(Note: this piece has been updated and slightly revised according to new information, some of which modifies the core story as first I heard it — or thought I heard it. The sharp-eyed pair of geniuses who detected a minor discrepancy or two and charged me with imbecility will be pleased. Thanks, guys!)
Here’s one for you out there in Political-Junkie-Land: When
the import of this disclosure hits, all of you will have a moment of breathless
awe – after which the Republicans among you will see the corners of your mouths
form the comic mask, while the Democrats will go tragic. Here’s the deal:
Tennessee’s legislature may have just gone Republican – with all that this
entails for the future of state and even national government – because of a purely inadvertent detour on John McCain’s part.
That’s right: an improvised flight plan on the part of the defeated
Republican presidential candidate is what turned the Tennessee General Assembly
fire-engine red.
Tennessee Republican National Committeeman John Ryder and I
did a joint review of the just-concluded campaign on Thursday to the members of
the Memphis and Shelby County Homebuilders group in Cordova. I had made the
point that the state House of Representatives would have remained Democratic –
though just barely, by 50-49 – had the state’s District 2 state House seat gone
to incumbent Democrat Nathan Vaughn rather than to Republican Tony Shipley, who
eked out an apparent victory by 1 percent.
In the last week of the campaign
Shipley had spurted past Vaughn, who only days before had led his GOP opponent
by 6 points in a reliable poll.
The turnabout, I pointed out, owed a great deal to the
last-minute visit to the district by McCain, who attracted a good deal of
attention in Sullivan County when he spoke there on Monday, election eve, after
landing at the Blountville, Tennessee, airport.
No less an observer than state
Republican chairperson Robin Smith has attributed a deluge of late votes in the
northeast Tennessee area to that visit.
Ryder added the surprise clincher on Thursday: Though,
like everybody else – including ultimate Democratic presidential winner Barack
Obama, who did not deign to visit Tennessee himself – McCain had conceded the
Volunteer State to the McCain-Palin ticket, the Republican standard-bearer was
deeply concerned about Virginia (which he ultimately lost, if narrowly) and
scheduled an impromptu election-eve visit to southwest Virginia.
Here’s where the gremlins come in, as Ryder explained. The
closest airport available for the Arizona senator’s campaign plane to land was
Blountville, and that’s where he set down – in Tennessee, not Bristol,
Virginia, just on the other side of the state line. Tennessee is where the
airport is for the divided city – not Virginia. The long and the short of it is
that McCain ended up doing a well-noted rah-rah speech in the home town of Tennessee’s Republican Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey – a visit that
greatly facilitated the Republicans’ climactic Get-Out-the-Vote effort in what
just happened to the second district of the Tennessee House of Representatives.
The result: a flip of the vote there, whereby the GOP’s
Shipley got his unexpected narrow win over Democrat Vaughn, and the Tennessee
Republicans had their first majority in the state House of Representatives
since Reconstruction – by that aforesaid bare majority of 50-49. Small as that
margin is, it precludes any real prospects of desperate maneuvers by longtime
Democratic House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh of Covington to keep his Speakership. The
next Speaker, it would seem, is going to be Jason Mumpower, the intensely
conservative GOP House leader from that same northeast corner of the state.
Not just that: the Republicans, who picked up enough seats
in the state Senate to make their previous one-vote edge there more comfortable
(19-14) will be able, through their domination of both houses, to decide who the
state’s constitutional officers will be: the Secretary of State, the
comptroller, the treasurer. The composition of the 95 county election
commissions in Tennessee – mandated by state law to be 3-2 in favor of the
majority party – will now be Republican-dominated, not Democratic-dominated.
If the current numbers hold when the next legislative
election in 2010 is concluded, the Republicans – greatly assisted by the
aforesaid Ryder, a gifted lawyer and one of the GOP’s arbiters on
reapportionment issues – will handle post-census redistricting, both for the
state legislature and for Tennessee’s nine congressional districts. Guess which
party is likely to enhance the number of its friendly districts?
But who knows? Maybe at some point between now and then
President Obama can be induced to make a timely visit or two to Tennessee,
giving Democratic cadres the same kind of boost that an errant John McCain did
on the GOP’s behalf on Monday, November 3, 2008.
