The 2024 presidential election results by precinct (Photo: Courtesy Don Johnson)
The Shelby County Republican Party is scheduled to hold its biennial convention in January, and the party has a bona fide chairmanship race on its hands.
One candidate is Bangladesh-born Naser Fazlullah, manager of a food-and-beverages firm and the local party’s vice chair, who has been highly active in Republican outreach efforts over the years. Most unusually, he professes a desire to “bring both parties together” for the benefit of Shelby County and has numerous friends both inside and outside GOP ranks.
The other candidate is insurance executive Worth Morgan, the former city council member who in 2022 ran unsuccessfully for county mayor and had been rumored as a possible candidate for Memphis mayor the next year before deciding not to make the race.
Both candidates are running as the heads of slates for a variety of other party offices.
Morgan’s campaign in particular, run under the slogan “Revive,” is in the kind of high gear normally associated with expensive major public races and has employed a barrage of elaborate online endorsements from such well-known party figures as state Representative Mark White, state Senator Brent Taylor, and conservative media commentator Todd Starnes.
The GOP convention is scheduled for January 25th at The Venue at Bartlett Station.
• Morgan’s choice of the campaign motif “Revival” is interesting. Not too long ago, Republicans dominated county government, but demographics now heavily favor Democrats in countywide voting. As one indication of that, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris outdistanced the GOP’s Donald Trump in November by a margin of 201,759 to Trump’s 118,917.
In a series of post-election analyses, however, veteran Republican analyst Don Johnson, formerly of Memphis and now with the Stone River Group of Nashville, has demonstrated the GOP’s supremacy virtually everywhere else in Tennessee. He has published precinct-specific maps of statewide election results showing areas won by Trump in red. Patches of Democratic blue show up only sporadically in these graphics and are largely confined to Memphis, Nashville, and the inner urban cores of Knoxville and Chattanooga. Even Haywood County in the southwest corner of the state, virtually the last Democratic stronghold in rural Tennessee, shows high purple on Johnson’s cartography.
Post-election analysis shows something else — a shift of the Republican center of gravity eastward, toward the GOP’s ancestral homeland of East Tennessee. For the first time in recent presidential elections, Republican voting in Knox County outdid the party’s totals in Shelby County.
Looking ahead to the 2026 governor’s race, it is meaningful that a recent poll of likely Republican voters by the Tennessee Conservative News shows two Knoxvillians — Congressman Tim Burchett and Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs — leading all other potential candidates.
• The Shelby County Commission ended its year with a full agenda of 89 items, several of which were matters involving schools and school funding. The commissioners navigated that agenda with admirable focus and aplomb, considering that the bombshell news of Tuesday’s scheduled Memphis Shelby-County Schools board meeting regarding the potential voiding of superintendent Marie Feagins’ contract exploded midway through their discussions.
• One of the more inclusive political crowds in recent history showed up weekend before last at Otherlands on Cooper to honor David Upton on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Upton is the proverbial man-behind-the-scenes in Shelby County politics and has had a hand — sometimes openly, sometimes not — in more local elections and civic initiatives than almost anybody else you could name.
With pressure building for potential tax increases in Memphis city government, the outlook for additional aid from state government took a hit Monday, as the State Funding Board acknowledged weaker-than-expected revenues and set a deliberately slow growth rate.
The board, composed of the state’s three constitutional officers and the state finance commissioner, set a growth rate in general fund revenue of 1 percent to 2 percent and total tax growth at 1.25 percent to 2.15 percent for fiscal 2025-26. That is on the heels of an estimated total growth rate projection for fiscal 2024-25 of -1.68 percent to -1.34 percent.
Economic growth has ground down considerably in Tennessee after a double-digit revenue windfall of two years ago. Among other factors, the state is facing a $1.9 billion business tax reduction stemming from legislative approval of Governor Bill Lee’s proposal to eliminate the property portion of the state’s franchise and excise taxes. That move followed additional tax breaks for businesses the previous year. The Department of Revenue has processed nearly $900 million in rebates this year, and more are expected.
On the eve of the oncoming 2025 legislative session, the weak budget outlook could affect lawmakers’ decisions, leaving in the lurch not only localities’ requests for aid but funding requests from state agencies totaling over $4.2 billion. The revenue forecast isn’t expected to come close to matching that figure, even with anticipated federal funds covering some of the costs.
• Two Memphians are finalists to succeed soon-to-be-retiring state Court of Appeals Judge Arnold Goldin of Memphis: Shelby County Circuit Judge Valerie Smith and interim Memphis Chancellor Jim Newsom. A third candidate is Jackson Chancellor Steve Maroney, a former chair of the Madison County Republican Party.
Smith was a member of a three-judge chancery court panel that dismissed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the state’s school voucher program. The decision was later reversed by the Court of Appeals.
Newsom was named in 2015 to a Chancery Court position by former Governor Bill Haslam but was defeated for re-election in 2016 by current Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins. He was reappointed interim chancellor this past summer by Governor Lee to assume the duties of Chancellor Jim Kyle, who has been disabled by illness.
• The three gun-safety measures approved resoundingly by Memphis voters earlier this month via ballot referenda have predictably come under legal challenge. The Tennessee Firearms Association has filed a lawsuit in Shelby County Circuit Court seeking to block city government from activating the measures.
In a sense, the gun-lobby group’s suit is pointless, in that backers of the referenda conceded that voter approval of the measures was conditional on the will and pleasure of state government, which had made clear that state policy at this point would disallow the implementation of the three measures.
State House Speaker Cameron Sexton had angrily opposed the referenda as antithetical to state law and threatened to retaliate by cutting Memphis off from various state-shared revenues if the measures were enacted.
The measures, certified for the ballot by the city council, would re-institute a requirement locally for gun-carry permits, ban the sale of assault weapons, and enable the local judiciary to impose red-flag laws allowing confiscation of weapons from individuals certified as risks to public safety.
