Issue #136: Halloween 2023 Part 1: The Kentucky Coroner Elections

A bloodbath for Democrats

Halloween is quickly upon us, so my annual coverage of coroner elections in America will be wrapping up. As you know, namely because I talk about it every other minute of the day, many counties in America elect coroners. I covered the party makeup of those posts as of 2021 on my main website.

Two weeks ago, I covered the October coroner elections in Lousiana. The Louisiana results showed Democrats continue to lose ground thanks to rural coroner offices, once long held by democrats, flipped. Many flips occurred more due to party switches or retirements.

In Kentucky, Democrats still controlled a large majority of the coroner posts, owing to the longtime down-ballot democratic strength. In 2018, Democrats lost some posts, but still firmly held a majority of counties.

As the Presidential map shows, all but two democratic coroners are in counties Trump won. While Democrats do control the Governor’s office, that is currently the last of democratic strength. The fall of the legislature to the GOP has continued to see the down-ballot realignment take hold. Each cycle has shown county-level posts move more toward how the county votes top of the ticket.

Trust me, this has also been true in suburbia, where once GOP-dominated local bodies moved to Democrats to match Presidential voting patterns. In places like Kentucky, however, there are few GOP suburbs for Democrats to flip. Rather, its a sea of rural voters with Democrats wearing out their welcome.

In 2022, all coroner posts were up. How did Democrats do?

The 2022 Elections

The top of the ticket in Kentucky in 2022 was the US Senate race. Rand Paul ran for a 3rd Senate term, facing Charles Booker of Louisville. The results were never in doubt, with Paul easily winning the election by 23 points.

The real high-profile statewide race in Kentucky was Issue #2, a pro-life ballot measure. This proposal failed, a major victory for the pro-choice movement. I wrote about this measure last year You can read it here.

So how did the local races go for Democrats? All but three counties backed Rand Paul in the Senate race, and Kentucky has straight-ticket voting options. How many of those red-county Democrats would hold on?

When all was said and done, Republicans gained 26 coroner posts! They now control a majority of the offices.

This is really a stunning number. Looking back at my 2021 article, there is no state that saw so many flips at once. Kentucky was definitely primed for it, with Democrats clearly being over-extended.

Ok so the GOP gained 26 seats. How did these flips happen? I broke down the results based on if seats were contested, unopposed, and what led to a flip. Those results are below.

As the map shows, a vast majority of coroner posts were unopposed in 2022. Democrats who won while actual facing a general election is small, just 5 counties. Republicans, meanwhile, got many posts from Democrats thanks to the incumbent switching parties. Of the 26 flips, only four Democratic incumbents were defeated.

The details of each flip can be seen below. I added the Governor margin, the last Democratic statewide win, to offer more context. As the data shows, most of these flips were in Bevin counties.

Most of the flips were unopposed. Only one party switcher faced a general election opponent (in that case an NPA), and only two of the open seats that flipped actually saw the Democrats put up a fight.

Indeed, many changes were due to officials running under different banners or changings in the guard.

The flip that may have stood out to you the most by this point is Ballard County, which saw an NPA win as a write-in. What is the story there? Well its actually pretty simple. The longtime Democratic incumbent, Bob Morrow, left the post after being elected Mayor of the City of LaCenter. His son, Tyler, who served as deputy coroner, was temporality appointed to the post and filed to run. All this took place late in the year, past qualifying. Only write-ins could file for November general, and Tyler won that contest. I could only verify this via newspaper archives. I’d love to see breakdowns of the contest, but efforts with the county clerk have not been successful.

So I categorize that as a NPA victory, but the whole thing is weird.

With that said, I want to look at some of the contested coroner posts. This will largely focus on the incumbents who lost. First, however, I want to look at Lexington.

The Saga of Gary Ginn

As the statewide map highlighted, four Democratic incumbent coroners lost their jobs. I’m going to delve into each of those. However, first I want to look at the coroner contest in Fayette County, home to Lexington. There, the coroner post has been held by Democrat Gary Ginn since the early 2000s. By all accounts his office is well run, with strong accredited officials, and full support of the funeral industry. So why then, did Ginn underperform other Democrats in 2018?

Ginn had a close call in 2018 thanks to a sex scandal out of his office. He was being sued by a former employee arguing Ginn groped her and bragged about venturing to strip clubs and other lewd comments. The scandal, ongoing at the time, led to Ginn have a closer call, but still holding the post.

