Tag: Naser Fazlullah

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Politics Politics Feature

Early Heat

Terry Roland (Photo: shelbycountytn.gov)

As no one needs to be reminded, the year 2025 is starting off with near-arctic temperatures, but enough political action is ongoing or forthcoming in the near future to generate a bit of heat.

• The executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party will convene in Nashville on Saturday, January 25th, to pick a new chairperson, and no fewer than seven candidates have been nominated for the honor. They are:

— Rachel Campbell of Chattanooga, currently serving both as party chair of Hamilton County and vice chair of the state party. She is one of two co-favorites in the race.

— Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a state representative and, most recently, the Democrats’ unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2024. The other co-favorite, she has good name recognition and a residual network within the party, but there is some question as to whether her legislative service would disqualify her from the fundraising duties required of a chair.

— Brian Cordova of Nashville, the state party’s current executive director, and a veteran of numerous Democratic electoral campaigns. In the event of a deadlock between Campbell and Johnson, he is seen as a possible fallback choice.

— Vincent Dixie of Nashville, another state representative and a former chair of the party’s legislative caucus. Like Johnson, he, too, might be conflicted on the issue of fundraising.

— Alec Kucharski, a veteran of Tennessee political campaigns and currently a resident of Chicago, where he serves as a liaison with the Democratic delegation of the Illinois legislature.

— Todd Frommeyer of Pulaski, an activist, lawyer, and Navy vet.

— Edward Roland of Chattanooga, said to be a salesperson. 

All these candidates will participate in a forum at 1 p.m. on Saturday, to be streamed on Facebook via the Tennessee Democratic County Chairs Association.

• It will be noticed, by the way, that this fairly sizeable field of Democratic candidates contains no aspirants from Memphis.

One longtime member of the Democratic state committee from Shelby County, David Cambron, takes note of this, saying in a text, “We are not Big Shelby any more.”

Cambron maintains that the Memphis area’s “last chance of relevancy” was lost in the 2006 U.S. Senate election, which saw Democrat Harold Ford Jr. lose to Republican Bob Corker.

And, in Cambron’s view, the problem has bipartisan dimensions. “It’s the same reason every statewide discussion of possible Republican gubernatorial candidates doesn’t mention Brent Taylor.” 

The reference is clearly to state Senator Taylor’s seemingly nonstop campaigning for more assertive state authority over law enforcement in Memphis and Shelby County. Often, such intentional omnipresence in media attention bespeaks an intention to seek higher office.

Yet, as Cambron points out, Taylor’s name is rarely to be found in public speculation about the 2026 governor’s race.

(In fairness, it should be pointed out that when the Flyer queried Taylor about a possible ambition to run for governor, the senator replied, “The short answer is no. The long answer is hell, no.”)

• As it happens Saturday, January 25th, is also the date for a GOP chairmanship decision, this one for the leadership of the Shelby County Republican Party, the issue to be decided at the Venue at Bartlett Station.

The two declared candidates are former Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan and longtime GOP activist Naser Fazlullah. As noted previously in this space, Morgan has been the beneficiary of a hyped-up PR campaign involving numerous public endorsements from influential local GOP figures.

All of that has gotten the goat of one prominent Republican, however. Former County Commission Chairman Terry Roland of Millington, who praises Fazlullah’s “selfless” service to the local party, denounces the pro-Morgan faction’s “Revive” campaign as nothing more than an “elitist” plot to suppress grassroots Republicans.

And Roland, who has headed up local campaign efforts for Donald Trump from 2016 on, levies what may be the worst charge in his vocabulary against Morgan, whom he calls a — wait for it — “Never-Trumper.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Seeing Red

The 2024 presidential election results by precinct (Photo: Courtesy Don Johnson)

The Shelby County Republican Party is scheduled to hold its biennial convention in January, and the party has a bona fide chairmanship race on its hands.

One candidate is Bangladesh-born Naser Fazlullah, manager of a food-and-beverages firm and the local party’s vice chair, who has been highly active in Republican outreach efforts over the years. Most unusually, he professes a desire to “bring both parties together” for the benefit of Shelby County and has numerous friends both inside and outside GOP ranks.

