Chip Forrester – Memphis Flyer

The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the presidential race will likely open up career opportunities for fellow Republicans — including some in the Memphis area.

One possible beneficiary is lawyer John Ryder, a longtime eminence in GOP affairs. Ryder has served as local Republican chairman, as a member of the Republican National Committee from Tennessee, and, currently, as general counsel to the RNC. After the census of 2010, Ryder headed up the Republican Party’s redistricting efforts nationwide, and the map he helped create has strongly reinforced the GOP’s hold on districts in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A partner at the Harris Shelton law firm of Memphis, Ryder was named Republican Lawyer of the Year in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., last month. That follows a year in which he served as a Trump delegate to the GOP convention in Cleveland and was a key member of that conventions’ rules committee.

Considering that Ryder, as general counsel, has essentially been the right-hand man of RNC chairman Reince Priebus, and that Priebus has just been designated by Trump to be the new president’s chief of staff, the question arises: Is Ryder a prospect to succeed Priebus as head of the RNC?

“That would be a decision reached by the president-elect,” Ryder said Monday in a telephone conversation that took place as he drove to Nashville, where he teaches a course at Vanderbilt. “We’re going to see what happens. A lot of different paths are going to open up in the next few weeks, and I’m looking to where I can best be of service to the republic.”

Ryder emphasized that “nothing’s been discussed so far.” As for the possibility of his being offered other positions in the official GOP network that stands to be expanded in the new administration, Ryder said, “I’m not particularly looking for anything. I’m not particularly expecting anything.”

Elsewhere locally, Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who served as Trump’s West Tennessee chairman, said he expected to have a say in whatever patronage positions might be available in his bailiwick.

Meanwhile, Tennessee Democrats may be looking to change direction in the wake of yet another election in which they failed to advance. Except for one upset win, that of Democrat Dwayne Thompson over GOP state Representative Steve McManus in state House District 96 (Cordova, Germantown), Democratic candidates lost all the legislative races in which they challenged Republicans. The net result was a loss of one seat in the House, which means that there will be 25 Democrats and 74 Republicans in the House come January; the state Senate remains at its current level: five Democrats and 28 Republicans. The Republican legislative super-majority holds tight.

And that’s not a satisfactory set of affairs for Bill Freeman, the wealthy Nashville businessman who is the chief Democratic donor in Tennessee and, as he made clear in a visit to Memphis earlier this month, has ambitions of running for governor in 2018.

Likening the party’s electoral showing to a dismal season in the NFL, Freeman told the Nashville Tennessean that, “we’ve got to look at every option, including a new chair.”

The current chair, Mary Mancini of Nashville, has no intention of giving up the job, however, and has said she will run for another two-year term.

One of Freemen’s closest associates is former state party chairman Chip Forrester, who has served several chairmanship terms in different decades, who served Freeman as campaign manager in his unsuccessful race for Nashville mayor last year, and will probably head up a Freeman gubernatorial campaign in 2018 if there is one.

But there is no indication so far that Forrester is looking at another run at the party chairmanship, and Freeman is talking up Holly McCall, who early in the year declared for House District 65, then held by bad-boy Republican incumbent Jeremy Durham, an accused sexual predator. She eventually lost her bid for the seat to Sam Whitson, the Republican who ousted Durham in the GOP primary.

In a letter to members of the state Democratic executive committee emailed on Monday, Freeman put the kernel of his argument this way:

“First and foremost, for all the effort that we focused on in Tennessee, we gained absolutely no ground in the state senate and had a net loss of one seat in the state house. Instead of moving the needle forward, we went backward. This is unacceptable. … We should have done better and done it more robustly. I believe we need new leadership to do so.”

Of Mancini, Freeman said, “She is a fine person and clearly committed to serving our party, but we have failed to grow as we all had hoped for during these past two years. … The poor results we have seen this past Tuesday show clearly that we need a change.”

Pointedly, Freeman made reference to “a critical statewide race for the United States Senate in 2018,” and said, “We must rebuild our party to have the infrastructure in place so that our Democrat nominees for governor and U.S. senator have the party machinery in place to succeed.”

