Tag: Gabby Salinas

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Politics Politics Feature

Two 2020 Races Generate a Flood of Candidates in Shelby County

Ready? Deirdre V. Fisher, Eddie Jones, Gortria Anderson Banks, John Ford, Paul Boyd, Rheunte E. Benson, Thomas Long, Del Gill, Joe Brown, Tanya L. Cooper, Tavia Tate, Adrienne Dailey-Evans, Michael Finney, Reginald Milton, George D. Summers, Lisa W. Wimberly, Wanda R. Faulkner.

Those 17 names represent just the first wave of applicants at the Shelby County Election Commission for the right to seek the post of General Sessions Court clerk, a post that has been held since 2011 by Ed Stanton Jr. (not to be confused with his son, lawyer Ed Stanton III, who received appointments from President Barack Obama both as U.S. attorney and later as a U.S. district judge, though his nomination for the judgeship was bottled up and kept from confirmation by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell).

The senior Stanton, a Democrat, was a longtime employee of county service before his selection by the General Sessions judges to fill a vacancy as clerk and his subsequent two re-elections in 2012 and 2016. Stanton, a solid sort, attracted few challengers as an incumbent clerk, but there are obvious reasons — foremost among them, perhaps, being the $134,986 annual salary — why the job, now open, has generated the current flood of office-seekers.

Jackson Baker

District 97 Candidate Gabby Salinas (r)shmoozes with voter Sherry Compton; Another District 97 hopeful, Allan Creasy, chats up Norma Lester

Some of the candidates are neophytes. Others have names that are, how to put it — well-worn: Del Gill, Joe Brown, John Ford? Ford may not ultimately be eligible, inasmuch as his rights seem not clearly to have been restored since a felony conviction from the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz sting. Two current county commissioners are on the list of hopefuls — Jones and Milton. Long and Boyd have previously held clerkships. Of this early list of 17, all are Democrats except for Boyd, Finney, Summers, and Wimberly, who are Republicans. 

So far, only seven of the petition-pullers have filed, but expect that number to grow, as will the number of new applicants asking for petitions.

• Meanwhile, the candidate field for state House District 97 is doing some multiplying as well. This is the seat in Bartlett/Eads that has been the bailiwick of longtime Republican incumbent Jim Coley, who decided to take his leave after a final term in which various ailments were incapacitating him. Two fellow Republicans have declared their candidacies for the job — John Gillespie, who works as a grant coordinator for Trezevant Episcopal Home, and Brandon Weise, an employee of the Shelby County Register’s office.

Gillespie made the first splash and has attached himself to Coley’s coattails, as well as to the Republican establishment in general, and lines up with a somewhat modified version of the education savings account bill (aka: voucher program) steamrollered into passage last year when then House Speaker Glen Casada, acting on Governor Bill Lee‘s behalf, kept the voting rolls open in the House long enough to to turn one legislator’s crucial nay note into an aye.

Weise stands in opposition to the voucher program, which would affect only Shelby County and Davidson County schools and would be likely to fall in behind new GOP Speaker Cameron Sexton of Crossville, who opposed the bill relentlessly last year and has indicated he would like to at least delay its immediate implementation. Weise, however, does observe Republican orthodoxy on matters such as opposition for federally funded Medicaid expansion and support for block grants to deal with health-care issues.

Democrats have their own contest pending in House District 97, with Allan Creasy, a narrow loser to Coley last year, making a renewed try for the seat. And another Democratic near-success story from 2018, Gabby Salinas, is also looking for another way into the General Assembly, after giving GOP state Senator Brian Kelsey a serious scare in his re-election race last year.

Both candidates see themselves as still having hot hands and ready-to-go constituencies. Before taking on Kelsey, Salinas had been able to turn on a head of steam to defeat David Witherspoon, a well-supported candidate and an early favorite in the Democratic primary. Salinas has the benefit of an affecting backstory regarding her childhood pilgrimage to the United States from Bolivia with her family in order to seek treatment for her at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. A personal endorsement by Marlo Thomas of St. Jude, daughter of the institution’s founder, Danny Thomas, proved helpful to Salinas’ candidacy.

Both Creasy, a popular manager and bartender at Celtic Crossing restaurant in Cooper-Young, and Salinas are opposed to the governor’s voucher legislation, and both also favor acceptance of federal Medicaid expansion funds under the Affordable Care Act. Both were much in evidence pressing the flesh at Sunday’s annual Democratic Women’s Christmas party at the IBEW headquarters building on Madison.

After several years in which Democrats figured only as sacrificial lambs in suburban legislative districts, the fact of having competitive primaries in such districts has the party faithful both nervous and excited.

• At its regular monthly meeting on Monday, the Shelby County Commission: 1) approved with near unanimity the use of PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-tax) rents in the Pinch District TIF area by the Center City Revenue Finance Corporation, contingent upon the developer’s complying with CRFC requirements that not less than 28 percent of spending on construction will go to minority vendors; with the same requirement being imposed on the ongoing Union Row project; 2) voted to resolve a work-overload issue in the Register of Deeds office by approving two new full-tme positions and three temporary positions; 3) approved an add-on funding formula to enable additionl capital improvement projects at municipal schools; 4) agreed to hear in committee a proposal by Commissioner Van Turner for a MATA Capital Funding Ordinance to codify Shelby County’s commitment to transportation needs.

