Danielle Schonbaum – Memphis Flyer

As one election, a national one, finally heads to an end (with votes still being counted here and there), the next process of electoral transition is underway, locally.

This week, an abbreviated one because of the Thanksgiving holiday, sees the beginning of turnover on the Memphis City Council. Of the body’s 13 available seats, three will be spoken for during the next few weeks. Those are the ones that were scheduled for vacating as of August 2nd, when three council members — Bill Morrison in District 1, Edmund Ford Jr. in District 6, and Janis Fullilove in Super District 8, Position 2 — won elections for positions in Shelby County government.

Jackson Baker

Jeff Warren

At the Flyer‘s press time on Tuesday, the first of these seats — that of Morrison, who was elected Probate Court clerk — was due for reappointment that evening by vote of council. The applicants were Paul Boyd, Mauricio Calvo, Faye Morrison, Tierra Holloway, Rhonda Logan, Danielle Schonbaum, and Lonnie Treadway.

The seats currently held by Ford and Fullilove will be filled next. Fullilove, now Juvenile Court clerk, has announced her resignation, effective November 23rd, and Ford’s resignation will take effect two days later, on November 25th. Applicants for either seat must submit proof of their residency, a resume, a letter of interest, a sworn affidavit, and a nominating petition with 25 signatures of registered voters in the relevant district.

Registration packets for the two seats will be available as of noon next Monday, November 26th, and the deadline for filing applications is Thursday, December 13th. The council is expected to vote on filling the two seats at its meeting on December 18th.

The seats held by Morrison, Ford, and Fullilove became points of controversy following the August 2nd election, when local activists insisted in vain that the council members resign their positions soon enough to permit the inclusion of their vacated seats on the November 6th election ballot. Instead, the three members chose to continue occupying their council seats for nearly the full 90 days post-election that the city charter permitted — a fact making it necessary to fill the seats by appointment and giving the remaining council members the say-so over replacing the departing members.

Ford, now a member of the Shelby County Commission, was even deputized by commission chair Van Turner to serve as a de facto liaison between the two local legislative bodies.

The councilman’s forthcoming resignation is not the only change on his horizon. He was named financial literacy coordinator for Memphis Public Libraries last week, and, as he informed his fellow commission members on Monday, Ford’s employment as a teacher in the Shelby County Schools system would end on Wednesday of this week — a fact permitting him to vote without recusal on an issue affecting school funding.

Ultimately, all 13 council seats, including the three being filled between now and year’s end, will be up for grabs in the 2019 city election scheduled for next October. At least one seat, the one for Super District 9, Position 3, now held by Councilman Reid Hedgepeth, has already drawn a challenger.

Seeking the seat will be Jeff Warren, a physician who served on the old Memphis City Schools board that went out of existence with the merger of Memphis and Shelby County systems. Warren was a member of the Memphis board minority that resisted the crucial vote of December 20, 2010, to surrender the MCS charter.

“I believe we are on the verge of turning a corner in Memphis,” Warren said in announcing his candidacy. “We have had many recent successes, despite our long-term challenges. We have been pushing educational growth and do not need to let up. Mayor Strickland will continue to need support and advice to increase job growth.”

• The county commission acted decisively on a number of matters at its Monday meeting. Especially noteworthy were a vote on authorizing a TIF (tax increment financing project) for a forthcoming Lakeland Commons development and a vote resolving a holdover schism regarding the ongoing opioid crisis between former county Mayor Mark Luttrell and the commission that expired with the August 2nd election.

There were several aspects to the divide between Luttrell and the commission, who engaged in a more or less continuous power struggle, but the opioid matter was the matter with the most relevance to the community at large.

The disagreement arose last year when then commission chair Heidi Shafer, supported by other commission members, availed herself of clauses in the county charter that, she argued, allowed her to contract for legal action against various parties, including physicians and pharmaceutical companies, involved in the over-distribution of opioids in Shelby County.

Shafer’s action arose from her conviction, shared by former chair Terry Roland and a majority of other members, that opioid abuse had become rampant to the point of causing serious damage to Shelby Countians and that the Luttrell administration had been slow in pursuing remedial action.

Unsurprisingly, Luttrell disagreed and, putting forth his own plan of action, insisted that the county charter left the authority for pursuing legal remedies entirely in his hands.

What ensued was a back-and-forth between the two branches of county government that required several hearings in Chancery Court and would not be fully resolved until agreement on coordinated action was reached between new Mayor Lee Harris and the new commission, culminating in the vote on Monday, authorizing a settlement.

Shafer, who would receive several testimonials of appreciation from commission members, was present for the vote and expressed her pleasure that no more intramural acrimony would be occurring and “we can concentrate on dealing with the bad guys.”

The Lakeland matter, involving a $48 million development at the site of an abandoned remainder mall, drew attendees from both sides of the recently concluded municipal election in Lakeland, with Mayor-elect Mike Cunningham and supporters asking the commission for a delay of two weeks on approving the TIF, giving the new administration time to acquaint itself with the details of a project that had been strongly favored by the administration of outgoing Mayor Wyatt Bunker.

The commission approved the TIF 9-2, after noting that authority for continuing with the project would still rest with the Lakeland city government.

A week and more since the election, the dust has settled, as they say, and the earth on which it rests looks, superficially, amazingly the same as it was before.

The landscape of Tennessee is still red-tinted, as it has been since the statewide elections of 2010 and 2014 and the post-census reapportionment of legislative seats, in-between. The state’s two Senate seats belong to the Republicans, as does the governorship, and a GOP supermajority will still be reigning in Nashville when the General Assembly reconvenes.

