Tag: Worth Morgan

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Politics Politics Feature

State Party Transitions

Worth Morgan (Photo: Memphis City Council)

In the political sphere, both major political parties chose new leaders over the weekend. 

The executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party (TNDP), meeting in Nashville on Saturday, elected Rachel Campbell of Chattanooga the party’s new state chair. Campbell, currently chair of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, defeated state Representative Gloria Johnson, the party’s unsuccessful 2024 candidate for the U.S. Senate, and three other candidates.

The election required two ballots, with Campbell ultimately winning over runner-up Johnson by a margin of 43 to 22. One of the issues militating against Johnson was a concern that, as an elected state official, her direct involvement in fundraising campaigns would be limited by restrictions set by the state Election Registry.

The TNDP elected Nathan Higdon of Blount County as vice chair.

And in Shelby County, also on Saturday, a few hundred delegates turned out for the local Republican Party’s biennial convention at New Hope Christian Church in Bartlett, electing former Memphis city councilman Worth Morgan Shelby County Republican chair over party vice chair Naser Fazlullah.

The contest had generated a fair amount of friction in local Republican circles, some of it carrying over to the convention itself, largely on account of Fazlullah’s charge that Morgan had been insufficient in his support of President Donald Trump.

Fazlullah repeated the charge to the convention attendees on Saturday, and for his pains heard himself being hooted at from the floor by supporters of Morgan, one of whom hurled the deadly epithet “Rino” (for Republican in Name Only) at Fazlullah.

The tally results — 307 votes for Morgan, 100 for Fazlullah— indicated that the advance Sturm und Drang, which was considerable, had been wholly disproportionate to the actual alignment of forces in party ranks.

Morgan’s campaign, run under the rubric “25 [for 2025] to Revive,” had been well organized and clearly included in its ranks a lopsided majority of local GOP influencers.

Patti Possel, a veteran of the erstwhile deannexation-from-Memphis movement in the suburbs, was elected local GOP vice chair.

Jim Kyle (Photo: Tennessee Courts)

• Jim Kyle, the onetime Democratic leader in the state Senate, who gave up his legislative seat a decade ago to make a successful run for Shelby County chancellor, made his retirement from the bench formal last week. 

Some months ago, Kyle had been forced to step down from his judicial duties because of the debilitating effects of CIDP (chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy). Lawyer Jim Newsom was appointed special judge, a temporary successor to Kyle, by Governor Bill Lee. 

Kyle reports progress in what has been a difficult rehabilitation period, one which has severely restricted his movements and confined him to a wheelchair. He is looked after by his wife, state Senator Sara Kyle, by other family members, and by various ad hoc helpers.

Gamely, Kyle says he is greatly buoyed by the imminent birth of a grandchild to his son James Kyle Jr. and by devoted watching of the televised games — “good, bad, and ugly” —of the Grizzlies basketball team. 

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Politics Politics Feature

A GOP Grudge Match

Naser Fazlullah with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security nominee and last year’s Lincoln Day keynoter. (Photo: Naser Fazlullah | Facebook)

The race for chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party, due to be resolved at the local party convention on Saturday at the Venue at Bartlett Station, has turned into a real donnybrook, with potentially divisive consequences.

As noted previously in this space, the two candidates are former Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan, the beneficiary of an intra-party “Revive” campaign supported by numerous prominent party members, and longtime activist Naser Fazlullah, whose nose-to-the-grindstone party activities have won him a sizable grassroots constituency. 

Underlying the surface aspects of the race are conflicts and rivalries involving other party figures and a myriad of issues.

Morgan’s most significant supporter is undoubtedly state Senator Brent Taylor, who claims credit for having recruited Morgan, an unsuccessful candidate for Shelby County mayor in 2022, to seek the chairmanship. Taylor won election to the state Senate that same year, claiming the seat vacated by former incumbent Brian Kelsey, who was forced out by legal problems. Since then, he has gone on to generate an amount of attention for himself unusual for a first-term legislator.