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Politics Politics Feature

Bogus Ballot Battle on Hold; Candidates Line Up for 2020

So what’s the status of the “bogus ballot” question, which was due to be given a post-election judicial hearing last week?

“On hold” is the answer. Several factors have intervened to postpone a final reckoning about the legality of sample ballots circulated at election time by entrepreneurs on behalf of candidates willing to pay potentially thousands of dollars to have themselves “endorsed” by shell organizations.

One factor was a heart attack suffered by retired Circuit Court Judge William B. Acree of Jackson, who was imported before the election to rule on the propriety of “pay-for-play” ballots circulated by organizations calling themselves the “Greater Memphis Democratic Club” and the “Shelby County Democratic Club,” respectively.

The former is operated by Greg Grant, the latter by M. Latroy Alexandria-Williams. Neither organization has an actual connection to any official organ of the Democratic party, and both “endorsed” candidates with demonstrable Republican connections in sample ballots mailed and handed out to prospective voters.

Lawyer John Marek, a candidate for Memphis City Council in the recent city election, the Shelby County Democratic Party, and the Young Democrats of Shelby County all joined on a request for an injunction against circulation of the ballots. Acree wound up hearing the case when all local judges, most of whom had previously patronized such ballots, recused themselves.

With three hours to go before the polls closed on election day, October 3rd, the judge issued a temporary restraining order against further circulation of the ballots and scheduled a follow-up hearing for last Wednesday, November 13th, to consider a permanent ruling on the matter.

Judge Acree’s heart attack was not the only event to intervene against that schedule. Defendant Alexandria-Williams, as was his right, filed a notice of removal of the case from state to federal jurisdiction. For his part, Grant has of yet not made a decision to join in the notice of removal. The case now rests in the hands of U.S. District Judge Sheryl Lipman, who has not yet ruled on whether she intends to keep the case or remand it back to state court.

Nor have the attorneys for the plaintiffs — Bruce Kramer, Jake Brown, and Melody Dernocoeur at Apperson Crump — decided on whether to seek the remand themselves. A goal of the attorneys, incidentally, in whatever is the final court of record, is a ruling of “unjust enrichment,” whereby the ballot entrepreneurs would be required to forfeit the profits they made from the sale of their endorsements.

• The 2019 Memphis city election may have come to a finish with the conclusion of last Thursday’s runoff elections for two city council positions in District 1 and District 7, won by Rhonda Logan and Michalyn Easter-Thomas, respectively.

But 2020, which will be chock-full of elections, is just two flips of the calendar away, and one of the races sure to draw much attention will be that for the position of General Sessions Court clerk, which will be vacated by current longtime clerk Ed Stanton Jr. (father of former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton III).

Three of the known contenders for the clerkship are, like Stanton, Democrats and well known to followers of local politics. The first name in the hat was that of Shelby County Commissioner Eddie Jones, who filed two weeks ago. At about the same time, Commissioner Reginald Milton began informing people of his interest in the race.

The two commissioners were just joined on the ballot by former longtime state Senator John Ford, who filed for the race on Monday. Yes, that John Ford, the controversial member of the Ford political clan who ran afoul of the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz sting in 2005, was convicted of bribery, and served a term in state prison.

Ford formerly served a term as General Sessions clerk, simultaneous with holding his Senate seat. Having long since regained his citizenship rights, Ford aims to re-establish himself as a public official. Despite his notoriety, he was regarded as someone with an in-depth knowledge of the ins and outs of state government and as a go-to legislator for mental health and various other public issues.

Milton, a community organizer and chairman of the commission’s community grants committee, which he brought into being, was a veteran of several political races before his 2014 election to the commission and his 2018 re-election. He greeted the news of Ford’s filing by saying, “I’ve never run an easy race. I’m used to it.”

Confiding that he would make a formal announcement next week, Milton said, “I appreciate those willing to offer themselves for public office, and I look forward to sharing with the public why I feel I would be best suited for this position.”

• As was noted in this space recently, state Representative Jim Coley (R-District 97) has decided to retire and won’t seek re-election in 2020. So far, two Democrats have made known their interest in seeking the seat — Allan Creasy, who got 45 percent of the vote in District 97 in a race against Coley last year, and Gabby Salinas, who gave Republican State Senator Brian Kelsey a close race in his 2018 re-election bid.

Republicans will try to hold on to the seat, of course, and there is an active GOP candidate in the field — John Gillespie, who works as a grant coordinator at Trezevant Episcopal Home and is making his first try for political office. Gillespie issued a press release this week claiming receipts of $47,000 at a recent East Memphis fund-raiser — not a bad first-time haul.