The other candidate is insurance executive Worth Morgan, the former city council member who in 2022 ran unsuccessfully for county mayor and had been rumored as a possible candidate for Memphis mayor the next year before deciding not to make the race.

Both candidates are running as the heads of slates for a variety of other party offices.

Morgan’s campaign in particular, run under the slogan “Revive,” is in the kind of high gear normally associated with expensive major public races and has employed a barrage of elaborate online endorsements from such well-known party figures as state Representative Mark White, state Senator Brent Taylor, and conservative media commentator Todd Starnes. 

The GOP convention is scheduled for January 25th at The Venue at Bartlett Station.

• Morgan’s choice of the campaign motif “Revival” is interesting. Not too long ago, Republicans dominated county government, but demographics now heavily favor Democrats in countywide voting. As one indication of that, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris outdistanced the GOP’s Donald Trump in November by a margin of 201,759 to Trump’s 118,917. 

In a series of post-election analyses, however, veteran Republican analyst Don Johnson, formerly of Memphis and now with the Stone River Group of Nashville, has demonstrated the GOP’s supremacy virtually everywhere else in Tennessee. He has published precinct-specific maps of statewide election results showing areas won by Trump in red. Patches of Democratic blue show up only sporadically in these graphics and are largely confined to Memphis, Nashville, and the inner urban cores of Knoxville and Chattanooga. Even Haywood County in the southwest corner of the state, virtually the last Democratic stronghold in rural Tennessee, shows high purple on Johnson’s cartography.

Post-election analysis shows something else — a shift of the Republican center of gravity eastward, toward the GOP’s ancestral homeland of East Tennessee. For the first time in recent presidential elections, Republican voting in Knox County outdid the party’s totals in Shelby County.

Looking ahead to the 2026 governor’s race, it is meaningful that a recent poll of likely Republican voters by the Tennessee Conservative News shows two Knoxvillians — Congressman Tim Burchett and Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs — leading all other potential candidates.

• The Shelby County Commission ended its year with a full agenda of 89 items, several of which were matters involving schools and school funding. The commissioners navigated that agenda with admirable focus and aplomb, considering that the bombshell news of Tuesday’s scheduled Memphis Shelby-County Schools board meeting regarding the potential voiding of superintendent Marie Feagins’ contract exploded midway through their discussions.

• One of the more inclusive political crowds in recent history showed up weekend before last at Otherlands on Cooper to honor David Upton on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Upton is the proverbial man-behind-the-scenes in Shelby County politics and has had a hand — sometimes openly, sometimes not — in more local elections and civic initiatives than almost anybody else you could name. 

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Politics Politics Feature

After Kelsey

Brent Taylor exiting the SCEC (Credit: Jackson Baker)

One looks for potential shifts in political direction. One case where that is sure to happen is with state Senate District 31, whose seat-holder up to now has been Brian Kelsey, the erstwhile “Stunt Baby of Germantown,” who evolved from a prankster as minority member of the last Democratic-dominated House to a saboteur of the state constitution as a GOP senator in a supermajority Republican General Assembly, sponsoring an endless series of hyper-partisan constitutional amendments.

Though an engaging sort personally, Kelsey has been a take-no-prisoners type as a legislator, and his easy way with the machinations of the GOP’s extremist fringe was no doubt useful to him in a cutting-edge career that now, alas, has left him bleeding on the battlefield — indicted for campaign-finance violations and compelled to drop out of his re-election race while he prepares a legal defense.

Kelsey’s would-be successors in the Republican primary are wholly different types — all Republican regulars but all more at home in a bipartisan environment. That is certainly the case with Brent Taylor, who recently resigned as chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission and seeks state service as a way of crowning a career that has included significant stints on the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission.

Taylor, who once had an uncanny resemblance to the TV character Pee-wee Herman, has matured into a statesmanlike presence who had stabilizing roles as an elective politician and on the Election Commission. So far, Taylor, who recently sold off an extensive funeral-home business, is the only Republican who has actually filed for the Senate position. And he is said to have the support of U.S. senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty.