But there are clear and obvious signs of change.

Politically speaking, there are two Nashvilles. The capital city’s name, used as a synecdoche for state government, or, alternatively, for the oft retrograde doings of the legislature, connotes all kinds of red-hued things. The actual city of Nashville, based on the voting habits of its electorate and the official acts of its public figures, is the most consistently blue spot in Tennessee; indeed, it is probably the last refuge on Planet Earth of the once-upon-a-time Solid Democratic South.

Laura Jean Hocking

Scene from Weekend Rally at Civic Center Plaza

Nashville is where not just blacks, who amount to 27 percent of the population, but politically ambitious whites find it worth their while to run as Democrats. Nashville’s legislators are still predominantly Democratic; the Congressman representing the city, Jim Cooper, is a Democrat, and so are its mayors; former Mayors Karl Dean, this year’s Democratic nominee for Governor and Phil Bredesen, the two-term Governor who carried the party’s banner in the 2018 U.S. Senate race being cases in point.

The cautious Micawber-like conservatism of Bredesen was on full display in the Senate race, as it had been during his gubernatorial tenure, and it was a source of continuing annoyance to a good many Democratic activists, who bridled at their nominee’s implicit and sometimes overt affinities for Trumpism, as when Bredesen, post-Senate hearings, embraced the Supreme Court candidacy of Brett Kavanaugh, or when, in a TV commercial, he seemed to relish the idea of working in tandem with the president (“a skilled negotiator”) to get pharmaceutical prices down.

While these overtures might have seemed ill-considered cave-ins to many of Bredesen’s Democratic supporters, they might very well have represented the candidate’s actual views. Bredesen is, after all, the governor who drastically pruned the rolls of TennCare and, in his first year in office in 2003, imposed across-the-board budget cuts of 9 percent in state spending. (By comparison, his victorious ultra-right-wing Republican opponent in 2018, Marsha Blackburn, had only demanded an 8 percent omnibus cut back then, as a state senator.)

The root fact may be that Bredesen, an import from the Northeast who made a fortune in Nashville as a health-care entrepreneur, is, politically, the exception who proves the rule about Nashville — someone who, upon entering politics, branded himself a Democrat because that was the “right” label for someone running for office in Nashville.

Whatever the case, Bredesen got 71 percent of the votes this year in Nashville as compared to 66 percent in Memphis. The rest of the state went for Blackburn by a 70 to 30 ratio, percentage-wise.

It is difficult to imagine James Mackler, the youngish Nashville lawyer and Iraq War vet who was talked into bowing out of the race to accommodate Bredesen’s race, doing much worse, statewide. And the progressive ideas Mackler unfolded during his brief candidacy might well have proved as rousing as Beto O’Rourke’s similar approach did in Texas, making the Lone Star congressman’s race there a close-run thing and elevating him into national prominence. We’ll never know. It was assumed, probably correctly, that only Bredesen could raise the requisite amount of cash for a competitive statewide race in Tennessee.

Similar reasoning underlay the nice-try but no-cigar race by Karl Dean against the GOP’s new-look gubernatorial winner, Bill Lee.

The state Democratic Party, incidentally, did what it could financially to augment several of the legislative races in play on last week’s ballot, including races mounted in Shelby County’s most suburban corners against long-term Republicans thought to have an unbreakable hold on power.

There was Gabby Salinas, the Bolivian-born cancer survivor and research scientist who, running as a Democrat, pleaded the cause of Medicaid expansion against its chief antagonist, the supposedly entrenched Republican state senator and state Senate Judiciary Chairman Brian Kelsey, in District 31, a sprawling land mass extending from Midtown and East Memphis into the suburban hinterland of Bartlett, Germantown, and Collierville. Gabby, as she was everywhere known, came within 2 percent of ousting Kelsey, who squeaked out a win of 40,313 to 38,793.

Democrat Danielle Schonbaum made things look relatively close in her contest with the veteran Mark White in House District 83, another East Memphis-Germantown-Collierville amalgam where she polled 11,336 votes to White’s 15,129. Even closer was fellow Democratic newcomer Allan Creasy, who won 10,073 votes against incumbent Jim Coley‘s 12,298 in District 97, a somewhat gerrymandered slice of Bartlett and Eads.

And, of course, there was District 96 (Cordova, Germantown), where Democrat Dwayne Thompson, who managed to upset Republican incumbent Steve McManus in the Trump year of 2016, expanded his margin of victory from 14,710 to 10,493 over Republican warhorse Scott McCormick in a reelection bid.

If those outcomes on the suburban rim look familiar, they are the contemporary Democratic equivalents of the kinds of gains Republicans made in the period of the GOP’s ascendancy, beginning in the late 1960s. Just as the GOP did in its rise to power, the refurbished Democratic Party, led by Corey Strong, made a point of challenging every available position, an effort that Republicans could not or would not match.

Unmistakably, Shelby County’s Democratic totals were swelled enormously by the African-American voters who are the essence of the party’s base here. But this year the effort made by white Democrats, focused in the Germantown Democratic Party, whose president Dave Cambron doubled as the party’s chief recruiter of candidates, and by millennial-dominated groups like Indivisible and Future 90 and new leaders, like Emily Fulmer, was intensified to a point of fever pitch.

Fulmer and others were galvanized into action again on Saturday, in a rally on Civic Center Plaza of hundreds who braved cold weather to protest the prospect of a post-election move against the Robert Mueller investigation by President Trump.

Unmistakably, Democratic sentiment in Memphis and Shelby County is again on the rise, after a decade or two of slumber.