These races have a little breathing room
If one thing is true of this year’s political landscape, it’s that anything can happen. But there are still a few foreseeable wins: For example, Democrat Bill Beck is a state representative from District 51 who got a DUI in his first term but doesn’t have a challenger in November. The outcome of the following races may not prove to shock many, but will be interesting to watch regardless:
District 56 — House Speaker Beth Harwell (R) vs. Chris Moth (D)
It was well-known from the get-go that House Speaker Beth Harwell sat in a good spot to win District 56, which covers largely rich, white areas in and around Belle Meade, Forest Hills and Oak Hill. Harwell, the first female House speaker in the state, hasn’t had a great year, and if there were ever an opportunity beat a Republican in that district, insiders say this is the one.
She was on the wrong side of the Rep. Jeremy Durham debacle, waiting until the last minute to take charge. She’s faced ethics complaints about the way she handled expulsion proceedings for Durham — brought by a member of her own party — and another complaint about her behavior during an investigation of alleged abusive language by a staff member in Harwell’s office.
And while she recently put out an advertisement touting her positive relationship with Gov. Bill Haslam, she hasn’t denounced Donald Trump in the same way Haslam did after the infamous “grab her by the pussy” video was released. She’s refused to debate in public forums with her Democrat opponent Chris Moth, whom she beat by more than 6,000 votes for the same seat in 2014.
Yet despite all that’s working against Harwell this year, Moth still doesn’t really stand a chance. Harwell’s war chest has a lot to do with that: In the third quarter, her campaign raised $117,513. Add in cash from Harwell’s PAC, which raised $51,500, and it comes to nearly $170,000. She spent $56,303 — not counting whatever that Haslam ad cost — leaving her campaign with $1,110,746. That’s 10 times what Moth’s left with at this point: $97,427 after loaning his campaign $50,000 twice. He’s raised $14,063 and spent $10,934.
If she keeps her seat in District 56, her speakership will be challenged in the next session. State Rep. Jimmy Matlock has said that if he wins his race in November he plans to make a run for her leadership position in the Tennessee House of Representatives. But if Harwell can still win her district after a rough 2016, she has a good chance of keeping her bigger gig, too.
District 53 — Rep. Jason Powell (D) vs. Davette Blalock (R)
In the same way that Harwell’s deal is nearly sealed, incumbent Jason Powell’s is too. It can be a tough race for any Republican in District 53, which is made up of a large swath of South Nashville between I-65 and I-24. The district is diverse and has a large, politically active immigrant population, and the GOP hasn’t scored a lot of points with immigrants this year.
Republican Davette Blalock, who represents District 27 in the Metro Council, is still avidly supporting Trump — Blalock dismissed the comments released of Trump talking about groping women as “national tabloid gossip,” and refused to count him out as her choice for president. (Blalock was chosen as an alternate delegate for Trump.)
Powell has also significantly outraised Blalock: He started Quarter 3 with $85,925, brought in $38,655 and has almost $100,000 remaining, compared to the $115 left in Blalock’s campaign through the third quarter.
Republican John Wang (who donated $250 to Blalock) gave Powell a bit more competition in 2014, though Powell still won by a little more than 1,000 votes that year. But Wang had also raised more than Blalock in 2014 and wasn’t dealing with Trump fallout.
District 50 — Rep. Bo Mitchell (D) vs. Republican Nathan Massey (R)
When incumbent Bo Mitchell ran for this seat in 2014, it was a close race. He won by a healthy, if not-a-little-too close 430-vote margin over Troy Brewer in a district that includes Bellevue, Goodlettsville and much of the western edge of Davidson County.
This year Mitchell faces Republican Nathan Massey, who appears to be garnering a bit more party support than Blalock. Representing the more populous end of the district in the council and the legislature is a natural advantage for Bellevue’s Mitchell against Joelton’s Massey.
State Rep. Glen Casada contributed $1,000 to Massey’s campaign, and Harwell gave $1,500 — an additional $1,500 came from Casada’s CAS PAC. Reps. Gerald McCormick and Courtney Rogers also threw some money toward Massey, who brought in 70 percent of the vote in the Republican primary against Bill Bernstein, an Orthodox Jewish gun dealer.
Mitchell and Massey raised nearly $40,000 apiece in the third quarter — though $10,000 of Massey’s consisted of a loan from himself to the campaign. Overall, Massey has lent his campaign almost $40,000. He’s left with $39,333, while Mitchell has a healthy $88,241. —Amanda Haggard
These races will be tight
Meanwhile, the eyes of city political watchers are focused on the two closest races: District 20 in the Senate and District 60 in the House:
District 20 — Sen. Steve Dickerson (R) vs. Erin Coleman (D)
In Senate District 20, which nearly wraps around the entire perimeter of Davidson County, incumbent Sen. Steve Dickerson pitches himself as “a different kind of Republican.” It’s true, to a degree. Dickerson, an anesthesiologist who plays in a rock band, has often taken positions that set him apart from the rest of his caucus. In 2014, Dickerson voted against a bill bringing back the electric chair as a backup plan for state executions, and earlier this year he was the only Republican to vote against a resolution calling on Gov. Bill Haslam to sue the federal government in an attempt to stop refugee resettlement in Tennessee. He has also sponsored bills on medical marijuana and pharmacist-prescribed birth control, the latter of which passed into law. He also supported tuition equality for undocumented immigrant students.