…

Jackson Baker

Democrat Edmund Ford Jr. (left) and Republican Amber Mills (right) co-sponsored County Commission resolutions providing $80,000 to the County Health Department for testing children for alleged exposure to lead in water sources at Shelby County Schools and adding to the Commission’s legislative agenda an official notice of the issue to the General Assembly and Governor Bill Lee. The Commission approved both resolutions unanimously.

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Politics Politics Feature

Post-Mortem, Pre-Birth

CREDIT: Laura Jean Hocking

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.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Election 2018: Winners, Losers, and Close Calls

CREDIT: JB

JB

The thrill of victory was experienced by (l to r) Aaron Fowles, Steve Mulroy, and Racquel Collins, opponents of the losing referendum to repeal Instranr Runoff Voting.

Note: For reasons that remain obscure, the following text, published in the early morning of November 7, vanished from online, to be replaced by an earlier election-highlights brief that was posted on election night itself. I am happy to see the longer piece, like Lazarus, freed from untimely interment and restored. — jb

When the final report was done, the last round poured, the surviving hors-d’oeuvres wilted, the election results locally mirrored those nationally. There were lots of near misses, college tries, and moral victories — mainly among Democrats who had aspired to overturn the verdict of 2016 (or, in many ways, of the last few decades).

But the inherent limitations of the near miss, the college try, and the moral victory would rapidly become obvious as the reality of defeat and the resilience of the status quo sunk in.

The purest and most unsullied triumph locally was enjoyed by the band of activists in Save IRV Memphis and their sympathizers, who resisted a concentrated effort by the Memphis City Council on behalf of three ballot referenda that, the activists contended, were designed to protect the incumbency of Council members.

To start there, the count was 62,316 for and 104,431 against in the case of Ordinance No. 5669, which would have repealed the prior 2008 referendum authorizing IRV (a method of vote -counting that successively redistributes runner-up votes in a given race until a majority winner emerges). The vote was 67,220 for and 101,607 against for Ordinance No. 5676, which (via language that was ambivalent, to say the least) would have lengthened term limits for mayor and Council members from two to three four-year terms. And Ordinance No. 5677, which would have abolished runoff elections altogether, lost out by a vote of 77,223 for and 91,184 against.
The Democratic candidates, all first-time candidates, who attempted to oust Republican state legislators in the suburbs, made a good run of it, but fell short. In the most avidly watched race, Gabby Salinas, the three-time cancer survivor and budding scientist lost to incumbent District 31 state Senator Brian Kelsey by the relatively narrow margin of 40,313 for Kelsey to 38,793 for Salinas.

Republican incumbent Mark White turned back Democrat Danielle Schonbaum in the District 83 House of Representatives race, 15,129 to 11,376. And incumbent GOP state Representative Jim Coley defeated Democrat Allan Creasy by a vote of 12,298 to 10,073 in District 97.

More decisive victories were won by Republican incumbent Kevin Vaughan over Democear Sanjeev Memula in House District 95 and by the GOP’s Tom Leatherwood (a ballot replacement for the late Ron Lollar) over Democrat Dave Cambron in District 99.

Democratic state Rep. Dwayne Thompson, an upset winner in 2016 in House District 96, retained his seat by a vote of 14,710 over 10,493 for Republican challenger Scorr McCormick.

In the races for Governor and the U.S. Senate, local totals were:

For Governor: Democrat Karl Dean, 173,699; Republican Bill Lee, 105,369
For U.S. Senator: Democrat Phil Bredesen, 188,923; Republican Marsha Blackburn, 95,351.

Those local totals were almost diametrically opposite the statewide ones, which showed resounding victories for Lee over Dean, 1,291,458 (59.3 percent) to 846,186 (38.8 percent); and for Blackburn over Bredesen, 1,224,042 (54.7 percent) to 981,667 (43.9 percent).

Though arguments on the point can and will rage indecisively, the statewide results possibly reflected the natural dispositions of red-state Tennessee in cases where the Democratic challenge is muted by politesse. Dean and Lee reciprocated their gentlemanly approaches to each other, while Bredesen’s acknowledgement of partisan differences was minimal to the point of non-existence.

Bredesen surely qualifies for the 2018 “Oh, Yeah?” award for his mid-race statement to Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: “I’m in the fortunate position that people on the left are enraged enough that they will find almost anything I do, with the D after my name, acceptable.”
Count that as arrogance or as self-deception. It was demonstrably incorrect.

Bredesen’s public embrace of President Trump’s Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and his suggestion in a late ad that he and Trump (“a skilled negotiator”) could blissfully work together to lower drug prices were downers to his base, whereas Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s throwdown of the gauntlet to Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race almost brought him a victory. Texas is clearly no more liberal a place than Tennessee.

The local difference in the gubernatorial and Senate races manifestly arose from the demographics of Shelby County, where Democratic turnout was at levels approximating those of presidential years. The stout showing of the Democratic challengers in legislative races was also buoyed by the turnout, a continuation of sorts of the blue wave that crested so strong in the august election.