Tennessee Democrats — and Mancini — did, however, have one legislative victory in the recent election that nobody saw coming except the participants in the winning campaign. As indicated, this was the upset win of Thompson, a genial human resources administrator and longtime Democratic activist, over state Representative McManus, a GOP legislative mainstay, in District 96.

Under the circumstances of the 2016 election cycle, which not only strengthened the GOP super-majority in Tennessee but put Donald Trump into the presidency and gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate and House, it is astonishing that Thompson should have won election to the state House from a suburban Shelby County district. It is doubly astonishing that he unseated an incumbent Republican to do so.

Not only was Thompson the only Democrat in Tennessee to unseat a Republican, he believes himself to be the only Democrat in the South to have done so.

Thompson’s victory over McManus, who had been serving as chairman of the state House banking and insurance committee, was by the total of 351 votes out of almost 28,000 cast, and that ultra-thin margin can be attributed to old-fashioned work ethic on the winner’s side and what has to be reckoned as complacency and over-confidence on the loser’s.

McManus’ campaign war-chest totaled $155,754.59 as of the third-quarter financial-disclosure deadline, dwarfing Thompson’s $5,088.20. Thompson later received an infusion of financial aid from the Tennessee Democratic Party: $1,500 in a direct outlay on top of a $13,100 in-kind contribution in the form of a “polling survey.”

In October, Thompson’s total expenditures of $13,817 were almost equal to McManus’, and the Democratic challenger targeted his campaign money well, spending some of it on some modest internet advertising that pointed out, among other things, the fact that he had a military record.

McManus’ confidence may also have stemmed from the fact that he had easily dispatched Thompson in their first match-up, in 2014, with 62 percent of the vote to Thompson’s 38 percent.

Thompson was determined to prove that District 96 was a swing district, composed of a working-class/middle-class mix that was susceptible to a Democratic appeal. He boasts that he and his campaign team knocked on a total of 12,000 doors in the course of the campaign, focusing on issues ranging from Cordova’s traffic problems to skepticism about charter schools and the need for reviving Governor Bill Haslam‘s dormant Insure Tennessee program for Medicaid expansion, which, he emphasized to voters, had been blocked in McManus’ committee in the special legislative session of 2015.

State representative Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), who was reelected last week as leader of the 28 Democrats remaining in the 99-member state House of Representatives, created something of a stir in the wake of his win, when he suggested that “someone at the top” of the state party should become a candidate for governor in 2014, opposing incumbent Republican governor Bill Haslam.

Asked by reporters if he himself might fit that role, Fitzhugh did not disown the possibility, and Democratic bloggers and activists across the state responded quickly and positively to the idea of his candidacy. Enthusiasm was perhaps greatest in West Tennessee, bailiwick for Fitzhugh and for such state party luminaries of the recent past as longtime House speaker Jimmy Naifeh of Covington, now retired, and former Governor Ned McWherter of Dresden and longtime Senate speaker and lieutenant governor John Wilder of Somerville, both now deceased.

In the election cycle of 2012, when other West Tennessee Democrats fared poorly, Fitzhugh overcame a stout challenge from a well-financed Republican to win reelection to his District 82 seat.

The courtly and well-spoken Fitzhugh, a banker and lawyer, is respected among members of both parties and, as party leader, proved himself adept at keeping lines of communication open with the now-dominant Republicans while simultaneously making strong arguments for Democratic positions.

The question is: Would Fitzhugh be willing to forgo another reelection try in 2014 in favor of what would almost certainly be the role of sacrificial lamb in a gubernatorial race?

The facts, as revealed in a poll recently conducted by Vanderbilt University and announced last week, are that Haslam’s popularity, halfway into his first term, is high with Tennesseans of all political persuasions.

The poll, conducted of Tennessee voters, who were contacted on both land-line and cell phones during the period between November 27th and December 9th, showed the governor to be enjoying a general approval rating of 68 percent. That broke down to 81 percent of Republicans, 62 percent of independents, 60 percent of Democrats, and 79 percent of Tea Party adherents. Moreover, at a time when the nation’s Congress was approved of by only 21 percent of those polled, a majority — 52 percent — had a favorable opinion of the GOP-dominated Tennessee legislature.