That’s partly due to the fact that Taylor, wealthy from the sale of his extensive funeral home network, has personally endowed numerous GOP candidacies and party events, both statewide and locally. And he continues to attract publicity for his aggressive efforts, in and out of the legislature, to impose stronger state control over law enforcement in Shelby County.

The most recent manifestation of what Taylor calls a “Make Memphis Matter” campaign is his ongoing attempt to force the removal of Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, whom he accuses of lax crime control. The senator has initiated a legislative procedure that would ultimately require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the legislature to oust Mulroy.

As it happens, Fazlullah opposes that effort, on the grounds that using legislation to remove a legally elected local official is unjustified overkill.

That’s one reason for Taylor’s animus toward Fazlullah and his recruitment of Morgan as a rival candidate. Another is his assertion that, at last fall’s Germantown Festival, Fazlullah strenuously urged GOP state Representative Mark White to oppose Taylor’s reelection in 2026. White acknowledges that Fazlullah made such an approach, which he politely turned aside.

Says Taylor: “Naser should never be party chairman after trying to recruit a candidate to run against a sitting state senator in a primary who happens to have been the largest contributor to the Republican Party while he was vice chairman. Two can play at this game!”

Meanwhile, Fazlullah has allies who hold grudges against Worth Morgan. One is Terry Roland of Millington, a notable GOP conservative who regards Morgan as a lukewarm Republican, a “Never-Trumper,” and a potential advocate of city-county consolidation.

Roland sees Morgan as a tool of party “elitists” and reproaches the chairmanship candidate for allegedly “boycotting” the local GOP’s 2022 Lincoln Day banquet, which was keynoted that year by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The showdown over the chairmanship reflects a complicated pattern of conflicting loyalties, with GOP moderates and conservatives to be found on both sides.

• You saw it here first, in our year-end forecast of future political events: U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn is seriously considering a race for governor in 2026 and has so informed an increasing number of her fellow Republicans statewide. 

Glenn Jacobs, the Knox County mayor who was previously regarded as perhaps the leading Republican gubernatorial hopeful, has energized Blackburn’s likely candidacy with a formal endorsement. 

The Republican nomination, though, will apparently still be contested by U.S. Representative John Rose of Cookeville, a multi-millionaire with the capacity to self-fund. 

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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

Mayor Floyd Bonner?

Floyd Bonner electioneering this year (Photo: Jackson Baker)

There is, it would seem, a different Name of the Week in generalized speculation about the 2023 Memphis mayor’s race. Confessedly, there have certainly been different figures to talk about in successive weeks of this column.

Previously mentioned as likely mayoral candidates next year have been: NAACP head Van Turner, who is finishing up his second and final term of the County Commission this week; Paul Young, the president/CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission; Karen Camper, caucus leader of the state House of Representatives Democrats; and Joe Brown, the onetime Criminal Court judge and former TV celebrity judge.

Brown’s intentions, though he has certainly promoted a possible race, may be more fanciful than real. The others are, one way or another, making tangible plans to run. Turner has basically already announced, Young is reportedly lining up some serious financing for a campaign, and Camper is expected to make an announcement any week now.

Other names that are getting some mention are those of the Rev. Keith Norman of First Baptist Church-Broad, a chief lobbyist for Baptist Memorial Hospital and a former Democratic Party chair; Beverly Robertson, president/CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber; Patrice Robinson, City Council member and former Council chair; and Worth Morgan, City Council member and defeated Republican candidate for county mayor this year.

This week’s most mentioned mayoral prospect? Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who in two successive county elections has led all other candidates for office and has a decent-sized campaign account left over to start a mayoral campaign with.

Bonner’s popularity with the voters as a Democratic candidate has been such that Shelby County Republicans did not even bother to nominate an opponent for him this year and themselves endorsed him.

His interest in running for the nonpartisan office of mayor is a very real thing, and he has definitely had preliminary discussions about mounting a campaign next year. Bonner’s status on the eve of the Memphis city election has been likened by more than one observer to that of AC Wharton in the first decade of this century, when Wharton was considered an inevitable candidate for, successively, Shelby County mayor and Memphis mayor, both of which offices he would win.