Mindful of Sexton’s attitude, backed by Governor Lee, the Shelby County Election Commission originally acted to remove the referendum measures from the November ballot, but they were approved for the ballot by Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson.
• It begins to look as though the beleaguered Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert will survive various ouster attempts and will survive in office until the election of 2026, when she will be term-limited.
Her latest reprieve came from Circuit Court Judge Felicia Corbin-Johnson, who disallowed an ouster petition from attorney Robert Meyers, ruling that such an action had to be pursued by Shelby County Attorney Marlinee Iverson, who had recused herself.
Judge Corbin-Johnson had previously disallowed an ouster attempt from Hamilton County District Attorney Coty Wamp, who was acting as a special prosecutor.
A widely disputed graph posted by Lee Mills (Photo: ZeroHedge)
If, in the aftermath of a decisive (if narrow) victory for Donald Trump in the just concluded presidential election, anybody expected Republican-minded folks to put aside their “stop-the-steal” concerns from 2020, that was a premature hope.
It turns out that numerous believers in a stolen 2020 election still believe in it, and a fairly significant controversy regarding the matter continues to fester on social media.
One local believer is former Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills, who has carried on a brisk online conversation about it on Facebook.
“Now that it’s officially over,” Mills wrote on his page last week, “can we revisit 2020 for a moment?”
Whereupon he reproduced a dubiously sourced bar graph that’s been making the rounds in MAGA circles.
Crude and simplistic, employing blue and red bars, respectively, to indicate Democratic and Republican vote totals, it purports to compare the results for both parties in the presidential elections of 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Strikingly, it seems to show the Democratic vote holding to virtually identical levels in 2012, 2016, and 2024, while the Republican vote is represented graphically as steadily rising through the respective campaign years, finally out-distancing the Democratic vote total this year.
The year 2020 is seen as an anomaly, with the blue bar representing the Democratic vote vaulting high above the red bar representing the GOP presidential total. Both bars show an increase over previous years.
The blue bar is depicted as coming back to “normal” for 2024. The red bar is somewhat lower as well.
Mills feels emboldened to comment: “This is a rhetorical question, but who can explain this anomaly?”
And he supplies some numbers, after a fashion. “So l’m not misconstrued by the Trump haters: The 2020 election saw a huge turnout spike — 159 million people voted, with Democrats getting nearly 80 million votes, which is a massive 23% jump from previous years. Statistically, that’s a total outlier.
“A big factor was the sudden expansion of mail-in voting, which went from 21 percent in 2016 to 46 percent in 2020.
“Here’s the issue: A lot of these changes were made by unelected officials, bypassing the state legislatures. When you change the rules to allow massive non-in-person voting [sic], it opens the door for fraud to run rampant.
“While this doesn’t flat-out prove fraud, it definitely raises red flags about how secure the process was with all these last-minute changes.”
Response on Facebook was forthcoming. William Albert Mannecke agreed: “They learned to cheat on an industrial level.”
As did Ellen Ferrara. “They stole 2020, 100 percent.”
Randy Higdon probed a little further: “We will find out he [presumably Trump] won all 50 states. Only states she [Kamala Harris] won were ones that didn’t require voter ID. Then this goes back to 2020. Many, many heads are gonna roll.”
But a demurrer would come from Cole Perry, a local statistician with both solidly Republican bona fides and a well-earned reputation for accurate analyses of election results: “Harris is going to end up with somewhere near 76.5 million votes, and Trump will end up [with] close to 78.5 million. That’s almost exactly the same total turnout as 2020. If they really did cheat in 2020, why did they suddenly forget how to do it?”
A telling point. Another one is this, apropos the effects, such as it was, of write-in votes, which were disparaged by a suspicious Trump in 2020, the Covid year, but actively encouraged by him for his supporters in 2024.
That might be as good an explanation as any for the supposed “anomaly” of the 2020 electoral outcome.
In the week since the end of the 2024 presidential campaign, various experts, partisans, and pundits have been holding forth on the meaning of it all.
Well, with your indulgence, it’s my time for a little thumb-sucking. Really, I just wonder how this new order is supposed to work. The incoming Trump administration is pledged, as its first order of business, to expel somewhere between 2 and 20 million undocumented immigrants in what the president-elect has promised will be “the largest mass deportation in this nation’s history.”
Probably a majority of those being targeted are embedded to some degree in the fabric of society — as mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and students and toilers (significantly, in that last category, as taxpayers).
Those Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who became the bane of Republican rhetoric during the campaign, were not here as scavengers of dogs and cats and geese, nor is there any reason to believe they performed as such. They were not border-jumpers, by the way, but nose-to-the-grindstone workers legally imported to do local infrastructure jobs that native-born sorts wouldn’t touch.
Remember all those new houses that went up during the building boom of the ’90s? To a substantial degree, the grunt work on them was done by Mexicans, most of them undocumented, to be sure.
After the deportation of all these willing hands, there is sure to be some serious attrition within a labor market that is arguably under-strength already.
And what about the sheer expense of such a massive operation, estimated to be as high as $315 billion, and the human costs of all this forced dislocation?
There are few parallels for mass deportations on such a formidable scale, most of them stained by controversy, disrepute, or worse — the Turkish expulsion of Armenians, the German boxcars of Jewish victims eastward to death camps in World War II (and the retributive exodus of that country’s own civilians, driven in the other direction by Russian tanks), the Nakba of Palestinians in 1948, the ethnic cleansings of Yugoslavia in 1992.
Hyperbole? Maybe. But that’s the name I myself would give to the whole imagined immigrant scare.
Compromise. Consensus. Those are indispensable qualities of the democratic process, indeed, of the human contract itself. And there is no sign of them as concepts of this plan — no indication even of a reliable means of distinguishing between the rank and file of the immigrant population and the relative few malefactors that may lurk within them. Nor of an inclination to apply such means.