In 2022, Ginn faced the voters again. In the last four years, the suit was unable to move forward in the courts due to lack of evidence. The issue has largely left the public attention, other than from Larry Owens, who challenged him again in 2022. This time, Ginn won by a more comfortable 60-40 margin. This did, however, underperform his other county democratic incumbents. The democratic Sheriff and Clerk both secured support in the high 60s.

Owens made a point of highlighting the accusations against Ginn while also highlighted a different scandal from his office. A few years prior, a deputy from the coroner’s office was callous in how they informed a parent of their teenage son’s passing. The scandal, which led to outcry from the victim’s family, led to a statewide law that mandated sensitivity training for employees. Ginn got ahead of the scandal by welcoming the new rules and the funding that came with it, saying it would help him ensure such an issue never occurred again. He definitely got ahead of the story.

Ginn’s increased margin means the scandal is no longer in the public eyes, but that Ginn has not moved completely beyond either. That said, its easy to see Ginn being ousted in a more swingish county. He benefitted from being in such a Democratic region.

Other Democrats were not as lucky.

The Democratic Incumbents Defeated

The first of the democratic incumbents to lose that I want to look at is Woodford County. There, Ronald Owns lost by fairly wide 10 point margin.

The same day that Owens lost, the Democratic sheriff absolutely crushed his own re-election. The coroner results mirrored the Senate margin, which saw Paul win by 10. So what happened with Owens. Why did he lose?

The answer….. I have no idea. This race highlights one of the tricks with covering some of these local contests. I cannot find anything on this race or the candidates, I just have the results. No blogs, social media, or newspapers seem to be online that covered this rural county, which had just over 10,000 ballots.

So what happened here? I cannot say.

Over in Carter County, the race for Coroner has a good deal of backstory. Incumbent William Waddell won the post of coroner several years early when he ousted the incumbent in the 2014 Democratic Primary. That incumbent, at the time, was George Sparks, the very man who beat him as a Republican last year.

The race was still modestly close despite Rand Paul crushing with over 70% in the county. The area also had a notable geographic divide. I actually mapped this out by magistrate district due to issues confirming some precinct borders.

Over in Nelson County, which saw Rand Paul got 64% of the vote, there were several Democratic losses. One of those was longtime coroner Rayfield Houghlin, who fell by 5 points to multi-time candidate Danielle Chladek.

This result has already proven controversial in the first year. Houghlin was actually saving the taxpayers money because as a funeral director, he had his own morgue and equipment he used instead of the county paying for a facility. Chladek actually tried to use this to argue there was a conflict of interest. In 2014, when Chladek was running against Houghlin as well, she filed an ethics complaint after he hired his daughter to work at the office. Nepotism is a legit issue but there was no evidence of her lack of qualifications. The blood was bad between these candidates.

Since Chladek’s victory, which many attribute to the straight ticket voting option, the county has been forced to spend more money to outsource services. Chladek also had a tense budget meeting with the commission when they denied her request for a bullet proof vest, gun, and a 3rd deputy (which the county cannot get as the number is based on county population size).

So that isn’t great……

Arguably the most stunning loss was in Logan County, which is on the south Kentucky border with Tennessee.

Incumbent Democrat Mary Givens was elected to the office in 2006 and was by all accounts an accomplished officials. Due to the lack of hospitals in several neighboring county, Logan would often work with other counties on death investigations and autopsies. Givens went through so much training and work that she received the designation of Master Coroner, which is indeed a certification that indicates skill and experience. Her opponent, Ben Kemplin, is broadly qualified in that he ran a funeral home and was part of the Kentucky Funeral Home Association. His primary work, however, was working with the Logan board of education.

With the results, Kemplin narrowly won, taking 51% of the vote. Givens got 49%, which was well about the 27% that Charles Booker got against Rand Paul. However, it was not enough.

Conclusion….. and Part 2

The night was overall bad for Kentucky Democratic coroners. The story was similar for many offices. I saw Democratic clerks, attorney’s, commissioners, and sheriffs fall. In the spirit of that, I will have one more Kentucky article.

On Halloween day itself, I will have a Part 2, looking specifically at Pike County - in the heart of the eastern coal fields. This has been a quintessential example of the “down-ballot democratic but deep-red for President” coal counties of Appalachia.

There I will look at the unprecedent Republican push to take local offices, as well as the contested battle for County Coroner.