Jason Martin (Photo: Jackson Baker)

• Jason Martin, the Nashville critical-care physician who emerged as the winner of the Democrats’ three-way gubernatorial primary, was the speaker at last week’s Germantown Democratic Club meeting.

Addressing an audience of 70-odd attendees at the Coletta’s restaurant in East Shelby County, Martin deplored GOP Governor Bill Lee’s policies on several counts, including Lee’s restrictive posture toward abortion rights, his refusal to countenance Medicaid expansion and the annual federal outlays of $1 billion that would come with it, his striking away of gun regulations, and his moves toward privatizing public education.

Said Martin: “The other side is so radical on these issues that most people are like, ‘That’s not me.’ And that’s why we’re getting traction.”

• As first reported last week on memphisflyer.com, outgoing District Attorney General Amy Weirich will be taking a position as assistant DA with the office of Mark Davidson, district attorney for the adjoining 25th Judicial District, which serves the counties of Tipton, Fayette, Lauderdale, McNairy, and Hardeman.

A press release from Davidson’s office on Monday confirmed that Weirich will be sworn in as special counsel to his office on September 1st, a day after the swearing-in of Steve Mulroy, who defeated Weirich in the August 4th county election, to replace her as Shelby DA.

• The ever-worsening situation of Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert, under fire for mishandling license-plate distribution and her office affairs in general, almost got even bleaker Monday when the Shelby County Commission, in its final meeting as currently composed, failed by one vote to appoint a special counsel to begin ouster proceedings.

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Politics Beat Blog

County Mayor Candidates Skirmish

“Well,” said one woman as she left The Bluff restaurant on Highland following a Tuesday Rotary club luncheon debate between county mayor candidates Lee Harris and Worth Morgan, “that was a case of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm versus Mack the Knife!” 

She didn’t specify which was which,and there was abundant antagonism on both sides of the match, but presumably she was assigning the attacker’s role to Harris, the Democratic incumbent who seeks a second four-year term from the voters.

Having won the coin toss supervised by moderator Otis Sanford, Harris opted to go first on the program, and for several detailed minutes, he dismissed his Republican challenger as a neophyte and a lightweight who had shunned positions of leadership and key votes during his seven years so far on the Memphis City Council..

The youthful-looking Morgan responded not in visible anger but with a show of forbearance toward what he said was Harris’ mischaracterization of his record. “Personally, it doesn’t bother me,” he said. “And I know my heart. I know my positions, and so it doesn’t shake or bother me, but professionally, it is disappointing.” That turned out to be a prelude to his own attack on Harris.

“Some of that disappointment that I see today is something that I’ve also seen over the last several years, [when] I’ve been disappointed with Shelby County’s response, especially the mayor’s office response … to the pandemic … to economic development. The community depends on the Shelby County mayor to be a leader on so many of these issues. My hope is that this is a fast-paced moving world and we haven’t been left behind. There’s still opportunity.”

Morgan continued: “We’ve got a great story to tell here in Shelby County. We’ve got to have somebody out there to tell it; you’ve got to have a pitchman speaking on behalf of people, speaking on behalf of the community, for Shelby County. And we haven’t had that. We haven’t had the leadership that we needed.” 

His ingenue appearance notwithstanding, Morgan proved to be every bit the aggressor that Harris was. He enumerated important issues, such as crime, economic development, jobs, education, and poverty. With “the chief among those,” he said, being public safety. As he has before on the stump, Morgan suggested Harris had failed to work in harmony with other divisions of county government, with the courts, the state, and Shelby County’s seven municipalities.

Morgan cited in particular the county’s problems on rolling out vaccines to counter the Covid epidemic. “Was he responsible for the response from the health department for the vaccine distribution that had to be taken over by the state? Absolutely. When you look at our numbers compared to other major counties, where we still don’t have the vaccine rate that you see in Davidson County. … We’ve had close to 3,400 deaths in Shelby County.”