No provision to earn future citizenship for the long-term residents whose worth as permanent members of the American body politic has already been demonstrated by their conduct and contributions to society. On top of it all is the expressed intent of the incoming administration to renounce that traditional birthright of citizenship that is automatically conferred on those born here.
And the most flagrant cheat of the whole thing? These all-too-disposable migrants are here by express invitation. Latinos in the main, they are — man, woman, and child — the blood brothers and sisters of all the upstart populations that have come to America before them — the Teutons and Anglo-Saxons and Jews and Italians and Slavs and Irish and Asians who, amid unimaginable hardship and life-and-death circumstance, answered the call of one Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words adorn the Statue of Liberty in the beckoning waters of New York harbor:
“… Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Keeping that lamp lit for others, not snuffing it out, should be the concern of those of us fortunate to find ourselves secure behind that door.
The 2024 election season had its share of both suspense and drama.
That was certainly true of the quadrennial national election for president (arguably the most momentous one since the Civil War), which went down to the wire and frazzled millions of nerve endings before a winner could be discerned.
As all prognostications had it in advance, the presidential picture seemed headed for a resolution later than election night itself. Such opaqueness as lingered in the vote totals abruptly dissolved by the morning’s light, however. Shockingly, Donald J . Trump was back. With a vengeance.
At the center of the suspense had been the three so-called “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It was presumed that a victory for Democrat Kamala Harris in all three of these habitually Democratic states would give her the presidency, but just barely. A victory for former GOP president Trump in any of them could drastically derail that prognosis. In the event, he appears to have won them all, as he did in 2016.
Kamala Harris (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)Donald J. Trump (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Nor was drama absent from the local side of the ballot. There is little prospect of the local results being challenged, as is always possible with the presidential numbers, but their effect may linger and, in some cases, simmer.
This is especially true of the series of referenda that Memphis voters were asked to pass judgment on. As of late Tuesday evening, election commission totals had all the referenda winning handily.
The most significant ones — the outcome of which was never much doubted — had set city against state and enraged the guardians of statehouse authority well in advance of the individual items receiving a single vote.
In brief, the offending referenda items of Ordinance 5908, asked city residents to approve (1) restoration of permits for the right to carry firearms, (2) a ban on the sale of assault weapons in the city, and (3) a “red flag” proviso empowering the local judiciary to confiscate the weapons of demonstrably risky individuals.
All of the items are “trigger laws,” to be activated only when and if state law should permit them.
Even so, the Republican Speaker of the state House of Representatives, Cameron Sexton, had made bold to threaten the city of Memphis with loss of state-shared revenues unless the offending referendum package — unanimously approved by the city council — was withdrawn from the ballot.
That was enough to make the Shelby County Election Commission blanch, but the council itself was not cowed and, led by Chairman JB Smiley Jr., sued to have the measures restored. Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson obliged.
As did Memphis voters, in their turn. All three questions of Referendum 5908 passed by gigantic majorities of 100,00 votes or more.
Other referenda passed on Tuesday would: strike down the city’s existing ban of runoffs in at-large elections (Referendum 5884), impose a two-year residency requirement for Memphis mayoral candidates (Referendum 5913), and authorize the city council to determine the salaries of the mayor, council members, the city chief administrative officer, and division directors (Referendum 5893).
All in all, it was a good night for the referenda, as well as for the council itself. And, arguably, for the citizens of Memphis.
Perhaps predictably, the form sheet also held for elective offices, with incumbents of both parties doing very well indeed.
Marsha Blackburn (Photo: United States Senate, Public domain | Wikimedia Commons)
Republican U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn held off a challenge statewide from Knoxville state Representative Gloria Johnson, her Democratic opponent, though in heavily Democratic Shelby County, Johnson was leading, 156,303 to 104,633.
Another Republican incumbent, 8th District Congressman David Kustoff led Democratic challenger Sarah Freeman by a 2 to 1 margin in Shelby County’s portion of the vote, 66,398 votes to 30,255.
Steve Cohen (Photo: U.S. House of Representatives, Public domain | Wikimedia Commons)
Meanwhile, 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen was overwhelming his perennial Republican opponent Charlotte Bergman even more dramatically with vote totals in the county of 162,299 to 47,634.
On the legislative scene, the much-ballyhooed District 97 state House race saw Republican incumbent John Gillespie edging out his Democratic challenger Jesse Huseth, 15,859 to 14,600.
John Gillespie (Photo: Courtesy tn.gov)
And, in another state House race where Democrats nursed upset hopes, in District 83, incumbent Republican Mark White held off Democrat Noah Nordstrom, 19,283 to 13,713.
Mark White (Photo: Courtesy tn.gov)
Most attention — locally, nationally, and even worldwide — remained on the showdown between Trump and Harris.
As late as the last weekend before this week’s final vote, the presidential race was being referred to as a dead heat, a virtual tie, a sense of things apparently corroborated by a string of polls in the so-called “battleground” states — the Rust Belt trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin; the Sun Belt states of Nevada and Arizona; and the competitive Southern states of Georgia and North Carolina.
A freakish outlier poll in the presumably red state of Iowa showing Harris with a last-minute edge over Trump in Iowa, though, was an indicator of possible unexpected volatility.
That the presidential race had even gotten so measurably close was a reflection of a political standoff in which halves of the nation had seemingly cleaved against each other in a variety of different and sometimes paradoxical ways.
This was not the same old story of Democrats versus Republicans. Both of those coalitions had undergone profound changes over the years. No longer was the “working class” (ditto, the “middle class”) to be grouped in a single body. Upward mobility had revised people’s notions of class, then stalled in such a way as to confuse them further. Generational change was rampant, and ethnicity was no longer a dependable metric for determining political attitude. Disagreement over social matters like gender identity and abortion policy had sundered the old divides.
The center could not hold. It was not only, a la Yeats, that the falcon could not hear the falconer. Social media and impatient ways had created multitudinous new sources professing to be the latter.