The turnout factor was also prominent in the blowout win of 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen over GOP perennial Charlotte Bergmann, 143,690 to 34,710, though it was not too much help to Democratic challenger Erika Stotts Pearson in the wider West Tennessee expanse of the 8th Congressional District, where Republican incumbent David Kustoff triumphed, 66,889 to 32,578.

More to Come:

There were races in most of Shelby County’s suburban municipalities, too — the most dramatic being those in Germantown and Lakeland, where the issues of city spending and economic development loomed large.

In Germantown, Mayor Mike Palazzolo apparently won reelection by the razor-thin margin of 10,240 to 10,113 for challenger John Barzizza, who declined to concede, pending a final certification of results. The main issue in the mayoral contest was Palazzolo’s backing of Thornwood, a mixed-use development on Germantown Parkway.

Meanwhile, Palazzo’s coattails proved unavailing for two candidates he endorsed for city positions: Scott Sanders, a Barzizza endorsee, defeated Brian White in an alderman’s race, while Robyn Rey Rudisill lost a School Board race to angela Rickman Griff. Two other mayoral endorsees, Alderman Mary Anne Gibson and School Board member Betsy Landers triumphed over Jeff Brown and Brian Curry, respectively.

In Lakeland, where the primary issue was Mayor Wyatt Bunker’s development plans, including those for a new high school, Bunker was upset by challenger Mike Cunningham, 2,648 to 2,324.
Apparent winners for the city Commission were Richard Gonzales and Michelle Dial, while School Board winners were Kevin Floyd, Laura Harrison, and Deborah Thomas.

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Marlo Thomas Endorses Gabby Salinas for State Senate

CREDIT: JB

To Gabby Salinas, Democratic nominee for the District 31 state Senate seat, Marlo Thomas is “my angel … the reason I’m alive.”

JB

State Senate candidate Gabby Salinas (left) and supporter Marlo Thomas of St. Jude prepare to meet with the media on Saturday.

To Thomas, national outreach director for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the daughter of St. Jude founder Danny Thomas, Gabby Salinas is “a warrior” fighting for her community as she had previously fought for her life at St. Jude as a victim of childhood cancer.

On Saturday, the two made a pair of stops together — at a morning fund-raiser at the Belltower Coffee Shop on Highland and later in the parking lot of White Station Church of Christ, an early-voting location.

Thomas said she was actively supporting Salinas, “an old and very good friend” whom she has known since Salinas was seven years old, because of the aforementioned warrior spirit, because of the candidate’s valuable “common sense,” and because of the public positions advocated by Salinas.

“She’s a good-hearted, good human being, and she knows about things like health care first-hand, and she’s fighting very hard for Medicaid expansion,” said Thomas, who mentioned such other Salinas concerns as education, infrastructure, jobs, agriculture, and tourism. “She brings moral values, has a moral sense and family values. When you get the real deal, you’ve got to support it.”

Thomas said, “I am very, very happy to get involved in Shelby County politics.” She said she considered Shelby County “home to the Thomases” and noted that her parents were by their choice buried here (they are interred in a mausoleum at St. Jude).

Salinas has been the subject of a series of attack ads directed against her by the campaign of Reoublican incumbent Brian Kelse and/or its supporters. Some of the ads refer to her as a “socialist” and one says that she “supports stealing benefits from our elderly,” and supports Planned Parenthood, which “sells baby parts.” Another ad makes a point of saying that Kelsey is “one of us,” and critics have charged it with being a “dog-whistle” message calling attention to Salinas’ birth in Bolivia.

When Gabby Salinas’ cancer was detected at the age of 7, her entire family moved to Memphis with her so that she could be treated at St. Jude.

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Politics Politics Feature

November Ballot Features Several Contested Local Races

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In addition to the well-watched races for senator and governor and the key referendum measures on the ballot for Memphis voters, a number of key local contests remain to be decided: Contested Legislative Races

State Senate, District 29 (Millington, Memphis): Democrat Raumesh Akbari, who made a name for herself as a member of the state House, is favored over Republican Tom Stephens, a low-profile Republican in this traditionally Democratic area.

State Senate, District 31 (Germantown): Incumbent Republican Brian Kelsey, a lawyer, has rarely been tested on his home ground, where anti-crime and low-tax rhetoric usually keep him safe. He may win again, but he faces an unusual challenge from his Democratic opponent, political newcomer Gabby Salinas, a progressive whose backstory as a three-time cancer survivor fuels her campaign for Medicaid expansion. 

A Kelsey mail-out piece depicting him as “one of us” drew criticism from Democrats who regarded it as a dog-whistle reference to the fact that Salinas is a native Bolivian. Salinas, who is now on the verge of becoming a scientific researcher herself, emigrated to Memphis along with her entire family during her childhood so that she could receive medical treatment at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

State House of Representatives, District 83 (Cordova, Germantown): Republican incumbent Mark White, who works as a conflict manager and facilitator, is in many ways a typical GOP conservative, but he gives extremism a wide berth and, if reelected,  stands to become chair of his body’s education committee. He is opposed by first-time candidate and Democratic activist Danielle Schonbaum, whose father was employed at St. Jude and whose personal background as a CPA and workforce specialist stand her in good stead for legislative duty.

