Introduction: Part III - District 43 of the Kentucky State House of Representatives

As a designated diversity district, the 43rd, has necessarily suffered identity crises because it contains strongly contrasting demographic groups. The neighborhoods to the North and West, encompassing boat-dwellers and sundry miles inland from the riverbanks, between Chickasaw park, through the pseudo-ghettos west of the downtown blocks, along Interstate 64 and River Road east as far as Lime Kiln Road, constitute the 43rd. It is, by some estimates, home to the poorest and richest neighborhoods in the United States.

While advanced electronic devices, split-second communications networking, and the latest newfangled campaign tools typify the average campaign in a west or east coast state, this part of Louisville is closer to its cultural, historical roots. It is also tangled in political wrangling and special interest, deeply inlaid down to the foundations of local politics. A river port town, also driven by struggling horse-racing and manufacturing sectors, Louisville has been forced to struggle. No parts of town have been more heavily affected than the 43rd, which includes the aptly named Portland township and the now ghostly industrial district west of the downtown area. As jobs have become scarce, welfare homes have become abundant, and a once thriving working community has reduced men of all colors into a remnant workforce that provides little more than a shadow of more successful times past. In the 43rd District, which will be the base for political analysis in this paper, campaigns do not open shop until ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, even in the heat of mid-October electioneering. Why? Simply, it is pointless to campaign to voters who are not up to talking about politics, because they are not even up out of bed. Thus the unemployment rates and welfare slums affect the most practical aspects of politics.

Residents of Portland, a 43rd District neighborhood that used to be an independent township, still clutch to older, better days. They will happily tell you what a nice neighborhood it was before federal Section 8 housing began hurting local property values and causing home ownership to fall. Missing a few teeth, nervously tapping a cigarette, an elderly Portland local may well tell you about the old days in a tone that shows she has long acknowledged that the good parts about those days are long gone. Mixed with her drawled, “Oh, yes, honey, this town used to be a fine place indeedy!” comes a regular cursing stream of verbalized worries about health care premiums, public aid checks, town meetings, and unstable, low-paying jobs. These are not complaints: they are real problems this campaign volunteer cannot ignore, that she hopes her candidate will be able to finally address.

In the deep west end of Louisville one finds the Black neighborhoods, which boast a rich cultural difference from the predominantly white Portland area. In some cases the two boroughs lay literally across the street from each other, but are wholly separate and distinct. This bright line that divides the birthplace of Muhammad Ali and the old shipping town only separates two of the three distinct subsections of the district. As though the 43rd were an animal with a tail, there is reaching out from the relatively square western side of the district a suspiciously narrow appendage along the river, which encompasses the extremely well-to-do River Road residential district, complete with lavish boathouses and tobacco and whiskey manors and land holdings. As though the ethnic contrast between the poorer Portland and West side were not enough to amuse the political whims of redistricting Frankfurt politicians, this River Road subsection lies in arrant dissimilitude in its astronomically higher average income bracket.

In 2004 a peculiar and unique political battle took place in the 43rd, spurred on by an open Representative seat in the state House in the Frankfurt state capitol. Mr. Michael Czerwonka, an experienced candidate, ran the Republican ticket against Mr. Darryl T. Owens, a Democrat, seasoned local bureaucrat and retired former President of the Louisville National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The purpose of this paper is to document this electoral race and learn from it whatever possible about the district, the state, and electoral political science in general. The goal of the author is to speculate on the reasons for the outcome of the election, possible alternative outcomes had one or both candidates done things differently, and what would have been required for a much more remarkable though not so distant reversal of the results.

The majority of the research used in this paper will not be cited material from published sources. The race in question was a relatively small one; while Czerwonka and former state Representative Paul Bather made national news, each in his own right, in 2002 and 2003, this race is was just as fascinating but not considered as newsworthy. Instead research backing this paper is supplemented by original answers by the candidates and others who were intimately involved in the campaign. The questionnaires used to gather this information were based on (a) concepts of home-style politics laid out in the definitive work on the subject by Richard F. Fenno, Jr., and (b) responses made to earlier questionnaires.