Marquita Bradshaw
In 1946, well before Marquita Bradshaw was born, the U.S. Army disposed of leaking mustard-gas bombs and other hazardous materials at Dunn Field, a 60-acre open storage and waste burial area at the Memphis Defense Depot. The pollutants would later sicken the community into which Bradshaw was born. She observed her parents organizing legions of their poor Black neighbors to fight back — many in the neighborhood succumbed to cancer, including her grandmother.
The snowball effect of growing up near the depot, which was designated a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency, gave her life a much different trajectory from that of Republican Bill Hagerty, her U.S. Senate race opponent. He studied at Vanderbilt, earned a law degree, became a White House Fellow, had a career in private equity in Silicon Valley, served as Tennessee’s economic development commissioner, became the U.S. ambassador to Japan and was appointed to the White House recovery task force. Bradshaw, on the other hand, is a single mother and University of Memphis graduate who has ongoing reproductive health issues that she believes stem from toxin exposure. A related surgery covered by an 80/20 health insurance plan was crushing. She was still paying off student loans and had to pay bills for her college-age son’s health care. Then she lost her job as a union organizer at the AFL-CIO, and her next job, taking care of a special-needs adult, paid one-third as much. She filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy.
“Right now, I am currently in bankruptcy — and I’m running for U.S. Senate,” says Bradshaw, as if it makes all the sense in the world. Maybe it does. Many of the political themes of 2020 — income inequality, health disparities, racial injustice — are her areas of expertise.
“It takes a working woman, a working man to understand working people’s issues,” says Bradshaw. “Right now the U.S. Senate, they represent the ultra-rich. And so the policies actually are directed for the ultra-rich. They were able to save Wall Street three times in 48 hours, and we’ll never know the price tag. But when it came to working people, you can barely get a stimulus together because they don’t know how people experience the pandemic, or working-people issues.”
Bradshaw is an unusual Senate candidate to be sure, and the Republican-dominated political landscape in the state doesn’t work in her favor. But she earned bona fides for her stunning Democratic primary win in August with no headquarters and $22,000 in funds. What she has is sheer grassroots shrewdness. She has said, “The way a single mom spends $1 is not the same way a rich man spends $1.”
A year ago, Bradshaw formed a volunteer network of 55 campaign staff members across the state by tapping people she already knew through union work and decades of organizing. “I know people that have organized around every social justice issue there is,” she says, noting that she’s worked on police accountability, human rights issues, trade policy and tax reform in Tennessee, and spent decades volunteering as an environmental activist.
That type of organizing requires sharing stories, making connections and turning other people into organizers to reach a common goal. Now, she says, the goal is to “make sure that working people have a voice in the U.S. Senate.”
Bradshaw figured that her primary challengers — including attorney and U.S. Army veteran James Mackler, who had campaigned for Senate before — would attract big money. She wouldn’t be able to out-raise her opponents, but she could outsmart them. She figured other campaigns would spend their money to buy ads around the early voting period and Election Day, so she reached voters much earlier. “By the time their campaign started really rolling out, spending their money for commercials and different things like that, we had already established a network of volunteers to get out the vote.”
As the Democratic nominee, Bradshaw has $700,000 in the bank, according to her campaign. To date, the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee hasn’t sent funds. “They can come along whenever they get ready,” she says.
Meanwhile, Hagerty spent nearly $10 million before his own primary election and has the full support of monied Republicans at the state and national levels for the general election. He’s also got Trump’s backing. But Bradshaw is undeterred. As she heads into the homestretch, she’s hired a paid campaign manager — Ken Taylor, a Karl Dean and Phil Bredesen campaign veteran — and she’s hiring paid staff. But, she says: “Money can only do so much. You have to organize. And you have to utilize religion and politics in order to win. This is not new in politics, what I’m doing. It’s just people have gotten away from it at a U.S. Senate level.”
Her plan: Visit all 95 counties and hold socially distanced live events, as well as virtual events. Ask questions. Listen. Enlist hundreds of volunteers and give them goals and metrics. Encourage people to bring their families, friends and co-workers on board. Enlist kids to do text banking and phone banking from the couch. “This is a principle of organizing,” she says. “We just don’t move one vote, we move whole families.”
Bradshaw taps into frustrations, even in rural areas where support might seem unlikely. She says people are feeling “forced to go to work and provide for their family at a job that actually pollutes their community at the same time.” They live in counties “where there aren’t any real jobs, or real industries.” She hears about towns where the main industry is health care, and “that’s slowly fading out because state representatives are sending money back for health care” — a reference to the decision not to expand Medicaid in the state. People are upset about crumbling roads, poor infrastructure, lack of child care and a weak education system. While environmental stewardship and regulation is not a common battle cry in this state’s politics, Bradshaw says when you ask people about it, they passionately want to enjoy their water and their land, and they want industry that doesn’t pollute.
“It is unfortunate that people have been left out and marginalized,” she says. “And people are tired of it.”
Bradshaw breaks the mold for recent campaigns in the state, and not just because she’s the first Black woman to win a major party’s nomination in a U.S. Senate race. Former Gov. Bredesen, the 2018 Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat, challenged Republicans from the middle. Mackler was doing the same in his primary campaign this year. Neither gained enough traction. Bradshaw is further left, and favors Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, universal background checks and a $15 federal minimum wage. That platform may be attractive to today’s Democratic voter — Bernie Sanders was a strong second behind Joe Biden in the state’s presidential Democratic primary in March, and that was before the pandemic upended the political climate. (Sanders has endorsed Bradshaw’s campaign, as have a number of left-leaning musicians, performers and various celebrities.) Bradshaw is hoping her progressive bent could attract disaffected voters who haven’t been moved by moderates. Perhaps it can awaken the other half of the state’s eligible voters — those who typically sit out. Maybe even some conservatives.
“If you look at some of the things that some Social Democrats want to see,” Bradshaw says, “it’s that they want their neighbors to be taken care of in a pandemic, to make sure everyone has health care. And when you say it like that to Republicans, they want the same thing too.”