The nation’s two-party political system had atrophied to the point that, seemingly, neither was able to generate a dependable bench of A-list players. Donald J. Trump, the Republicans’ once and would-be future president, had come from the worlds of seat-of-the-pants commerce and TV showbiz to reign over a hodgepodge of time-servers, has-beens, and sycophants in his party, and Democratic incumbent president Joe Biden, a survivor of his party’s dwindling corps of traditionalists, headed up the Democrats.
That’s how things were at the end of the early-year primaries, and there were no few voices wondering aloud: Was that all there was, this uninspiring rematch of moldy oldies?
To give Biden his due, he had done his best to wreak from overriding political inertia some promising legislation, especially in the rebuilding of the country’s decaying infrastructure. To give Trump his due, he had recovered from a stupefying series of misdeeds, including, arguably, an aborted coup against the political system, to regain his political stature.
When the two met on a late-June debate stage on the eve of the two party conventions, the 81-year-old Biden, who had fared well in the earlier presentation of his State of the Union address, crumbled so visibly and profoundly that to many, probably most, observers, the presidential race seemed over then and there, especially when the 78-year-old Trump would go on to defiantly survive a serious assassination attempt two days before the opening of the GOP political convention in July.
But desperation in the Democrats’ ranks had meanwhile generated a determination to replace the compromised Biden at the head of the party ticket. Enough pressure developed that the incumbent finally, if reluctantly, had to yield, and realistically, given the lateness of the hour, the most feasible outcome proved to be that of elevating Vice President Kamala Harris, the erstwhile California senator and former prosecutor, in Biden’s stead at the Democratic convention in August.
Once the matchup between Trump and Harris got established, it quickly settled into an even-steven situation, a kind of free-floating draw in which the two sides always stayed within reach of each other.
From the Democratic point of view, this would seem something of a miracle. Nikki Haley had based her runner-up GOP presidential race on the conceit that a female could win the presidency, either herself or, with the aging Biden still a candidate, his vice president, Harris, still regarded at that point as a nonentity. It was Haley’s way of mocking the opposition.
Indeed, even in Democratic ranks, Harris was long seen to be something of a liability, a drag on the ticket. That this was due to the way she had been used — or misused — by the incumbent president (in the ill-defined role of “border czar,” for example) became evident only when she was freed to become her own person.
On the stump in her own right, she proved to be a natural, with unsuspected reserves of charisma and an appeal that was fortified by her selection of the pleasantly homey governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, as her running mate. (Trump’s choice as potential veep, the edgy Ohio Senator JD Vance, was clearly head-smart and acceptable to Trump’s base among the MAGA faithful but kept bumping up against his own innate arrogance.)
The change in tone among the Democrats was almost instantly evident. It came to be symbolized in the concept of “joy” and in Harris’ slogan, “a new way forward.”
While coming across as a certifiable New Thing, she was also able, credibly, to posit herself as the defender of constitutional values against the alleged schemes by the usurper Trump to override them in the interests of personal power.
“We are the promise of America,” she would say, uniting her own purpose with those of her audience members.
Against this, against Harris, the ebullient rock-star presence on stage, Trump seemed buffaloed. In his fateful June debate duel with Biden, he had seemed vital, a hurricane of restless energy hurling scorn and unchecked charges at his befuddled opponent. Now it became more and more obvious that he, too, was a near octogenarian, with no new promise of his own to offer.
The shift in positions was fully demonstrated, post-conventions, in the follow-up debate with Harris when, matador-like, she had baited the bullish Trump with mockery of his rallies (which, in fact, were becoming more and more disorganized and less and less focused and empty of real content). His red-eyed response, that Haitian immigrants were eating the dogs and cats of Middle Americans in Ohio, was perfectly framed for the television audience by the split image of Harris’ gleeful wonderment at this out-of-nowhere non sequitur.
It was not long afterward that Harris’ progress was slowed somewhat, as much by a petulant media’s insistence that she submit to interviews as a sign of her seriousness as anything else. Dutifully, she did, and emerged with appropriate talking points — a middle-class tax cut, subsidies for small business and new housing starts, and legislation to suppress price-gouging. These would become highlights of the “to-do” list which she would juxtapose against what she characterized as the brooding Trump’s ever-multiplying enemies list.
It became a cliche of press coverage that the former president’s seething ire at an imagined “enemy from within” was displacing what his would-be handlers wanted him to discuss — a supposedly intractable inflation and the pell-mell overcoming of the nation’s borders by a horde of illegal invaders. Both menaces, as it happened, were in something of an abatement — the former by a plethora of relatively rosy economic indices, the latter by fairly resolute, if delayed, executive actions taken by the lame-duck president in the summer and fall.
What Trump’s audiences were getting on the stump instead was the overflow of his ever more naked id, a witches’ brew of resentment and machismo — insults against his adversaries, threats to use the machinery of government against them, and improvisations on themes ranging from Arnold Palmer’s junk size to nostalgia for “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Partly, this was due to what Harris characterized as her opponent’s presumed “exhaustion,” but partly, too, it was Trump’s instinctive reliance on what had always been the source of his appeal, an exposure of pure personality, a willingness, for better or for worse, to let it all hang out, to be The Show, a cathartic vehicle for release of his followers’ emotions.
It was this penchant, after all, that had allowed him to sweep past a stage full of practical Republican politicians during the primary season of 2016 and, later that year, to surprise the calculating and overconfident Hillary Clinton at the polls.
GOP eminences — even those who, like Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, despised Trump, or, who, like senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, had been vilified by him, learned that they were no match for his carnival-like presence and resolved to use him for their own purposes, only in the end to be used by him instead for his.
It remained a fact that, for all his defects, real and imagined, Trump was able to sustain a plausible hope of regaining the office he had lost to Biden in the pandemic-inflected campaign year of 2020.