If there was a high sign for Democrats in the poll, it was that the approval rating of President Barack Obama, which was 39 percent in a VU poll taken in May, had risen to 45 percent. That finding could prove especially meaningful, since the precipitate decline in Democratic fortunes in Tennessee can be traced to 2008, the year of Obama’s national triumph but one in which Republican presidential candidate John McCain won Tennessee by a 15-point margin over Obama.

It was a last-minute campaign trip that year by McCain to Bristol, Virginia, on the Tennessee border, that many observers credit with a surprise defeat of then state representative Nathan Vaughn, the Democrat who served the adjoining district in Tennessee. It was the unexpected loss of that seat, along with two or three others, that gave a majority in the state House to Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction. A number of Democrats, too, have suggested that the party’s standing in Tennessee suffered from Obama’s victory in the long Democratic primary season of 2008 over Hillary Clinton, who had the support of most ranking party members that year and who won the Tennessee primary.

Not only was Obama’s support base bereft of established supporters in county after county, the national Democratic campaign organization that year largely bypassed Tennessee in its allocation of funding and cadres.

The Republican victories in 2010, the year of Tea Party rebellion, were even greater than those of 2008, and in 2012, in elections conducted after a Republican-controlled redistricting process, the GOP achieved a virtual monopoly of state government — owning super-majorities in both houses of the legislature, the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, and seven of nine seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The road back to power for Democrats will be long and painful. Besides fielding a credible candidate for governor against Haslam in 2014, they will need someone capable of running respectably the same year against U.S. senator Lamar Alexander, who has already declared for reelection and, in the aforementioned Vanderbilt University poll, registered an approval rating of 56 percent.

• Another decision state Democrats have to make is that of a party chairman. Chip Forrester of Nashville has decided to step down after serving two terms, and while Forrester is credited with serious efforts to upgrade the party’s outreach and technological base, his tenure was shrouded from beginning to end with controversy.

Forrester was first elected in 2009 as the leader of a grass-roots faction challenging what was then the state party hierarchy, most of whom supported another candidate, Nashville lawyer Charles Robert Bone. Among those taking an active role on Bone’s behalf at the time were Governor Phil Bredesen; former Memphis congressman Harold Ford Jr., then serving as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council; and sitting congressmen Lincoln Davis, John Tanner, Bart Gordon, and Jim Cooper.

Forrester won that showdown in a convincing 43-25 vote by the state Democratic executive committee, but a long-running schism would ensue between himself and the offended party elders. Ironically, Forrester, who was reelected in 2011, outlasted the party brass who had opposed him. All except Cooper were out of office within two years, either by their own choice or that of the voters (or, in Bredesen’s case, by a constitutional two-term limitation).

Yet Forrester also suffered from a gutting of the Democratic power base — most of it accomplished during the Tea Party election of 2010 — during which Republicans made dramatic gains across the breadth of Tennessee and enlarged their control of both houses of the General Assembly. Inevitably, critics charged Forrester with failure to recruit viable candidates for legislative races, though they had to acknowledge his successes in fund-raising.

As it happens, the party treasurer who helped Forrester build the party coffers during most of the outgoing chairman’s tenure has been another Nashville lawyer, Dave Garrison, now a candidate to succeed Forrester and one who has strong ties with what remains of the onetime state party hierarchy. Garrison has, in fact, been endorsed by Cooper, one of only two remaining Democratic congressmen in Tennessee. (The other is Steve Cohen of Memphis’ 9th District.)

In a recent email to members of the party’s state executive committee, which will meet on January 26th to name a new chairman, Cooper described Garrison as a “champion of Democratic values and a capable fund-raiser.” Forrester, too, has given a strong endorsement to Garrison.

Other candidates include former party communications director Wade Munday, Nashville attorney Ben Smith, and Chattanooga labor leader Jane Hampton Bowen. Both Munday and Garrison have made pilgrimages to Memphis in recent weeks, soliciting support from local executive committee members, and Smith was a prominent attendee at the recent Christmas party of the Democratic Women of Shelby County.

Whoever gets elected will have the same problem faced by Forrester and by the party’s candidates for major office in the years to come: a constituency for Democrats among Tennesseans at large that is on the edge of vanishing and badly needs to be rebuilt.