Shelby County Republicans are in a pickle, sort of. Having realistically assessed the county’s voting demographics, they have forgone competing for one major county office this year — that of Sheriff. No Republican candidate appears on the May 3 primary ballot, leaving Democratic incumbent and virtually certain nominee Floyd Bonner with a de facto GOP endorsement.
“We approve his policies,” is how county Republican chair Cary Vaughn put it this week. That may in fact be the case and not just a face-saving statement. Bonner has certainly had his problems with critics on the left, and he is arguably more lawman than politician.
In any case, the Republicans are sitting that one out. They are, however, investing a lot of energy and money in the reelection campaign of District Attorney General Amy Weirich, their best bet for a victory in the August general election, though Weirich is sure to have a hotly contested race in the general, with local legal icon Steve Mulroy heading a trio of three candidates vying in the Democratic primary.
On the presumption of an ultimate Weirich-Mulroy race, neither candidate is exactly laying back this far. Both are having multiple events, and Mulroy’s “soft opening” on Thursday at his new Poplar and Highland headquarters drew hundreds of attendees, as did a monster fundraiser for Weirich last week.
The GOP is also hoping for an upset in the race for County Mayor, where City Councilman Worth Morgan is set to challenge the winner of the Democratic primary, where incumbent Mayor Lee Harris is being challenged by veteran City of Memphis official Ken Moody. The heavily favored Harris has most of the party support, though Moody has backing from Billy Orgel and Gayle Rose, both long-time political players.
Morgan’s hopes are largely dependent on the convergence in August of Democratic complacency (something that has happened before at election time) with a huge get-out-the-vote outpouring in the Republican-dominated suburbs.
It’s a Hail Mary strategy, but not an impossibility. As a reminder of where the GOP base is, the Morgan campaign this week sent out an impressive list of suburban supporters that included specific endorsements of Morgan from five of the six suburban Mayors. (The missing name — that of Collierville’s Stan Joyner — was owing to that mayor, also a Morgan endorser, being out of town when the statements were collected, said Morgan aide Nelia Dempsey).
Another contested general-election race of interest will be that for County Trustee. Democratic incumbent Regina Morrison Newman. Newman has been running hard for at least a year, perhaps in memory of 2010, when, as an interim Trustee and the presumed favorite, she was upset by Republican David Lenoir, who would go on to mount a losing race for County Mayor.
The Republican entry against Newman, who is unopposed in her primary, is former County Commissioner Steve Basar, who was the beneficiary of a fundraiser this week that drew a decent crowd of at least outwardly hopeful Republicans.
Like Newman, Basar has experienced the sting of unexpected defeat, having been unseated from his Commission seat in 2018 by current Commissioner Brandon Morrison.
Coincidentally or not, Morrison herself is now under challenge in the one and only contested Republican primary race — for the District 4 Commission seat, spanning both Germantown and East Memphis, that, after redistricting, she has to defend.
Her opponent is Germantown lawyer Jordan Carpenter, who, though a political newcomer, recently won the endorsement of Morrison’s four GOP colleagues on the current County Commission — Mark Billingsley, Mick Wright, David Bradford, and Amber Mills.
While the Commissioners who have spoken on the matter attribute their action to a high regard for Carpenter, the fact is that their uniform stand against a colleague is based on some internal Commission politics. The Republican contingent on the Commission, though shrunken to minority status in recent years, mainly because of the county’s aforementioned demographic tendencies, has had considerable success in prevailing on Democratic outliers to vote the GOP’s way on certain disputed issues.
What Morrison did that alienated her colleagues was to cooperate in like manner, on some key votes, with the Commission’s Democratic majority. She presented her actions as cases of healthy bipartisanship, of “seeing the big picture.” Her GOP colleagues saw it otherwise, and several of them vowed payback as far back as a year ago, when, with Democratic votes and her own, Morrison was elected Commission vice chair.
The upshot is that Shelby County Republicans have, at least in that case, something of a schism on their hands. Interestingly, both Morrison and Carpenter had conspicuous campaign signs on the East Memphis street where the Basar fundraiser was held.
Morrison’s sign leads with the line, “Vote Republican,” followed by her name. Carpenter’s sign has no reference to the party label.
That may change, as GOP primary voters in District 4 are faced with the implied question, “Will the real Republican please stand up?”