Responded Harris: “There’s only been one investigative report about the handling of the vaccine scandal, and it was performed by Memphis Business Journal, and the Memphis Business Journal after doing their investigation concluded, without equivocation, that the whole scandal was made up — that there was a fiction invented by representatives from the state. … I’m proud that during the COVID-19 [pandemic], our county outperformed all 95 counties regularly. When it came to transmission rates per capita, Shelby County was the best-performing county in our state regularly. Now that is unprecedented.”

Harris continued: “There were hundreds of meetings around COVID response, hundreds of opportunities for my opponent to make his presence known. Councilmember Morgan could not be found during the last two years of the pandemic.”

Morgan replied that Councilman Dr. Jeff Warren, not himself,  had been the council’s speaker-designate on Covid issues, and, after lauding Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s follow-up success in dealing  with vaccine distribution, he said “the only statistic that really matters is that we have had 3,400 deaths as a result of the pandemic. Davidson County has about 1,700. Our population is 34 percent  higher, and the death rate was 97 percent higher.”

Morgan waffled somewhat when moderator Sanford asked him directly about state interference with Shelby County’s decisions on mask mandates and school openings. Morgan: “We are still in a little bit of Monday morning quarterbacking, trying to understand did we lose more in our school system by having kids out than we protected them by having them in place? There’s a lot of national debate that’s going on about that.” 

Harris saw his opening and took it. “I don’t know Mr. Morgan. I only met him recently, as per this process, in the last few days. So I’ve never seen him in the community. I’ve never shaken hands with him or anything like that before. But what I know about him from the last few days of getting to know him, is that when it comes to leadership opportunities, he has a whole encyclopedia of excuses of why he couldn’t attend hundreds of COVID response meetings for two years. And we have a member of the Memphis City Council that says, ‘Wait, somebody else do it. I can’t go.’ Leadership requires courage.”

Morgan’s response: “If you’re ever leaving a meeting and you feel like my voice is missing from the discussion, feel free to pick up the phone and call me. I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”

Sanford asked the contenders for their position on Governor Bill Lee’s ongoing voucher program for private schools — which is confined to Memphis and Nashville — and the governor’s intent to import charter schools from right-wing Hillsdale College. Harris was unreservedly against both. Morgan had an arguably equivocal answer: “This is a program that’s going forward. How can we make sure the kids in our public school system, the kids that are in the private school system, the kids that are in voucher programs, the kids that are in charter schools, how could they be successful, and make sure that they all have a path and opportunity to that next level?”

The candidates disagreed on the extent to which local politics should concern itself, at least symbolically, with national issues. Said Harris: “When it came to one of the darkest moments in our community’s history, members of the city council decided to condemn the January 6th insurrection. Except for Councilman Morgan. He said, I can’t vote. I can’t work on that issue. I can’t lead in this moment. When it came time to celebrate one of the proudest moments in our country’s history, the elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black woman Supreme Court justice, every city council member wanted to do it. Every county commissioner wanted to do it. Except Council-member Morgan.’”

Said Morgan: “We have a lot of resolutions that get introduced to the city council that I call sky-is-blue resolutions, or the resolutions that council members are grandstanding on, getting repetitive-stress injury for just how far they’re patting themselves on the back. In my opinion, a resolution that is outside the scope and authority of Memphis City Council in terms of what we have power and control to do, is not one of the things that we need to be spending time on, considering the issues of crime, potholes, economic development — all the obligations that we have. “

Harris and Morgan differed on the merits of the state’s new “Truth-in-Sentencing” bill, which would in effect abolish parole for offenders convicted of certain violent crime. Morgan saw it as “one tool in the chest” and Harris objected that “you have to have conditions upon release from prison. You’ve got to have drug-screening requirements, and you’ve got to have job search requirements. That’s how you make folks who are released from prison reintegrate successfully back into the community,”

Harris went further, criticizing Morgan for publicly celebrating passage of the bill “because he’s publicly declared he invested in Tennessee prison companies, and investors in Tennessee prison companies stand to make profits off of incarceration. I think it is a cruel and a bad way to make a buck. And I think celebrating [something that] stands to grow our prison industry is unwise.”

