Dem
47
GOP
53
As we noted yesterday, those crazy kids in Tennessee hold their primaries on Thursdays. Most states do it on Tuesdays, because it's a tradition established by the Constitution. Some states and territories do it on a weekend day, because that is when most people are off work. But Tennesseans shun both tradition and convenience. They have ever since Davy Crockett killed a b'ar when he was only three.
Although Tennessee is a red state, and is near-certain to give the Republicans a sweep of statewide and federal offices in November, there were some results of interest yesterday. To start, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R) is now her party's nominee for governor, and will become the first woman to lead the state when she wins in November. The primary was surprisingly close, however. Rep. John Rose (R) ran his campaign based on being an "outsider" (a curious way to describe someone who is serving his fourth term in Congress) and a "TRUE Tennesseean" (he is eighth-generation, whereas Blackburn was born in Mississippi). The Senator took 43.4% of the vote, the Representative took 32.9% and the rest went to state Rep. Monty Fritts (R) and a bunch of write-in candidates. We imagine that the deciding factor, since both Blackburn and Rose are MAGA (or at least pretend to be) is that a senator has wider name recognition than a representative.
The Democrat in that race will be Memphis councilor Jerri Green, who won a more comfortable victory, taking 69.0% of the vote as compared to 17.9% for second-place finisher Carnita Atwater. Green is running on a standard centrist Democrat platform—more money for schools and health care, moderate gun control and environmental policies, and avoid hot-button issues like the plague (except that she is pro-choice). It's not impossible she could win, since Tennessee has elected a Democrat to the governor's mansion this century (in 2006), but it's not very likely. There's been only one recent poll of the Blackburn-Green matchup, and it gives the Senator a 21-point lead, 49% to 28%.
Even less likely is a Democratic win in the U.S. Senate race. There, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R) was unopposed in his primary, and took 99.6% of the vote, with a few hundred folks wasting their ballots on write-in candidates. He will face Marquita Bradshaw (D), who took 54.8% of the vote in a five-way field. She is an environmental activist, and was the first Black woman to win a major-party nomination in a statewide race in Tennessee (she was also Hagerty's opponent in 2020). That it took until the 2020s for that to happen probably suggests something about the political prospects of a Black woman running for statewide office in Tennessee. Nobody has spent the money to poll this matchup yet, but we can tell you that about 630,000 Republicans showed up to vote yesterday, as compared to about 350,000 Democrats. This does not bode well for Bradshaw or Green.
The most notable result of the night actually came in TN-05. There, Rep. Andy Ogles (R) was running for reelection to a third term. He had Donald Trump's enthusiastic endorsement, up to and including the President making a couple of campaign appearances in the district. On the other hand, Ogles has a habit of saying impolitic things; in just the past few months, he tweeted: "Muslims don't below [sic] in American society" and "homosexuality has no place in America." Come to think of it, this may be why he has Trump's enthusiastic endorsement. Ogles was also accused of breaking campaign finance laws, though the Trump Department of Justice quietly dropped that investigation, which it inherited from the Biden administration.
When the dust had settled last night, Ogles came close to hanging on, but no cigar. Charlie Hatcher (R), who was once the state's agriculture commissioner, claimed 53.2% of the vote, as compared to 46.8% for the Representative. Hatcher will face off against Mayor Chaz Molder (D) of Columbia, who took 40.5% of the vote in his primary, enough to beat out Memphis councilor Yolanda Cooper-Sutton (D) and her 32.7%. Molder is, as you might imagine, Blue Doggy. And when he puts his glasses on, he looks like Clark Kent:
Democrats actually view this as their best chance to hold a seat in Tennessee. If so, Molder is going to need to find some kryptonite to use against Hatcher, because the district is R+10. That actually makes it the second "bluest" district in the state, just behind the R+9 TN-09, which was redrawn to kick Rep. Steve Cohen (D) out of office.
That's two times this week that Trump has backed a House candidate and had that candidate go up in flames. The one in Tennessee is a black eye for the President because he really tried to muscle Ogles over the finish line. The one in Michigan was a different kind of black eye, because Trump wasn't nearly as involved in that race, but his candidate, Amir Hassan, got crushed by someone who had dropped out a month earlier (though Thomas J. Smith has now dropped back in).
The widespread supposition has been that a Black guy named Amir Hassan cannot win a Republican primary, even if he is former military and former law enforcement and very conservative. The widespread supposition about Ogles is that his bigotry was just a bridge too far for too many Republican voters. It is not easy to reconcile these two conclusions; one candidate lost because of Republican voters' bigotry, one candidate lost because of Republican voters' anti-bigotry. It is not impossible to reconcile the two conclusions, mind you, just tricky.
What is definitely the case is that the people who run Republican political campaigns think that bigotry works with their voters. In support of this assertion, we give you the first day of the GOP campaign to defeat Abdul El-Sayed (D) in Michigan. Almost overnight, the GOP has taken to referring to him as Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. The Party did the same thing, of course, with Barack Hussein Obama, although in this case, the candidate really is a Muslim.
The NRSC has also released its first anti-El-Sayed ad, which is entitled "The Most Radical Candidate in America," and which you can view here:
It is remarkable that they managed to squeeze so many different propaganda techniques into a 30-second spot. It would not be difficult at all to build an entire 2-hour lecture and discussion of propaganda using only this ad as source material. The ad is so frantic and over the top that although the low-information base voters who live in fear of Muslim terrorists hiding under their beds may be petrified by it, we are less sure that independents—at least the ones who are rational and like the Democrats on social policy but the Republicans on taxes and jobs—will fall for it.
The RNC has also released a "fact sheet" about El-Sayed. Under the heading "Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Is [sic] A Terrorist Sympathizer Who Wants To Take A Sledgehammer To America, Believes America Deserved 9/11, And Let [sic] Terrorists Run The Show," they offer up the following "facts," accompanied by links to (almost invariably) right-wing "news" sites, primarily Fox and The Washington Free Beacon:
Eventually, this over-the-top cartoon-villain stuff has to backfire, right? In any event, it's going to be an ugly, ugly campaign.
Next up, voting-wise, is Hawaii. The results there will be similar to the ones in Tennessee, except with the other party dominating. Oh, and no Trump endorsee will lose, because the President does not endorse in that state as a means of protecting his batting average. (Z)