State House of Representatives, District 95 (Germantown, Collierville): First-term incumbent Republican Kevin Vaughan, a real-estate developer, hopes to defend the seat he won in a special election to replace the GOP’s Mark Lovell, who, accused of sexual harassment, resigned under pressure after turning out incident-prone Republican veteran Curry Todd in 2016. Vaughan’s Democratic opponent is Sanjeev Memula, a staff attorney at the Public Defender’s Office and another new face.

Jackson Baker

Dwayne Thompson addressing supporters last week

State House of Representatives, District 96 (East Memphis, Germantown): Democratic incumbent Dwayne Thompson, a retired human resources professional, took advantage of overconfidence of then-GOP incumbent Steve McManusin and, by dint of diligent door-knocking and significant financial aid from the state Democratic Party, won this seat in an upset in 2016. Though the area’s demographics continue to shift toward working-class and minority voters, Republicans are working hard to regain the seat and are backing Scott McCormick, former Plough Foundation director and a political veteran as an ex-Memphis City Councilman and current member of the Shelby County Schools board.

State House of Representatives, District 97 (Bartlett, Memphis): Retired Memphis schoolteacher Jim Coley, the longtime Republican incumbent, has seemingly regained his equilibrium after a marital separation, followed by a debilitating illness, and is getting handsome backing for his reelection campaign from the state Republican Party, which is deluging district mailboxes with flyers documenting educational and other legislation accomplished by the relatively moderate representative. Coley is opposed by progressive Democrat Allan Creasy, a Midtown bartender and a vigorous campaigner, who hopes to duplicate Thompson’s success of two years ago in capturing a suburban GOP seat.

State House of Representatives, District 99 (Northeast Shelby County): This seat was long a dependably safe enclave for veteran Republican Ron Lollar, whose unexpected death after the party primary this year resulted in an ad hoc GOP selection process for a successor, from which onetime state senator and outgoing county Register Tom Leatherwood emerged as the party nominee. Leatherwood’s Democratic opponent is David Cambron, project manager for a local computer company and one of his party’s most indefatigable activists. As the president of the Germantown Democratic Club, Cambron became the de facto chief recruiter for other local Democratic candidates this year and is largely responsible for the fact that Democrats, unlike Republicans, are competing in every legislative district. At a time when no one else seemed eager to take on the formidable Lollar, Cambron filled the breach himself.

Though no one seriously expects suspenseful returns on election night, the two U.S. House of Representatives seats directly affecting Shelby County are both being contested.  In House District 9, encompassing most of Memphis and parts of Millington and outer Shelby County, Democrat Steve Cohen, the incumbent since his first election in 2006, should have an easy time of it with the never-say-die Republican perennial Charlotte Bergman. Leo Awgowhat, more a performance artist than a candidate, is also on the ballot as an independent.  In House District 8, which includes parts of northern and eastern Shelby County in its West Tennessee expanse, first-term incumbent Republican David Kustoff faces off against Democrat Erika Stotts Pearson, who has a background as an educator and civil activist, and independent James Hart.

Suburban Races Bartlett, Collierville, Germantown, Lakeland, and Millington are all holding municipal elections this year, and, in at least two of those cities — Lakeland and Germantown — the contests involve serious local schisms.

In Lakeland, a slate headed by current Mayor Wyatt Bunker is opposed by one led by FedEx administrator Mike Cunningham. The main issue seems to be that of Bunker’s plans for Lakeland to build its own high school, a venture seen as unnecessary and unduly risky by his opposition. The situation is somewhat similar in Germantown, where Mayor Mike Palazzolo, an exponent of what he calls Smart Growth, embedded in a 20-year development plan, seeks a second term. He is opposed by Alderman John Barzizza, who expresses concerns about retaining the bedroom suburb’s residential identity. (More about these contests next week, as space allows.)

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Politics Politics Feature

Most Shelby County Election Results Were Predictable

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Republicans were not the only ones dismayed at the results of the August 2nd election. To be sure, the GOP took a licking in races for countywide positions, and they lost a swing district on the Shelby County Commission, giving Democrats a decisive 8-5 majority for the next four years.
But, with the exception of Democrat Michael Whaley‘s win in District 5, a city swing district, Shelby County Republicans held their own in localized one-on-one competition. On a countywide scale, though, the GOP fared less well, even in nonpartisan races. Two judicial candidates bearing Republican endorsements — David Rudolph and Jennifer S. Nichols — went down in defeat, despite having the advantage of being incumbents, albeit as recent interim appointees.

In a general way, the law of averages is what determined the outcomes. Yes, there are in theory more Democrats than Republicans in Shelby County; this year, unlike the case in 2010 and 2014, there was a general consensus in both parties that, quality-wise, Democratic candidates were as good as — if not better than — than their Republican counterparts, and, for a change, adequately funded. Crossover voting in the GOP’s direction, a factor in the previous two elections, was virtually non-existent this year. 