And, beyond the presidential race itself, Republicans still nursed hopes of holding onto their slim majority in the House of Representatives as well as of capturing the Senate outright. At stake were such matters as healthcare, climate change, and reproductive policy domestically, as well as of meeting the economic challenge of China and in the conduct of foreign policy in the Middle East and vis-a-vis Russia in its challenge to NATO in Europe.
Democrats Johnson, Huseth at High Point (Photos: Jackson Baker)
As was surely to be expected, the next-to-last weekend of the climactic 2024 election campaign was filled with feverish activity of various kinds — with early voting into its second week and candidates trying to get as many of their partisans as possible to the polls.
A case in point was a pair of events involving Gloria Johnson, the Knoxville Democrat who is trying to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Johnson, the state representative who gained national attention last year as a member of the “Tennessee Three” proponents of gun-safety legislation, has raised some $7 million for her bid — almost all of it from in-state sources, she contended proudly.
While that is no match for the incumbent’s $17 million or so, it has been enough to buy Johnson a series of concise and well-produced TV spots pinpointing Blackburn’s alleged shortcomings. And it even gives her some of the kind of influence that politicians call coattails.
Opponents Nordstrom and White at Belly Acres
Johnson was in Shelby County on Saturday, sharing time with two other Democrats, District 83 state House candidate Noah Nordstrom (like Johnson a public schoolteacher) and District 97 House candidate Jesse Huseth.
The first event was a joint rally with Nordstrom and state Democratic chair Hendrell Remus just outside the perimeter of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist early-voting station. Next, Johnson met up with Huseth at High Point Grocery for some joint canvassing efforts, after which Huseth, who opposes GOP incumbent John Gillespie, set out on some door-to-door calls on residents in that western part of his district.
The most unusual pre-election event on Saturday didn’t involve Johnson, nor was it, in the strictest sense, a partisan event at all. It was a meet-and-greet at the Belly Acres restaurant in East Memphis involving both Nordstrom and his GOP adversary, incumbent Republican state Representative Mark White.
Not a debate between the two, mind you. A joint meet-and-greet, at which both candidates circulated among the members of a sizeable crowd, spending conversational time with the attendees and with each other.
The event was the brainchild of one Philip D. Hicks, impresario of something called the Independent Foundation for Political Effectiveness. Hicks says he hopes the Nordstrom-White encounter, his organization’s maiden effort, can serve as a precedent for other such joint candidate efforts to come — presumably in future election seasons.
Inasmuch as political competition is, by its nature, an adversarial process, it’s somewhat difficult to imagine such events becoming commonplace, but, all things considered, this first one went amazingly well.
It wasn’t the same kind of thing at all, but there were elements of such collegiality between potential election opponents at an earlier event, a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club at Coletta’s on Appling Road during the previous week.
That event included Memphis City Council Chair JB Smiley as its featured speaker, and Smiley, who is reliably reported to be thinking of a race for Shelby County mayor in 2026, spent a fair amount of time comparing notes on public matters (e.g., MLGW, the future of the erstwhile Sheraton Hotel) with attendee J.W. Gibson, a businessman who has basically already declared for that office.
A local study of poverty rates in Memphis and Shelby County confirms what most people, local and otherwise, probably already suppose to be the case.
The incidence of poverty is higher in the city proper than in the county as a whole, and both Memphis and Shelby County have a higher rate of poverty than does Tennessee, while the state itself has a higher incidence of poverty than pertains in the nation.
Poverty as a percentage of population (Photo: Courtesy Delavega and Blumenthal)
The study, entitled 2024 Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet, was prepared by local analysts Elena Delavega and Gregory M. Blumenthal, a husband-and-wife team who undertake annual statistical reports on the incidence of poverty.
If there is a surprise in the study, based on 2020 census figures, it is that poverty rates for non-Hispanic whites are higher in Tennessee at large than in the United States, Shelby County, and the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) of Memphis.
This might seem to suggest a rising affluence gap between the state’s white residents and its Black and brown residents. It also has implications concerning the effects of out-migration from the Memphis area.
Poverty has increased since last year, the authors find. “This is true for most groups, including children and minorities, but not for whites in Memphis or Shelby County,” they say. “Poverty for non-Hispanic whites has fallen since 2022. It also appears that the population size of non-Hispanic whites in the city of Memphis has dropped more than for other groups, suggesting that those non-Hispanic whites who left were those in poverty.”
It is “not a surprise,” say the authors, that the poverty rate among minorities is higher than among whites. Indeed, they find that structural disparities based on race seem to have accelerated in 2023. “[These] disparities remain and will require deliberate efforts to dismantle. Solving poverty will require regional solutions and regional investments.”
One possible explanation for what seems to be a deepening divide locally is that the labor market in Memphis tends to consist of unskilled workers in the warehouse industry. “The lack of comprehensive, effective, and efficient public transportation also makes progress against poverty quite difficult,” the authors maintain.
“An additional problem has been that of external firms acquiring Memphis housing stock and renting it to Memphians at inflated prices, which makes it almost impossible for local families to afford housing.”
Finally, say the authors, “The divide between the city and the county, as evidenced by the racial and geographical differences in poverty, tends to deprive the city of Memphis of the funds it needs to support the region.”
Apropos the racial divide, the authors note that while Memphis ranks second in overall poverty and first in child poverty among large MSAs (urbanized areas with populations greater than 1,000,000) and second in overall poverty and child poverty among cities with over 500,000 population, it ranks significantly better when only whites are included.
Ranked only by its white population, Memphis is positioned significantly lower in the list, ranking 25th among 54 large MSAs (populations greater than 1,000,000) and 61st among 114 MSAs with populations greater than 500,000.
Ominously, the authors conclude that while the long-term poverty trend provides evidence of the structural nature of poverty in Memphis, five-year trend graphs suggest that disparities are increasing along racial lines.
• Meanwhile, on the eve of the pending presidential election, an equally fraught finding comes from a new poll by the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy. The survey, conducted from September 20th to 23rd, based on responses from 1,030 adults across the nation, concludes that most Americans think that democracy is in danger.