Morgan responded that his investment in prison stock had been part of a blind trust that he was unaware of, and that he disposed of it as soon as he was.

Harris was skeptical. “You have to declare under penalty of perjury, that you know what is going on in your life and know what your investments are. This is just not that hard. This is repeatedly why we can’t know what’s going on or why we can’t vote or we can’t go to meetings. This is the absence of leadership. And it is frustrating.”

There were other issues discussed and many more back-and-forths, but for all intents and purposes, the rest of the debate conformed to the recurrent pattern of charge and countercharge — Morgan trying to assert variants of his campaign slogan that “We Deserve Better” and Harris doing his best to indict his opponent’s lack of experience and essential commitment.

In reality, neither contender was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and both proved able and willing to use the scalpel. Next week’s election totals will indicate who left the most marks.

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Politics Politics Feature

Down to the Wire

Tuning it Up: GOP state Senate candidate Brent Taylor at campaign kickoff last week with country singer John Rich (Photo: Jackson Baker)

As the August 4th countywide election cycle winds down, the marquee race is still, as before, that for district attorney general between Republican incumbent Amy Weirich and Democratic challenger Steve Mulroy. The race remains the focus of attention in local politics. It has also engendered significant statewide and national attention.

A quiet moment in a turbulent campaign (Photo: Jackson Baker)

The Tennessee Journal, a weekly which is the preeminent statewide source for political news across Tennessee, featured the race in its lead story for the July 15th issue. Editor Erik Schelzig recaps some of the significant charges and other back-and-forths of the contest, highlighting the two candidates’ major differences regarding the state’s new “truth-in-sentencing” law, which eliminates parole in several major violent-crime categories.

Weirich, who boasts her years-long efforts on behalf of passing the law, points with pride. Mulroy sees it as a case of vastly increasing state incarceration expenses while blunting possible rehabilitation efforts.

In the several recent debates between the two candidates, the challenger notes that his skepticism puts him on the same page regarding “truth-in-sentencing” as opponents like the American Conservative Union and GOP Governor Bill Lee, who declined to sign the bill, letting it become law without his signature. Weirich seizes upon Mulroy’s mentions of that fact as an opportunity to advertise her purported independent-mindedness, noting that she also disagrees with Lee (and the Republican supermajority) on such issues as open-carry gun legislation. “I don’t care what the American Conservative Union says,” she adds.

All that being said (and it’s consistent with her would-be crossover slogan, “Our DA”), the race as a whole is between Weirich’s right-of-center hard line and Mulroy’s highly reform-conscious point of view. Mulroy wants cash-bail reform and systematic post-conviction reviews, the latter including DNA testing. Weirich is open to modifications in those areas but not to major changes.

The two have battled over the matter of alleged racial disparity issues in the DA’s office, with Mulroy charging, among other things, that Weirich has an 85-percent white staff of attorneys prosecuting a defendant population that is 95 percent Black. Weirich says she’s trying to alter the ratio but cites the difficulty of competing with better-paying private law firms in efforts to acquire African-American legal talent.

Both contenders have seemingly forsworn the Marquis of Queensberry rules regarding the etiquette of competition. With no real evidence to base her claim on, Weirich’s ads consistently try to saddle Mulroy with the onus of being a “Defund the Police” enthusiast. He answers that he would like to see more police hired, and at higher salaries, and given “better training.” His ads portray Weirich as being a Trumpian (a stretch) and the “worst” district attorney in Tennessee, one saddled with several citations for misconduct from state overseeing bodies and with an ever-rising violent-crime rate during her 11-year tenure that is the worst in the nation.

The two candidates took turns in verbally pummeling each other in a series of almost daily formal debates the week before last. The venues were the Rotary Club of Memphis, the Memphis Kiwanis Club, and an Orange Mound citizens’ association. Neither gave any quarter, each attacking the other along lines indicated above.