Similarly, there is the related fact that there are more African Americans in Shelby County than whites, and, while post-racial results have been known to occur in local elections (think Steve Cohen or, when he still had a bloom on, A C Wharton), it would seem to be human nature that, all else being equal, people will vote for their racial group-mates. Accordingly, in relatively close races between blacks and whites, the racial factor tilted toward African Americans.

Finally, in local politics as in state and national elections, women have steadily become a more active force, and people, including other women, who in the binary sense are yet another majority, have no compunction in voting for women.

Taking those three factors into account — party, race, and gender — a fairly reliable rule-of-thumb can be stated that, where any two are present, they can be decisive for the candidate on the majority side of the ledger. 

Thus, Democrat John Boatner Jr., a white candidate in the primary for Congress in the 8th Congressional District, was at a disadvantage in his contest with Erika Stotts Pearson, an African American. And, while Boatner had more money and was clearly the more active of the two candidates (omnipresent at campaign events, and with several large yard signs bearing his name on upscale sections of Walnut Grove Road), he was a first-time candidate, and, as a white male contending with an African American female, was on the wrong side of the arithmetic. (In his case, too, the power of the city vote, where Democrats are numerous, out-did the party’s rather scanty presence these days in the West Tennessee counties that comprise the rest of the district.)

A few other upsets reflect various versions of the Democratic/black/female tilt.

Circuit court Judge Rudolph had, by general consent, performed well after his 2017 appointment by Governor Haslam to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Judge Robert L. “Butch” Childers, and his diligence as a candidate, often in the company of his personable wife, Elizabeth, an administrator at the University of Memphis Law School, could not be faulted. The scion of an East Memphis family, educated at MUS and Vanderbilt, he was well-financed, to boot.

But he was felled by Yolanda Kight, an equally impressive and diligent young black woman from a humble background in South Memphis, who had risen very much by her own efforts to attain the lesser judicial rank of magistrate. Aided also by the “upset” factor which can generate sympathy in an electorate, she ended with a narrow win over Rudolph. 

Another such case was the victory in a Democratic state Senate primary race of Gabby Salinas, whose Bolivian family had immigrated to Memphis so that young Gabby could be treated for childhood cancer at St. Jude. On the threshold of being a scientist in her own right, she survived three different bouts with the disease, and, though she was faced with a better-financed opponent, the able and equally appealing Le Bonheur chaplain David Weatherspoon, her backstory may have made the difference. Her next challenge will be, as an advocate of Medicaid expansion, against Republican state Senator Brian Kelsey.

There were other unexpected outcomes. The victories of Joyce Dorse-Coleman and Michelle McKissack over Shelby County Schools Board incumbents Mike Kernell and Chris Caldwell conformed to the above-mentioned formula, though McKissack’s in particular also owed much to her support from charter-school advocates. Though hardly a novice in politics, the oft-controversial city Councilwoman Janis Fullilove, victorious as a Democrat over Republican Bobby Simmons for Juvenile Court Clerk, was expected to be shut out of the white vote entirely. Further analysis will determine whether she wasn’t or whether she was but was able to prevail anyhow.

Most outcomes on August 2nd conformed to the form sheet. It was a Democratic year, not so much because of a better-than-usual turnout but because their candidates were measurably better than in previous years, staving off the customary flow of crossover Democratic voters to Republican candidates that had marked prior elections. 

In the marquee local races, State Senator Lee Harris for county mayor was clearly an able political figure, as was Chief Deputy Floyd Bonner for sheriff, both of them sufficiently so to attract crossovers of their own to augment what was already their majority standing.  

The Democratic blue wave was no surprise. In the vernacular, this was how it was ‘sposed to be.

Ford Canale‘s win for a a vacant city council position was due to his maintaining establishment support against a field of several candidates breaking up the dissident vote. In the statewide contests, Republican Bill Lee won his gubernatorial primary by being himself; Democrat Karl Dean won his through superior resources and fidelity to a centrist party message. The U.S. Senate primary wins of Democrat Phil Bredesen and Republican Marsha Blackburn were no-brainers.

The final win of the mid-summer election season occurred Monday night at Shelby County Republican headquarters, where a small caucus of steering committee members from the state House District 99 of late state Representative Ron Lollar elected onetime state Senator Tom Leatherwood, outgoing as register and a loser in his race for Circuit Court Clerk, as a compromise choice to run against Democratic nominee Dave Cambron in November.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Remains a Beehive of Political Activity

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The pending visit to The Orpheum on Friday by former Vice President (and possible 2020 presidential candidate) Joe Biden for his “American Promise” tour highlights what continues to be a busy election season.