More than 50 percent of Americans think that our democracy is “under attack” in the run-up to the election. The Unity Poll is meant to offer “regular snapshots of Americans’ sense of national political unity and their faith in the country’s democratic institutions,” according to Vanderbilt professor John Geer.
The Flyer recently highlighted several referenda for Memphis voters on the November 5th election ballot. This week, which will see the onset of early voting (October 16th through October 31st), we look at partisan contests in several key races.
Legislative Races
Noah Nordstrom, tall, stately, with long blonde hair he ties into a bun, says people tell him he looks like Trevor Lawrence, the ex-Clemson quarterback who now pilots the Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL. “Either that or Thor,” Nordstrom says. “I’ll take either one.”
Images aside, Nordstrom is paradoxically mild-mannered and not macho at all, indeed somewhat diffident, as befits his day job as a public school teacher.
Noah Nordstrom (Photo: Jackson Baker)
What else he hopes to take is the title of state representative for Tennessee’s District 83, an enclave that straddles the southeastern rim of Shelby County and the western edge of Germantown. Challenger Nordstrom, a Democrat, has his work cut out for him. The seat has been held since 2010 by Republican Mark White, a fixture in the state GOP’s legislative supermajority in Nashville and the chair of the House Education Committee.
Education, as it happens, is also the central concern of Nordstrom, who teaches Spanish at Overton High School and is sounding the alarm about what he calls the “radical” ideas of the current legislative Republican supermajority. The specific moment that galvanized him into running came, he says, “when I realized that my state representative, Mark White, is pushing the voucher bill.”
That bill, a main priority of GOP Governor Bill Lee, is described by Nordstrom as “a proposal that would defund our public schools across the entire state of Tennessee.” A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but the premise of the proposed legislation is that substantial amounts of taxpayer money would be siphoned out of the general fund to provide tuition at private schools, which, arguably, are in direct competition with the long-established public school system.
“I live just over on the Memphis side [where] Memphis has set up against it completely,” said Nordstrom. Also, as he notes, “The leaders here in Germantown, the entire school board, and the mayor stood up and said, you know, we don’t want this. … Even the Republican-leaning communities don’t want it. And so I decided to throw my name in.”
Indeed, opposition to school vouchers is universal in Shelby County school circles, not only in the urbanized Memphis-Shelby County Schools, but in each of the six county municipalities — Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington, and Millington — that won the right to establish their own public school districts during the school merger controversy of the county’s previous decade.
Opposition to vouchers is one of the key wedge issues, along with demands for gun safety, also linked to public schools, that Democrats — presumed to be a minority in District 83, as they certainly are in the state at large — hope can support a political comeback for the party.
“We can do better for our kids, and so that’s been one of the main issues,” Nordstrom said at the Future901-sponsored meeting, held in a Germantown household, where he recently spoke his views. “Obviously one of the other major ones is gun violence. It’s overwhelming to realize that you might not be able to save some of these kids. We see it every day, wondering whether they’re going to make it home safe.”
Gloria Johnson (Photo: Jackson Baker)
Unforgotten is the “good trouble” of spring 2023, when mass protests were held at the state Capitol following a lethal episode of gun violence at a Nashville school. In the aftermath, three Democratic House members, including Justin J. Pearson of Memphis and Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a candidate this year for the U.S. Senate, were held to accounts by the Republican majority for their passionate support of protesters’ demands for gun safety legislation.
Pearson was expelled by the vengeful majority, along with Justin Jones of Nashville, the third member of the “Tennessee Three.” Johnson survived expulsion by a single vote. All three were celebrated nationally for their stands, and Pearson and Jones were hastily returned to office in special elections.
Realistically, Democrats don’t envision any immediate regaining of the hegemony the party held for much of Tennessee’s history, but they do hope to achieve at some point a competitive status with the Republicans, who established their dominance in the statewide election years of 2010 and 2014 and have never looked back.
At the Future901 meeting in Germantown, there was a fair amount of partisan bear-baiting of Republicans, to be sure, but there were also expressions of concern regarding the increasing takeover of the GOP by MAGA ideology and a corresponding erosion, as attendees saw it, of commonsense shared values among Republican office-holders.
John Gillespie (Photo: Jackson Baker)
White, Nordstrom’s opponent, and state Representative John Gillespie, the incumbent Republican in House District 97, were specifically cited as case studies of GOP moderates shedding their scruples, or at least trimming them at the edges, while going along to get along with the MAGA-minded majority.
As Nordstrom noted, “Now the gun lobby is so strong they say, ‘Don’t vote our way and we’ll find a candidate for the primary, and we’ll pick you out.’ And that’s part of the reason why Mark White has gotten so much more radical. You know, at one point he opposed getting rid of the permitting system for concealed carry. And last year, he voted to arm teachers, and that’s because he knows they” — members supported by the gun lobby — “are comfortable.”
Democratic activist Diane Cambron, an attendee, concurred: “That’s one of the reasons why [District 96 Democratic state Representative] Dwayne Thompson is not running for reelection. He didn’t run for reelection this time because, according to him, when he first got elected in 2016 there were some moderate Republicans with whom he could work, but every year, those moderate Republicans drop out, they don’t run, and they’re replaced by younger, more radical Republicans, and that is what our Republican legislature is becoming. Even though they have a majority, they’re getting more and more radical all the time. There are very few moderate Republicans left.”
It should be said that White, the criticism notwithstanding, is widely regarded as being able to work across party lines. And, as the old joke has it, White can cry all the way to the bank. As is the case with most incumbents, especially well-heeled establishment figures, his cash receipts dwarf those of opponent Nordstrom, a first-time candidate.
His Education Committee chairmanship is consistent with his background in that, before attaining some success with a party-favor business, he was an elementary school teacher and a principal. He co-founded something called the Global Children’s Educational Foundation, which provided financial assistance and educational opportunities to impoverished children in Panama. And he won the Tennessee Community Organizations’ Legislator of the Year award in 2016 and the Tennessee CASA Association’s Legislator of the Year award in 2012.
