Election 2023 – Memphis Flyer

UPDATED: As is generally known, Memphis city elections are not subject to partisan voting. There are no primaries allowing our local Republicans and Democrats to nominate a candidate to carry the party banner.

Nor, in the case of citywide office (mayor or council super districts 8 and 9), does there exist machinery for a runoff election when no candidate for those offices commands a majority of the general election vote.

There are runoff circumstances for districts 1 through 7, each of them a single district contributing to the pastiche of city government, by electing, in effect, a council member to serve a smaller geographical area or neighborhood.

The aforementioned super districts encompass the entire city. Each of them, in theory, represents a half of the city’s population — the western half being predominantly Black, as of 1991, when the first super-district lines were drawn, the eastern half being largely white. (Though population has meanwhile shifted, those distinctions are still more or less accurate.)

Runoffs are prohibited in the super districts as well as in mayoral elections in the city at large because, in the Solomonic judgment of the late U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner, who devised this electoral system in response to citizen litigation, that’s how things should be divided in order to recognize demographic realities while at the same time discouraging efforts to exploit them.

Each citizen of Memphis gets to vote for four council members, one representing the single district of their residence, the other three representing the half of the city in which their race is predominant. Runoffs are permitted in the smaller single districts, where racial factors do not loom either divisive or decisive, while they are prohibited in the larger areas, where, in theory, voters of one race could rather easily league together to elect one of their own (as whites commonly did in the historic past).

Mayoral elections are winner-takes-all, and Willie Herenton’s victory in 1991 as the first elected Black mayor is regarded as having been a vindication of the system.

Got all that?

Yes, it’s a hodgepodge, but it’s what we’ve still got, even though Blacks, a minority then, are a majority now. And, in fact, race is irrelevant in the 2023 mayor’s race, there being no white candidate still participating with even a ghost of a chance of winning.

Political party is the major remaining “it” factor, and the failure of either party to call for primary voting in city elections has more or less nullified it as a direct determinant of the outcome.

But, with the withdrawal last week from the mayoral race of white Republican candidates Frank Colvett and George Flinn, speculation has become rampant as to who, among the nominal Democrats still in the race, might inherit the vote of the city’s Republicans.

Sheriff Floyd Bonner, whose law-and-order posture is expected to appeal to the city’s conservatives?

Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Paul Young, who has several prior Republican primary votes on his record in non-city elections?

Businessman J.W. Gibson, who once was a member of the local Republican steering committee?

Only NAACP president Van Turner and former Mayor Herenton, among serious candidates, are exempt from such speculation, both regarded as being dyed-in-the-wool Democrats.

In a close election, the disposition of the Republican vote, estimated to be 24 percent of the total, could be crucial.

As noted in this space last week, the current Memphis city election year is seemingly destined to become the most long-distance such event in the city’s history, with several mayoral candidates already declared and notably running months in advance of any actual voting.

To stress the point: No ballots will be cast until September 15th, when early voting begins for the election, which concludes for most purposes on October 5th. Should there be district council races in which there is no majority winner, runoffs will be held for those districts on November 16th.

Contestants for mayor and for city council positions will not even be able to pick up their qualifying petitions from the Election Commission until May 22nd, almost three months from now. And district lines for the 13 council positions are still under review.

All these facts indicate just how far off in time the election really is; though in key races, for city council as well as for mayor, there is a distinct flurry of activity as would-be candidates try to get their campaigns (and their fundraising needs) established and in order.

• Apropos long-distance campaigning, Monday night of this week saw a different application of the term. Memphis mayoral candidate James Harvey, speaking not in Memphis but before an audience in Germantown, held forth for an hour and a half. That’s the length of speaking time that occurs usually only for events like a presidential State of the Union address or an arena speech by Donald Trump to one of his devoted, cult-like audiences.

Harvey, a longtime FedEx administrator who now is proprietor of his own staffing service, is a former member of the Shelby County Commission and served a term as that body’s chairman. An African American, he was a Democrat in those days, but his party affiliation has become somewhat ambiguous. He has involved himself in several Republican races as a sponsor of other people’s events, but on Monday night he downplayed the issue of partisanship (appropriately enough for the Memphis city election, which is formally nonpartisan).

Monday night’s event, at the Perkins Restaurant & Bakery in Germantown, was sponsored by the Shelby County Republican Party’s outreach committee, and chaired by the indefatigable Naser Fazlullah, who advised attendees that Harvey had “the gift of gab.”

That’s one way of putting it. Another was voiced years ago by then County Commissioner Chris Thomas, who commented after one of colleague Harvey’s extended monologues, “I could have gone out and gotten a haircut during all of that.”

James Harvey does indeed love to talk, and, though several members of his audience Monday night had to leave before he finished, the body as a whole seemed to resonate with his remarks, which focused on public safety and crime and the value of strong authority. He declared himself in favor of age 15 as the outer limit for Juvenile Court supervision and fulminated against tinted car windows and the antisocial actions of wayward youths, whom he characterized by the terms “Li’l Billy and Li’l Pookie.” He also at one point singled out “Jay [sic] Morant,” the Grizzlies superstar who has recently been involved in a series of questionable incidents.

As a candidate, Harvey is something of an anomaly and would be well advised to limit his speaking time but, in the best of circumstances, could find appreciative audiences like the one Monday night.

• Businessman J.W. Gibson, who is able to self-fund if need be, formally announced his candidacy for Mayor at an event Monday at the Stax Museum, calling for a “different tune” in city government.