Much of the aforementioned Tennessee Journal article is dedicated to the two candidates’ fundraising and campaign spending. In the second quarterly disclosure of the year (April through June), Weirich reported raising $130,400 and spending $240,400 — much of it on the Memphis consulting firm of Sutton Reid, where her blistering TV and radio ads are prepared. She began the quarter with nearly half a million dollars on hand and ended it with $361,00 remaining.

Mulroy raised $279,000 in the period, a sum which included a loan from him to his own campaign of $15,000. He spent $194,000 and had a remainder on hand of $159,000.

As noted by the Journal, Weirich has gotten almost all her funding from within Tennessee, all but $1,600. Mulroy, who has the avowed support of such celebrities as singer John Legend and author John Grisham, is also boosted by several national groups with a professed interest in criminal-justice reform. Some 35 percent of his funding has come from out of state.

One key venue for Mulroy is New York, where he has traveled twice recently, attending public occasions in tandem with such supporters as criminologist Barry Scheck, mega-lawyer Ben Crump, and entertainer Charlamagne Tha God. Mulroy’s travels and his funding sources are reportedly the target of a new Weirich TV spot which begins this week. It should be noted that the vast majority of Mulroy’s trips out of town during the campaign — all unpublicized until now — have been to Pensacola, where he drives down regularly to look in on his elderly mother.

With early voting about to expire and a week to go before the judgment day of August 4th, polling information is being held close to the vest by both principals, though Mulroy publicized an early one showing him with a 12-point lead.

A fact that looms large to all observers and to both participants and their parties: The position of district attorney general, is, as of now, the only major countywide position held by a Republican. Early voting statistics gave evidence of serious turnout efforts by both parties.

• There are other key races, to be sure. The race for county mayor, between Democratic incumbent Lee Harris and Republican challenger Worth Morgan has been something of a back-burner affair, with neither candidate turning on the jets full-blast in the manner of the DA race. Harris basically is resting on what he sees as a high productive record, and Morgan, though he challenges that, saying the county “deserves better,” has not featured many specifics beyond Morgan’s ill-based claim that Harris has — wait for it — defunded the police (strictly speaking, the Sheriff’s Department).

A recent TV ad shows Morgan in interview mode, chatting about his life and outlook and looking and sounding likable. Given Harris’ edge in incumbency and party base, that is probably not enough for now, but it does bolster Morgan’s name and image for later on.

In the race for Juvenile Court judge, Dan Michael’s incumbency works for him, while his opponent, city Judge Tarik Sugarmon, has a well-known local name and an active Democratic party base working on his behalf. Michael is heavily backed by the GOP in what is technically a nonpartisan race.

Few surprises are expected elsewhere on the ballot, though Democratic County Clerk Wanda Halbert, who has fumbled the issuance of new automobile plates, may get a scare (or worse) from Republican opponent Jeff Jacobs.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Political Ads Gone Awry — Cases in Point

County DA candidates Amy Weirich and Steve Mulroy. (Photos by Jackson Baker)

Yes, “Defund the Police” was a terrible idea and a genuinely stupid slogan. Any true believers in it are deserving of whatever comeuppance they get.

But the fact is, the unjust  linking of the term to political adversaries has turned into the latest political smear. It’s McCarthyism on steroids — right up there with a previous era’s “Soft on Communism.”

A solid piece of fact-checking by The Commercial Appeal’s Katherine Burgess conclusively made the case against County Mayor candidate Worth Morgan’s allegation that incumbent County Mayor Lee Harris, whom he opposes, defunded Sheriff Floyd Bonner’s budget, to the tune of some $4½ million. The accusation turned out to be so much jiggling of budget numbers, and Morgan has since owned up to having made an “error.” The clincher is that the Sheriff himself disowns any such complaint.

The “defund-the-police” smear has meanwhile become an increasingly prominent aspect of incumbent District Attorney Amy Weirich’s campaign against her Democratic challenger, Steve Mulroy.