Paul Boyd, who served two terms as Probate Court clerk after winning election to that office in the Republican sweep year of 2010, has toiled dependably in the GOP’s ranks for decades and, as an African American, brings a bit of outreach to a party that, to mince no words, needs it.

Naser Fazlullah, an engaging and near-omnipresent figure among local Republicans, is a native of Bangladesh who has been in charge of the party’s outreach efforts overall. Well-liked and uncontroversial, he is likely to end up instead on the ballot for GOP state committeeman.

And there is Brandon Toney, a political newcomer without much of an established pedigree in GOP ranks.

Four years ago, Democrat Gabby Salinas came close to ousting Kelsey in a much-watched race. During her successful run for the Shelby County Democratic chairmanship last year, Salinas more or less committed to not being a candidate for elective office this year. But Ruby Powell-Dennis, who was a strong runner-up to Salinas in the 2020 Democratic primary for the House District 97 seat, has basically been running hard for the District 31 Senate seat for some time and must be reckoned with in a district with purplish tendencies.

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Politics Politics Feature

Beyond the Party Line

Servers at Saturday’s “Elephants in the Park” homeless feed. (Naser Fazlullah front and center, with shades on) (Photo: Kristina Garner)

Political parties, as is surely no secret, are constantly looking for converts, and, to that end, normally have what is designated as an “outreach” officer or branch.

The Shelby County Republican Party, which in recent years has lost a shade of its former demographic edge, has one of the best and most effective outreach officials in Naser Fazlullah, a native of Bangladesh and a small business owner who, in the 20 years or so of his American experience, has employed his natural enthusiasm and work ethic to forge ties and friendships across all sorts of boundaries, political and otherwise.

A case in point was an event he conceived and brought to fruition on Saturday at Morris Park on the edge of Downtown. Called “Elephants in the Park,” it had cadres of the local Republican party working side by side with off-duty judges, members of law enforcement, and community activists like Stevie Moore, founder of Freedom From Unnecessary Negatives (FFUN), a renowned anti-violence group — all toiling at food tables handing out meal boxes (fish, spaghetti, fries, coleslaw) to a population of hungry Memphians recruited from three local homeless agencies, an estimated 300 people before the day was over. The food came from both Fazlullah’s own Whitehaven restaurant and from other donors.

Politics, as such, figured not at all. The idea was to make people-to-people connections, for the sake not merely of the beneficiaries but of the servers who worked for the day on their behalf — like John Niven, a veteran GOP activist who commented, “I’ve never done anything that made me feel as good as this did. The homeless basically don’t vote, and those who do probably vote Democratic, but so what?”

• The most common political name right now? That’s an easy one. It’s “Harris.” There’s Lee Harris (county mayor); Sheleah Harris (school board); Michael Harris (Shelby County Democratic Party’s chairman); and Linda Harris (candidate for district attorney general).

And, of course, there’s Kamala Harris (vice president of the United States).

The one who was on display Monday morning at The Hub in East Memphis (to a group of politically astute ladies calling themselves “Voices of Reason”) was Torrey Harris, first-term state representative for House District 90.

State Rep. Harris discussed with a rapt audience the ins and outs of how Democrats struggle to make their influence felt in the supermajority Republican legislature. His auditors were especially interested in — and aggrieved by — the majority’s passage in the last session of a bill outlawing the teaching in the state’s public schools of “critical race theory,” which, as Harris noted, is (a) not taught in the public schools, and (b) is the GOP’s catchphrase for attempts to deal honestly with the nation’s racial history.

Running as a Democrat last year, Harris had defeated former state Representative John DeBerry, whose long-term sympathy with Republican positions caused the denial of his right to run under the Democratic party label.

The defeated DeBerry, who ended up running as an independent, was rewarded by GOP Governor Bill Lee with a well-paid job as gubernatorial advisor, and one of the ex-Democrat’s main functions, Harris explained, is — wait for it — that of liaison with the House’s Democratic members.