Republican gubernatorial candidate  Randy Boyd last week underscored the importance of Shelby County in his election campaign by making the county the site of two different stops on his current 95-county bus tour of the state.
Boyd kicked off his bus tour in Millington on Monday, and after making several stops elsewhere in West Tennessee, returned to Shelby County on Saturday for a meet-and-greet lunch in the Collierville town square. Among the several Shelby County officials at the affair, either as backers for Boyd or as courtesy visitors, were County Commissioner David Reaves of Bartlett, Mayor Mike Palazzolo of Germantown, Germantown Alderman Mary Ann Gibson, trustee and county mayor candidate David Lenoir, former county Mayor Jim Rout, state Representative Mark White, and, serving as master of ceremonies for the occasion, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

Boyd, who went on to make a day of it in Shelby County, attending the FedEx St. Jude golf tournament and the Germantown Horse Show, noted that he had taken no salary while serving as director for economic development under Governor Bill Haslam. Boyd promised not to do so as governor, either, unless, as he jested, “some of you who have Invisible Fence stop purchasing new batteries, in which case I may need to renegotiate.”
Boyd, one of several independently wealthy candidates for governor, made his fortune as the inventor and vendor of Invisible Fence, which establishes electronic barriers for domestic pets. 
David Weatherspoon, who held the latest version of his “listening tour” at Cheffie’s Restaurant on High Point Terrace on Monday, is expecting to get an earful — and maybe a bagful — of support from members of Shelby County’s health-care community at a June 26th fund-raiser scheduled for Germantown Country Club.

Among the hosts for the affair are Gary and Glenda Shorb, Meri Armour, Ed Barnett, Richard Glassman and Susan Lawless-Glassman, David and Julie Richardson, Nadeem Shafi, Kip and Martha Frizzell, Charles and Kalyna Hanover, Melody Cunningham, and Michael Rohrer.

Weatherspoon, whose campaign treasurer is Ed Roberson, the erstwhile director of Christ Community Health Centers, has made support for Medicaid expansion (“a no-brainer decision”) a key point in his campaign for the District 31 state Senate seat now held by Republican Brian Kelsey (as, for that matter, has Gabby Salinas, the other Democrat running in the forthcoming Democratic primary of August 2nd).

Kelsey is a sworn opponent of former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and its Medicare-expansion component, and was the sponsor of legislation requiring approval by both chambers of the General Assembly’s Republican super-majority before expansion could take place, dooming Insure Tennessee, the state’s variant of the plan. The rejection, according to Weatherspoon, has cost Tennessee $4 billion in federal funding and contributed to the closure of 10 community hospitals.

• Headquarters Openings: Two candidates drew large crowds for opening new headquarters last week. Democratic county mayor nominee Lee Harris set up at 2127 Central Avenue on Friday, and a Memphis headquarters was established at in the Highland Strip by the campaign of former Governor Phil Bredesen, now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate.

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Politics Politics Feature

Two Tennessee Democrats on the Move

 If voters need a little help in brushing off the dust of the now completed May 1st county primary elections, two candidates in the forthcoming state primary elections of August 2nd may have the right formula.

Craig Fitzhugh, Democratic candidate for governor, and Gabby Salinas, who’s running in the Democratic primary for the state Senate in District 31, indicated to supporters on successive weekends that they know how to infuse a little energy into their stump appearances.

Fitzhugh did on Saturday, April 21st, at his local headquarters opening on Poplar Avenue, which ended with the place shaking to the strains of Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best,” rendered by a torch singer and band, both in excellent form. The performance was a tribute to the fact that Fitzhugh, a native of Ripley in West Tennessee, had the aforesaid Turner as a baby sitter growing up.

And on Friday, April 27th, not quite a week later, Salinas combined a 30th-birthday celebration with a campaign meet-and-greet at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn, and that one concluded with several numbers by Los Cantadores, a mariachi band par excellence, including the piece de resistance, a song called “De que manera de Olvido” (“How can I forget you?”) which was played in memory of Salinas’ father Omar Salinas, who died some years ago, along with her sister Valentina, in a tragic automobile accident.

Gabby Salinas

However, the rest of the extended Salinas family, which hails from Bolivia originally, was on hand with numerous local supporters for the celebration — one that flowed naturally and exuberantly around a candidate with movie princess looks and a killer backstory. Not only did Gabby Salinas survive the auto crash that killed two family members, she has survived three separate bouts of cancer, courtesy of the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital — including a case of Ewing’s Sarcoma and two instances of thyroid cancer.

For all that hardship, Salinas went on to earn a PhD in pharmacology. She has abundant energy and, as she demonstrated in her remarks to the crowd that turned out for her event, a firm knowledge of what she stands for. The main plank in her platform is a backing for Medicaid expansion, a determination she shares with her current Democratic primary opponent, LeBonheur Hospital chaplain David Weatherspoon, who was briefly profiled in this space last week.

The two state Senate candidates, Salinas and Weatherspoon, draw from similar constituencies, as, for that matter, do Fitzhugh and his rival for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean. All four cite health care as their number one issue. Others are education, jobs, child care, the needs of the underserved. As Fitzhugh put it, “We all do better when we all do better. I’m not worried about the folks in the skyscrapers. I’m worried about those living in the shadows of the skyscrapers.”

