we're 22,000 housing units behind. Housing is a major, major issue across the country. It's a major, major issue in Lexington in a specific way here, not just in sort of the generic sense.
Snyder: Just a follow-up question because we're seeing a lot of these hot-button issues being discussed in city hall, city government, and also just kind of across the nation. And I think, with your background coming from the Herald Leader, and before that CivicLex, I'm wondering your perspective. Do you get the sense more people are paying attention to city government than maybe in the past?
Bryant: I think there's a chance that's true. Thinking back to 2022, and my memory is far from stellar, so maybe there are things I'm forgetting or leaving out here, but the national issues that were going on in 2022, the most prominent one was Roe v. Wade and the threat that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, which eventually happened. And there were questions at mayoral forums to Gorton and then-candidate David Kloiber about what they would do to protect women's right to reproductive health care and abortion and all these things.
And that's a type of national issue that the local government doesn't have zero impact over, but it's very far removed. Gorton can't write a dissenting opinion on the Dobbs decision. It's not to say that there's nothing that can be done, but the city government's hands are way more tied on a national issue like that, as opposed to data centers and Flock cameras, which the fervor around those issues is nationwide. But those are issues that — the city's got a moratorium on data centers, is writing zoning language focused on data centers. The city has had a contract with Flock for ever so many years and can do whatever they want with that. One of the really interesting parts about this election is that the national issues that are being discussed are also issues that local governments do have a lot of control over in a way that I don't think was true in 2022. And because of that, I think there could be a chance that more people are paying attention to the local races, but I don't know if that's true. I have no data to back that up at all. But that is something that I've been thinking a lot about, because I've heard people, you know, people have talked to me, or I've heard people talking about them at coffee shops.
Especially Flock and data centers, these national issues that have trickled into local government — I disagree with that framing. Those are fundamentally local issues, or at least they can be. Of course, the state legislature can tell cities to do whatever the state legislature wants them to do or not do. There are many of many nuances in that, but they are issues that, despite being discussed and argued about and debated nationwide, those do play out in the local level in really, really concrete ways that I don't think are true of many previous national issues that past local candidates have been kind of forced to have answers prepared for.
