Germantown Democratic Club

Sharing the Spotlight

As was surely to be expected, the next-to-last weekend of the climactic 2024 election campaign was filled with feverish activity of various kinds — with early voting into its second week and candidates trying to get as many of their partisans as possible to the polls.

A case in point was a pair of events involving Gloria Johnson, the Knoxville Democrat who is trying to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn.

Johnson, the state representative who gained national attention last year as a member of the “Tennessee Three” proponents of gun-safety legislation, has raised some $7 million for her bid — almost all of it from in-state sources, she contended proudly.

While that is no match for the incumbent’s $17 million or so, it has been enough to buy Johnson a series of concise and well-produced TV spots pinpointing Blackburn’s alleged shortcomings. And it even gives her some of the kind of influence that politicians call coattails.

Opponents Nordstrom and White at Belly Acres

Johnson was in Shelby County on Saturday, sharing time with two other Democrats, District 83 state House candidate Noah Nordstrom (like Johnson a public schoolteacher) and District 97 House candidate Jesse Huseth.

The first event was a joint rally with Nordstrom and state Democratic chair Hendrell Remus just outside the perimeter of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist early-voting station. Next, Johnson met up with Huseth at High Point Grocery for some joint canvassing efforts, after which Huseth, who opposes GOP incumbent John Gillespie, set out on some door-to-door calls on residents in that western part of his district.

The most unusual pre-election event on Saturday didn’t involve Johnson, nor was it, in the strictest sense, a partisan event at all. It was a meet-and-greet at the Belly Acres restaurant in East Memphis involving both Nordstrom and his GOP adversary, incumbent Republican state Representative Mark White.

Not a debate between the two, mind you. A joint meet-and-greet, at which both candidates circulated among the members of a sizeable crowd, spending conversational time with the attendees and with each other.

The event was the brainchild of one Philip D. Hicks, impresario of something called the Independent Foundation for Political Effectiveness. Hicks says he hopes the Nordstrom-White encounter, his organization’s maiden effort, can serve as a precedent for other such joint candidate efforts to come — presumably in future election seasons.

Inasmuch as political competition is, by its nature, an adversarial process, it’s somewhat difficult to imagine such events becoming commonplace, but, all things considered, this first one went amazingly well.

It wasn’t the same kind of thing at all, but there were elements of such collegiality between potential election opponents at an earlier event, a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club at Coletta’s on Appling Road during the previous week.

That event included Memphis City Council Chair JB Smiley as its featured speaker, and Smiley, who is reliably reported to be thinking of a race for Shelby County mayor in 2026, spent a fair amount of time comparing notes on public matters (e.g., MLGW, the future of the erstwhile Sheraton Hotel) with attendee J.W. Gibson, a businessman who has basically already declared for that office.

Take heed, Mr/Hicks.

The tradition of presidential-election years holds that the American electorate really doesn’t begin to pay serious attention to the candidates’ campaigns until Labor Day has come and gone. That holiday happens this weekend, and the local branches of the two major parties got a running start on things with events held last week.

The Republicans brought out some of their leading lights Tuesday night at the annual Master Meal banquet of the East Shelby Republican Club, the county’s largest. First up on the dais at the Great Hall in Germantown was David Kustoff, who recently won the GOP nomination for the 8th District congressional seat and, given the Republican propensities of that district these days, has every expectation of serving in Washington next year.

Kustoff made it clear that he hopes to do so in tandem with a President Donald J. Trump, to whose candidacy he gave unstinting verbal support. Though the brash New York billionaire has had highly publicized trouble gaining traction, even in pockets of his own Republican base, Kustoff said predictions of a Trump defeat by Hillary Clinton were the results, essentially, of myopia on the part of an unsympathetic media, and he called the roll of candidates, ranging from Ronald Reagan to current Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who, he said, had won out despite negative forecasts in the press.

Kustoff’s commitment to the cause of Trump was further embodied in the opening on Wednesday night of this week of a “combined election headquarters” at 1755 Kirby Parkway, housing the “Kustoff for Congress” campaign as well as Trump’s Memphis-area efforts and the campaigns of other local GOP candidates.

Also toeing the line for a top-to-bottom Republican effort at the Master Meal were state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, and visiting state GOP executive director Brent Leatherwood, although Luttrell, who had also sought the GOP nomination in the 8th, gallantly focused most of his praise on Kustoff.

Perhaps the most telling commentary Tuesday night came from Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington, who earned a Trump-like shoot-from-the-mouth reputation of his own during his rise as a political figure. Against all expectations, Roland, who has already launched a campaign to be elected county mayor in 2018, became something of a conciliator — enough so that, as he neared the formal end of his one-year term as chairman on Monday of this week, he received standing ovations from his commission colleagues at each of the legislative body’s last two public meetings. By way of suggesting that Trump’s own rough edges might smooth out during a term as president, Roland, who is West Tennessee chairman of the Republican nominee’s campaign, said of Trump, “Folks, six years ago, that was me!”

• For their part, a sizeable swath of the county’s Hillary Clinton supporters turned out last Wednesday night at a standing-room-only meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club that required the opening of a partition to combine two separate meeting rooms at Coletta’s Restaurant on Appling Road.

Among those present for the occasion were Tyler Yount of Chattanooga, a statewide organizer for the Clinton campaign, and Rickey Hobson of Somerville, the Democratic nominee in the 8th District congressional race. Although attendees of the recent Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia were there to recount their experiences at the convention, the main focus of the meeting was that of organizing a get-out-the-vote effort in Shelby County.

Although the long-troubled Shelby County Democratic Party organization is temporarily defunct after its decertification week before last by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini, and apparently won’t be reconstructed until a local party convention can be held in March, various informal Democratic groups — the Germantown Democrats, the Democratic Women of Shelby County, and the county’s Young Democrats among them — seem intent on organizing a significant GOTV effort.

According to Germantown Democratic Club president Dave Cambron, a headquarters to house a coordinated local Democratic campaign will be opened on Poplar soon.