It is the linchpin of a currently playing TV commercial on Weirich’s behalf, one in which Mulroy is not only accused of having advocated defunding the police — something which he denies and for which no credible record exists — but is represented, through a highly creative juxtaposition of images, as having marched in a parade with activists carrying “Defund the Police” signs.

Fact: a still photo of Mulroy holding a picket sign (but obscuring what the sign says) quickly segues into a video of the aforesaid defunders’ march. The reality is that his sign (and his march) belonged not to that affair but to a wholly different one, on behalf of Starbucks employees’ efforts, ultimately successful, to unionize their workplace.

Similarly, the same commercial misrepresents Mulroy’s support, during a severe phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, of ongoing  litigation to secure improved safety precautions for at-risk jail inmates. The ad would have us believe the suit, by Mulroy himself as the litigant of record, was against Bonner for the simple purpose of releasing criminals  — any and all criminals, it would seem — from jail.

This is not to suggest that Mulroy himself, or his own ad-makers, are wholly innocent of misrepresentation. An  ad on his behalf yoked Weirich together with Donald Trump and the ex-president’s  “mobs”  on the occasion of Trump’s recent appearance in nearby Southaven. Yes, Weirich is running for reelection as the Republican nominee, but there is little in her record to suggest that she is a party-line Republican, much less a Trumpian fanatic.

The balance of Mulroy’s ad is more defensible. He alleges, correctly, that violent crime has risen during Weirich’s tenure as D.A., and viewers of the ad can decide for themselves whether that upsurge has occurred because of, or in spite of, her crime-fighting techniques. It is also true, as the ad suggests, that Weirich has been accused by official tribunals more than once of professional misconduct.

On a recent prime-time evening, the two ads ran back-to-back on local television — Weirich’s first, followed without a break by Mulroy’s. To say the least, the combined effect did not add up to an ideal instance of the Socratic method at work. (Not that TV advertising of any kind is totemic with regard to truth.) And, in fairness to the two candidates, head-banging distortions of the sort described here  seem to be the rule, not the exception, for political advertising in particular.

POSTSCRIPT: Despite the fact-checking in the CA, a TV ad continues to push Morgan’s claim that County Mayor Harris “defunded the police.”  The “defunding the police” claim put forth by Weirich against Mulroy is still extant as well. Meanwhile, the Mulroy ad mentioned above continues to appear, though both he and Morgan have aired new commercials.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Weirich, Morgan Get Endorsements from Police, Sheriff’s Department Associations

Top: Amy Weirich (3rd from right) at endorsement ceremony. Bottom: Worth Morgan (front and center). (Photos by Jackson Baker).

The Memphis Police Association (MPA) and the Shelby County Deputy Sheriffs Association conferred their official endorsements on two candidates for major office — Amy Weirich, the incumbent District Attorney General, and City Councilman Worth Morgan who is running for Shelby County Mayor. Both are Republicans.

There were separate announcement ceremonies at different locations on Wednesday. The first announcement at MPA headquarters on Jefferson, was for Weirich. After expressing thanks to the two organizations for their vote of confidence, she hastened to note a piece of news that she thought relevant to her campaign against Democratic D.A. candidate Steve Mulroy.

“We saw last night something that we rarely get an opportunity to see and that is consequences of potential decisions that we might make,” Weirich said. “In San Francisco last night, the district attorney was recalled. And make no mistake — the district attorney’s platform in San Francisco is and has been identical to that of my opponent, making statements that he would not seek the transfer of juveniles to adult court, meaning that murderers, rapists, armed robbers, armed carjackers, armed kidnappers, would face no more than two years in prison.”

Weirich was asked what her position was toward recent anti-abortion legislation by the General Assembly attaching criminal penalties to doctors who might violate provisions of the very restrictive new law.

