Meet Kelsey

My name is Kelsey Linnehan, and I am the Republican nominee for Delegate in Virginia’s 79th District. I am a conservative Catholic homeschooling mother of four, soon to be five, wonderful children living in Southside Richmond. In my professional career, I was an international trade attorney focused on helping U.S. manufacturers and farmers fight back against illegally dumped and subsidized imports.

I want voters in our community to have a real say in elections, which is why I am proud to run as a true alternative to the Democratic party that has consistently increased our taxes while failing to provide basic goods and services, like clean drinking water.

Building a Family in Richmond

In 2019, my husband and I found ourselves pregnant with our first child and I was overwhelmed with maternal instincts telling me to leave Washington D.C. where the local government extracted the maximum amount of tax revenue from its citizens while tolerating crime and homeless encampments throughout the city. We wanted better for our new family, so we decided to leave.

Looking outside of D.C., we immediately ruled out Northern Virginia. The high cost of living to be near strip malls, cookie-cutter developments, and data centers simply wasn’t enticing. We longed to live in a place with character, history, and community. We found everything we were hoping for in Richmond.

We moved to Richmond at the start of 2020, and we immediately fell in love with our new city. We bought a 100-year-old home in Southside, where we are the happy beneficiaries of generations of Richmonders who have come before us. Our first child was born in that home August, 2020, as was our second child in 2022. In 2024 we welcomed our third and fourth children — twins! — at a local hospital. And later this year we will welcome our fifth child. We are so grateful that all five of our children are native Richmonders!

I want my children to grow up in the Richmond my husband and I fell in love with. As your delegate, I will fight to stop Richmond from losing its heart to the homogenized growth we see in Northern Virginia, and from following Washington D.C.'s footsteps in ways I hoped to leave behind.