Fitzhugh, accompanied to his event by son Tom, wife Wendy, and their newborn child, cited his roots as a West Tennessean. He called himself a “supporter of Memphis” from birth on, one who learned to spell by learning the letters of the now-defunct HumKo shortening plant, which he’d see on trips from the city on Highway 51 North.

Like Salinas, Fitzhugh, currently the Democratic minority leader in the state House and one beloved by his troops, knows he’s got a tough primary fight.

So does Salinas. “I’m a tough lady” she says, and she figures that, having beaten cancer, her ultimate election opponent, the formidable Republican incumbent in District 31, Brian Kelsey, would be easier pickings.

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Politics Politics Feature

Democrats Doubling Up in Primary Races

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Tennessee may be a certifiably red (i.e., Republican) state, and, indeed election results in recent years, even in Shelby County, which has a theoretical Democratic majority, have generally been disappointments to the once-dominant Democratic Party.

And the official Party itself has only been reconstituted in the county for a few months after various internal fissures and dissensions caused it to be decertified by the state party in mid-2016.

But none of that has stopped a veritable flood of would-be Democratic office-holders from declaring their candidacies for election year 2018 as the filing season gets going in earnest. Most unusually for a minority party, in fact, many of the races on the ballot this year are being contested by multiple Democratic entries.

That starts at the top of the ballot, as two name Democrats — former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and current state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley — are vying for the office of governor. (Even more Republicans are running: six gubernatorial candidates in all, most of them with serious networks and campaign funding at their disposal.)

Jackson Baker

Forrest fan Jenna Bernstein taking her leave

It seemed for a while that there might be a Democratic primary contest for U.S. Senator as well, until the well-backed entry of former two-term Governor Phil Bredesen convinced a promising newcomer, Nashville lawyer James Mackler, to withdraw in favor of Bredesen, whose second gubernatorial win in 2006 was his party’s most recent statewide hurrah. (At least two name Republicans — 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn and former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher are vying for the GOP nomination.)

In any case, Democrats are also doubling up — and not just in the marquee races. There are competitive Democratic primary races at virtually every election level.

Take the case of state Senator Brian Kelsey‘s reelection bid in Senate District 31. The long-serving Germantown Republican sent out several S.O.S. emails to supporters this week informing them that he has a Democratic challenger and asking for campaign donations.

The opponent Kelsey had in mind was Democratic activist Gabriela “Gabby” Salinas, who did indeed announce her availability last week as a Democratic candidate in District 31. And she has a backstory that gives Kelsey reason for his concern. Salinas, who survived childhood cancer as a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and went on to do research work herself at St. Jude, was also a survivor later on of an automobile accident that took the lives of family members.

Nor is Salinas the only Democrat seeking to unseat Kelsey. Another declared candidate for the seat is David Weatherspoon, one of several first-time office-seekers on the Democratic side.

On Monday, one of the Democratic Party’s recognized stars in Nashville, state Representative Raumesh Akbari, announced she would seek to fill the state Senate seat left vacant by Lee Harris, who is running for Shelby County mayor. And Akbari has a Democratic opponent in the primary, her House colleague, Joe Towns.

There are numerous other races on the ballot in which Democrats are competing with each other for the honor or capturing an open seat or one currently held by a Republican. One such case is the Shelby County Commission District 13 seat, a swing seat now occupied by Republican Steve Basar.

Both former Election Commissioner George Monger and political newcomer Charles Belenky are competing for that one. Monger, a former boy wonder who became a music manager at 15 and ran for the City Council at 18, declared his candidacy over the weekend, while Belenky turned up as a citizen critic of a purchasing contract at the commission’s regular public meeting.

And where a seat is traditionally considered Democratic, the infighting can be brisk indeed; two Democrats — Eric Dunn and Tami Sawyer — are vying for the Commission District 7 seat; four seek the seat in Commission District 8: David Vinciarelli, Daryl Lewis, J.B. Smiley Jr., and Mickell Lowery; while Commission District 9, vacated this year by the term-limited Justin Ford, is being sought by no fewer than five Democrats — Edmund Ford Jr., Ian Jeffries, Jonathan L. Smith, Jonathan M. Lewis, and Rosalyn R. Nichols.

• Monday’s first county commission meeting of the year was an abbreviated affair, starting at the late hour of 4 p.m. to accommodate attendees at the well-attended funeral at Idlewild Presbyterian church of the late public figure, Lewis Donelson.

On a day when the city was visited by groups of protesters partial to the now-removed statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the commission was the site of one such protest — from one Jenna Bernstein of Tampa, who said she had come all the way from Florida to call for the expulsion from the commission of Van Turner, head of Memphis Greenspace Inc., which purchased two parks from the city prior to removing their Confederate monuments.

Bernstein’s mission received fairly short shrift, resulting only in a brief debate between Commission chair Heidi Shafer (nay) and Commissioner Walter Bailey (yea) as to the right of a non-resident to be heard. Shafer’s view prevailed.