With only days remaining before the financial disclosures of county candidates for the first quarter of 2022 will be made public, Shelby County Commissioner Brandon Morrison says she is satisfied with her fundraising efforts to date and is focusing on meet-the-public events.
Jordan Carpenter, her Republican primary opponent and a political unknown before this race, is meanwhile having as many fundraising events as he can manage. Addressing an audience at a Germantown residence on Sunday, he recalled asking “all the big names” to head up his financial efforts as he planned his race, “and they’re like no, no, we’re not gonna.” So he settled on Jason McCuistion, a banking attorney and his friend “since the eighth grade,” to be his treasurer.
The newcomer has the support of the current four Republicans on the commission, three of whom — Amber Mills, Mick Wright, and Mark Billingsley, who is term-limited and leaving office — were present on Sunday. David Bradford, the fourth GOP member, was absent. The newly reapportioned District 4, which Carpenter and Morrison are competing in, is a montage of East Memphis and Germantown precincts.
Contending that Morrison has “failed” to represent the district, Carpenter cited two issues he thought important to suburban Republicans. One was the lingering issue of support for MATA, something Morrison has expressed openness toward by reorienting present funding. “You don’t take county taxpayer money and send it to a Memphis city entity when they’re not using the money that they already have correctly,” he said.
And the challenger took issue with Morrison’s serving last year as vice chair of an ad hoc commission committee to examine a joint city-county proposal on future Metro consolidation. That, Carpenter said, was “an issue that people care about a lot … a forced marriage, where half the residents of the county don’t want to be in it.”
He continued: “And there are people that say that issue is dead. And I say, you shouldn’t believe those people while the political action committees are being formed. And the money is being given in the background. And the swords are being sharpened behind closed doors …”
Apprised of Carpenter’s statement, Morrison, back in Memphis late Monday after a trip to Nashville, where she presented the legislature with a commission’s wish list, said her opponent was “being divisive, and I’m not going to play that game. I’m looking forward.”
• Political acrimony was wholly absent from two other weekend events. One was the opening at Poplar and Highland on Saturday of Sheriff Floyd Bonner’s campaign headquarters. Inasmuch as Bonner is unopposed on the Democratic primary ballot and the Shelby County Republicans are offering no candidate for sheriff, the event was ready-made for a massive turnout, and an enormous number of candidates from both sides of the political aisle, as well as independents, showed up for a share of the dais.
The other big event of the weekend, also crowded, was nonpartisan by design. It was the official unveiling on Sunday of the new Memphis Suffrage Monument on the riverfront in a space behind the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. The tribute to the women who worked to extend the ballot to womankind was the brainchild of Memphis activist Paula Casey, who labored 20 years to bring it into being. On hand for the unveiling was a virtual who’s who of local officials and civic figures.