“All that is hypothetical,” Weirich said. “You  would first have to assume that doctors in this community would break the law. And then you would have to assume that that criminal conduct was reported to law enforcement. And then you have to assume that an investigation is conducted and that there is enough information to make a charge against someone. Too many hypotheticals, too many hoops to jump through, and that’s not the universe I live in. I don’t make conjecture statements about what I could or should do. We deal in facts.”

Morgan’s event was at his Park Avenue headquarters in East Memphis. He, too, expressed gratitude for the endorsements. “Together these two organizations represent almost 4,000 members of law enforcement in our community,” he said. “They are on the streets, they are in our communities, they are in our neighborhoods every day 24/7/365. They know what’s going on. They know the issues that we’re facing, they know and see and interact with the victims and the perpetrators on a daily basis. And I ask that you trust their judgment, you trust their intuition, you trust their endorsement of my campaign for Shelby County Mayor.” 

Regarding his opponent, incumbent Democrat Lee Harris, Morgan said, “We’ve got a current county mayor that is not taking meetings with people, and people don’t want to take meetings with him. You can’t get it done.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Still Party Time?

Worth Morgan (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Not too long ago, Republicans held a one-vote majority on the Shelby County Commission. Then, for a spell beginning in the mid-aughts, it was on the slim end of a 7-6 ratio — still a force. As of 2018, the ratio became eight Democrats to five Republicans, and the “gentlemen’s agreement,” whereby the parties would swap chairmanships year by year, was allowed to lapse. If the Democrats win all of the contested races remaining to be settled in August, as they are favored to do, the ratio will be 9 to 4.

Though pendulum shifts of a sort will possibly continue, the general trend is clear. Assuming the continuation of partisan elections for county offices — begun under GOP auspices in 2002 — Election Year 2022 is almost a last-stand occasion for the Shelby County GOP as an electoral force, countywide.

By general consent, the big race on the ballot is that for District Attorney General, where Republican incumbent Amy Weirich, running as “Our D.A.,” hopes to continue for another eight years.

The thrust of Weirich’s strategy is made plain by that self-description. In what is a throwback of sorts to the days of Democratic dominance in the state, she chose, in a signal event last week, to downplay her party identification. This was at a Republican Party unity rally at the Grove in Cordova, in which Todd Payne, the party’s nominee for the Commission’s District 5, played something of a host’s role.

Following remarks by Worth Morgan, the Republican nominee for county mayor, who himself struck a basically bipartisan note, Weirich began, “I’m going to say something that may offend you. I don’t want your vote just because I have ‘Republican’ by my name.” Voters, like elected officials, should think in bipartisan terms.

Stressing the issues of public safety and economic development, Morgan also minimized partisanship: “You have to be able to bring all those different divisions of county government together, including the state, including the Memphis Police Department, which has a major role to play, and sit down at the table and work through those issues.”

In short, the Republican Party needed a “reach-out” strategy to become again what, in theory, it had been for much of the previous two decades — the governing party of Shelby County.

In an interview after his remarks at the rally, Morgan pledged to pursue a policy of “transparency” and to hold regular press conferences — something he said the Democratic incumbent, Lee Harris, had been “negligent” about. And he promised to process “without resistance or delay” any press or public requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

To regain something resembling its former footing, the Republicans need strong showings in other remaining contested positions on the August ballot besides the high-profile ones. Besides Payne in Cordova, who opposes Democrat Shante Avant, another determined GOP candidate for the commission is businessman Ed Apple, who opposes incumbent Democrat Michael Whaley in District 13.

At the opening last week of the Midtown headquarters he shares with trustee candidate Steve Basar, Apple mused, “One thing that struck me early on when I was going through the hoops to kickstart this race, was that it was binary: ‘You Republican or Democrat?’ Yeah. Can’t run as an Independent. It really bothered me that people I spoke with didn’t understand what stirred my soul and what made me decide yes. And the main reason was: This is about Memphis. This has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican.”

That’s the rhetoric, anyhow, but the reality is that county elections, for the time being, are still partisan ones, and, like it or not, the two parties are on the line, not just the candidates. And the GOP is up against it.