He is no slouch, no easy target.
All of which is to say that Noah Nordstrom and the Democrats will have their hands full in District 83. They remain hopeful, though, that they can build on the incremental success they began in 2016 — ironically the year of Donald J. Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton nationally. The victory in 2016 of the aforementioned Dwayne Thompson over incumbent Republican Steve McManus in District 96 was just as much of an upset locally. As then constituted, District 96 also straddled city and county lines and the accustomed bailiwicks of either party.
Jesse Huseth (Photo: Jackson Baker)
So does House District 97, where the case can be made that Democratic challenger Jesse Huseth might even be regarded as a favorite over incumbent Republican John Gillespie. The two opponents have raised approximately the same amount of money, each with cash on hand of just under $100,000, and, as currently configured, the district lines encompass a territory where Democrat Jason Martin, a distant second to incumbent GOP Governor Bill Lee virtually everywhere statewide, actually out-polled Lee. And the same can be said of Joe Biden in his presidential race against Trump.
The district’s current configuration remains one of the mysteries of Election Year 2024, since Gillespie, as a member of the GOP supermajority, had the opportunity to call the shots during the redistricting that followed census year 2020. And he decided to discard two Republican-dominated county precincts in return for two politically ambivalent ones further west in Memphis proper, presumably lowering his chances for reelection.
There has yet emerged no satisfactory explanation for Gillespie’s decision. One theory is that, as someone not regarded as slavishly partisan, he fretted over the prospect of being challenged in this year’s primary by a MAGA type in the formerly configured district. Another is that he was determined to prove that he could still win the more problematic district as a presumed Republican moderate — one who conspicuously deviated from GOP orthodoxy on the issue of guns, among other issues. Yet a third theory is that Gillespie simply wishes to represent the concerns of Memphis’ Poplar Corridor business community.
In any case, the District 97 race is regarded statewide as something of a coin-flip race — a test case of sorts regarding future partisan tendencies and the Democrats’ best chance of altering the current statistical ratio in the House, which stands at 75 Republicans and 24 Democrats.
The race could hinge on the two candidates’ contrasting positions on crime, which reflect an ongoing showdown between state and city. Huseth is a strong supporter of three referenda on the Memphis ballot that seek citizen support for “trigger” laws that would allow possible local reinstitution of gun permit requirements, the banning of assault rifle sales, and the imposition of “red flag” laws allowing judges to confiscate firearms from likely offenders. The Democratic candidate is an adherent as well of District Attorney General Steve Mulroy’s call for a new Memphis crime lab that would facilitate detection and prosecution of violent crime.
Gillespie has allied himself with state Senator Brent Taylor, a declared foe of Mulroy, in aggressive sponsorship of legislation strengthening anti-crime penalties and counteracting local options on matters of sentencing. Gillespie authored a bill striking down the Memphis City Council’s ban of “preemptive” traffic stops based on minor infractions.
Partisan races exist in several other legislative districts, where the incumbents are heavily favored. The contests are: Democratic incumbent Larry Miller vs. Republican Larry Hunter in House District 88; Democratic incumbent G.A. Hardaway vs. Republican Renarda Renee Clariett in District 93; Democratic incumbent Antonio Parkinson vs. the GOP’s Cecil Hale in District 98; and Republican incumbent Tom Leatherwood vs. Democrat William P. Mouzon in District 99.
U.S. Senate
Democrats have not come out ahead in a statewide race in Tennessee since then-Governor Phil Bredesen fairly handily won reelection in 2006. By the time Bredesen was next on the ballot, in a race for the U.S. Senate in 2018, he was defeated with equal ease by arch-conservative Republican state Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Nothing more clearly indicates the sea change in Tennessee partisan politics which occurred in the meantime, with the rapid shift of Tennessee from the status of a bellwether state to one in which Republican domination of state affairs had become a given.
Blackburn is up for reelection this year, and Democratic hopes are vested in the aforementioned Gloria Johnson, who won prominence as a member of the “Tennessee Three,” the Democratic House members who drew the ire of the Republican leadership for their assertive support of gun safety protesters in 2023.
Both Blackburn and Johnson have well-deserved reputations for intense partisanship, with Blackburn being a mainline supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, of strong action against illegal immigration, and of MAGA causes in general, and Johnson being equally vigorous in espousal of Democratic positions on such matters as reproductive freedom and climate change. She has clashed repeatedly with Republicans in the legislature and, after being gerrymandered out of one state House seat by the GOP supermajority, returned to the General Assembly as the representative of another.
Efforts by Democrats and others to arrange debates between the two candidates have so far foundered on a confident and financially well-endowed Blackburn’s reluctance to entertain them, but various polls have suggested that underdog Johnson, beneficiary of a recent fundraiser at the Annesdale Mansion in Memphis, may be within striking distance.
Congressional Races
Incumbent Democrat Steve Cohen is heavily favored against Charlotte Bergmann, a perennial Republican opponent of his in the Memphis-based 9th District, while Republican incumbent David Kustoff in the 8th District has a scrappy challenger in Sarah Freeman of Germantown, who hopes to revive a dormant Democratic base in the rural enclaves of that West Tennessee district.
Sarah Freeman (Photo: Jackson Baker)
The effect of the 2024 presidential race on any and all of these local races is somewhat harder than usual to estimate. Normally a heavy Democratic turnout in Memphis precincts for the presidential race inflates the totals of Democrats running in local districts. And that effect could be augmented by a larger turnout than usual among women voters who favor the Democratic position on behalf of abortion rights and who might be influenced by the fact of a woman, Kamala Harris, heading the Democratic ticket. But local Republican candidates, too, can expect a boost, from whatever turnout the Trump/MAGA base can command.
JB Smiley at Germantown Democrats’ picnic (Photo: Jackson Baker)
Most people are familiar with an adage, often attributed to the late Speaker of the U.S. House Tip O’Neill, that “all politics is local.”
Until it isn’t.
Tennesseans are becoming uncomfortably aware that state government is muscling into as many local government prerogatives as possible — in areas ranging from education to healthcare to social policy to, increasingly, law enforcement.
A number of current circumstances reflect what seems to be a war of attrition waged at the state level against the right of Memphis and Shelby County to pursue independent law-and-order initiatives.
Memphis City Council chairman JB Smiley spoke to the matter Sunday at the annual picnic of the Germantown Democratic Club at Cameron Brown Park.
Said Smiley: “You know, recently, I’ve been, against my will, going back and forth with someone in the statehouse who doesn’t care for Shelby County called Cameron Sexton. Yeah, he doesn’t believe that Shelby County has the right to exercise its voice.“
Sexton, of course, is the Republican speaker of the state House of Representatives who recently threatened to withhold from Memphis its share of some vital state revenues in retaliation for the city’s inclusion on the November 5th ballot of a referendum package soliciting citizens’ views on possible future firearms curbs.
The package lists three initiatives — a reinstatement of gun-carry permits, a ban on the sale of assault rifles, and the right of judges to impose “red-flag” laws against the possession of weapons by demonstrably risky individuals.
All the initiatives are in the form of “trigger laws,” which would be activated only if and when state policy might allow the local options. As Smiley noted, “That’s what the state did when they disagreed with the federal government when it came to abortion rights. As soon as the law changed in the country, [their] law became full and effective. That’s what we’re going to do in the city of Memphis.”
Simultaneous with this ongoing showdown between city and state has been a determined effort by Republican state Senator Brent Taylor and others to pass state laws restricting the prerogatives of local Criminal Court judges and Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy.
One piece of Taylor-sponsored legislation, passed last year, would transfer authority over capital punishment appeals from the DA to the state attorney general. Litigation against the law pursued by Mulroy and an affected defendant resulted in the measure’s being declared unconstitutional in trial court.
But the state Appeals Court reversed that judgment last week, seemingly revalidating the law and causing Taylor to crow in a social media post over what he deemed a personal victory over Mulroy, whom he accused of wanting to “let criminals off of death row” and whose ouster he has vowed to pursue in the legislature.
The fact is, however, that there will be one more review of the measure, by the state Supreme Court, before its ultimate status is made clear.
Some of the immediate media coverage of the matter tended to play up Taylor’s declaration of victory over Mulroy, ignoring the ongoing aspects of the litigation and overlooking obvious nuances.
One TV outlet erroneously reported the Appeals Court as having found Mulroy guilty of “inappropriate” conduct when the court had merely speculated on the legalistic point of whether the DA had appropriate standing as a plaintiff (a point that was conceded, incidentally, by the state Attorney General).
Mulroy’s reaction to the Appeals Court finding focused on the issue as having to do with governance: “The Tennessee Constitution says local voters get to elect a local resident DA to represent them in court. This law transfers power over the most serious cases, death penalty cases, from locally elected DAs across the state to one unelected state official half a state away. This should concern anyone, regardless of party, who cares about local control and state overreach.”
Election coverage and various polls keep emphasizing the dead-heat aspects of the national presidential election, but the fact is that, for voters in Memphis and Shelby County, there is minimal suspense associated with the presidential race.
The assumption is that — population demographics, past election performances, and partisan loyalties being what they are — the Republican Trump-Vance ticket should win easily statewide, and the Democratic Harris-Walz ticket should romp locally.
Which is not to suggest that the presidential race won’t affect other options on the November 5th ballot. There will undoubtedly be a carryover effect from the anticipated heavier turnout of voters expressing their preferences for president.
Clearly, this effect could be all-important in some races on the Shelby County ballot — especially the showdown in the District 97 race for state representative between GOP incumbent John Gillespie and Democratic challenger Jesse Huseth. This race, for the right to represent Memphis’ upscale Poplar Corridor, is being closely watched for its potential future implications regarding the statewide voter mainstream.
But in the long as well as the short run, the key portions of the local ballot could be four referenda directed at Memphis voters, the outcome of which could be more than usually significant.
The most highly publicized of these is City of Memphis Referendum Ordinance No. 5908, a three-parter couched in pollster-like terms that could serve as a potential trigger mechanism for enacting local gun safety measures in the future.
The referendum would serve to measure city voters’ sentiment for reinstatement of carry permits for firearms, for banning the local sale of assault rifles, and for enabling judges to issue extreme-risk (“red flag”) protection orders prohibiting gun ownership by certifiably risky persons.
Ordinance No. 5908, authorized by the city council in light of citizen alarm concerning violent crimes locally, ignited a back-and-forth legal and rhetorical struggle between city and state authorities, resolved finally by Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson in favor of allowing the referendum on the local ballot in the face of threats by state officials to withhold shared state tax revenues from the city.
Also on the ballot are several provisions involving the city charter that would have direct impact on the conduct of Memphis elections and city government at large.
City of Memphis Referendum Ordinance No. 5884 would strike down the ban of runoffs in mayoral and at-large city races that was established in 1991. The ban was imposed by the late federal Judge Jerome Turner as a safeguard against organized blanket voting against Blacks, then (but no longer) a racial minority.
City of Memphis Referendum Ordinance No. 5913 would impose a requirement that candidates for Memphis mayor would have to establish legal residence in the city for two years prior to election. This referendum, if passed, would resolve a legal dispute that arose in the mayoral election of 2023 — one that saw the viability of several prominent candidates come under question.
And City of Memphis Referendum Ordinance No. 5893 would “authorize the City Council by ordinance to fix and determine the salaries of the Mayor, City Council, Chief Administrative Officer, and Appointed Directors and Deputy Directors.”
This referendum, authorized by the council in light of several recent disputes between itself and the current mayoral administration, would tilt the weight of authority in favor of the council.