“I’ve tried to come up with what I call ‘Venn diagram’ solutions where you look for groups that may not apparently have overlap, and you find the common thread through an issue and you try to [get] that piece of public policy through and passed, even though, at first glance, it doesn’t make sense,” he tells the Scene.
He also says he doesn’t “see a path” that would lead to him vote for Donald Trump in November, albeit after months of Trump exhibiting every “ism” one can name.
Dickerson’s challenger, Erin Coleman, shouldn’t have a problem getting votes from committed Democrats. In August’s primary, in which she ran unopposed, she received more votes than Dickerson and his Republican opponent combined.
But a dilemma for undecided or even Democratic-leaning voters might be this: Is it better to add one more Democrat to a paltry Senate caucus or keep in place a Republican who has at least backed some proposals you support and, because he’s a Republican, been able to get them taken seriously within the supermajority?
Coleman, a veteran, attorney and small business owner who fell just short of winning a Metro Council at-large seat last year, says for one thing, Dickerson isn’t really a “different kind of Republican.”
“I think that he only became a different kind of Republican in January of this year, when he knew that he had a liberal, progressive woman running against him,” Coleman says.
She highlights his support for bills expanding gun rights and restricting abortion, and the fact that he hasn’t taken a stance on Insure Tennessee, Gov. Bill Haslam’s plan to expand health care coverage, and she notes that his first vote every year for the past four years has been to make Ron Ramsey speaker of the Senate.
As for his birth control legislation, Coleman says, “One birth control bill does not a woman’s advocate make.”
When it comes to questions about the relative significance of adding one more Democrat to the Senate, Coleman has a very practical answer. With only five in the caucus, each Senate committee has just one Democrat sitting on it. By adding a sixth, three of those committees would have two Democrats, meaning Democratic members would likely have an automatic second to their motions to bring bills up for discussion — something they don’t have now.
“Balance is really the key to good governance,” she says.
District 60 — Rep. Darren Jernigan (D) vs. Steve Glover (R)
In House District 60, it’s Republicans who are looking to take back a seat they lost four years ago. In 2012, Darren Jernigan, then a Metro councilman, unseated Republican Rep. Jim Gotto, beating him by just 95 votes. Ahead of that election, Jernigan told the Scene something interesting. “Whoever wins this race is going to be in there the next 10 years or however long they want to,” he said, predicting that these two were the strongest candidates their parties could offer in the district. Two years later, in 2014, he fended off a rematch from Gotto.
Now his theory is put to the test. Jernigan, who has opposed school vouchers and pushed for Insure Tennessee at the legislature, faces another challenge from Steve Glover, a conservative Metro councilman known, as Gotto was, for often standing apart from the more progressive council body. Glover, who is also a former Metro school board member, recently opposed legislation to create a civil penalty — an alternative to harsher criminal penalties — for small amounts of marijuana. True to conservative form, Glover routinely sounds the alarm about spending at the council and has highlighted his support for gun rights as a state House candidate.
Jernigan has raised more than $84,000 this year for his re-election campaign, while Glover has brought in a little more than $60,000. In 2014, Jernigan bested Gotto by more than 1,000 votes. But Glover, unlike Gotto in 2014, is a sitting councilman who was unopposed for re-election to a second term on the Metro body. The district’s recent history suggests it’s a narrowly divided one that proves the truism: It all comes down to turnout. —Steven Hale
In Williamson, a pair of interesting contests
If Davidson County is a blue dot in a red field, Williamson County to the south is so deeply red that everything pales in comparison. And yet, two seats that should not be newsworthy — Glen Casada’s and the one held by the now-deposed Jeremy Durham — are suddenly seen as competitive by Democrats (even if the odds of an upset are still very long).
District 63 — Rep. Glen Casada (R) vs. Courtenay Rogers (D)
With disgraced former state Rep. Jeremy Durham out of the picture — crushed in his August primary after damning allegations of repeated sexual harassment, and expelled from the Legislature in September — it was hard to imagine the two contested general elections in Williamson County could possibly deliver much drama. And indeed, with the exception of a couple of minor dustups, the races are quietly being run door to door, as two female Democrats try to convince voters in districts drawn to be safely conservative that they are more in line with voter values than the two male Republicans running.
In District 63, Glen Casada, the House Republican caucus chairman — and likely frontrunner for majority leader, if re-elected — is running for his eighth term. His opponent, a former naval officer and single mother, Courtenay Rogers, isn’t shy about saying the incumbent’s views are “completely out of touch” with his district — after all, Williamson was the only county in the state not to go for Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Meanwhile, Casada has continued to defend Trump, even after profane video emerged in which Trump discussed sexually assaulting women.
“I will vote for Donald. His sins are not as bad [as Hillary Clinton’s],” Casada told the Franklin Home Page after the video emerged. (Casada declined to speak with the Scene for this story.)
But Rogers isn’t running against Casada simply because she’s a woman, or because she’s to the left of Casada’s positions on everything from a bathroom bill to Insure Tennessee. Part of the reason she’s running, she says, is that her personality is the opposite of Casada’s.
“It’s about being able to listen. It’s about being able to bring innovative, creative, forward-thinking ideas to the table. It’s about being able to not just support people who write me checks,” Rogers says. “I’m not beholden to developers or road-builders like Glen Casada is. It’s really apparent in the way that he votes that he is definitely voting in favor of people who pay him a lot of money.”
Most of Casada’s campaign contributions this year have indeed come from PACs — but PACs also donate more heavily to incumbent and to leadership candidates. Yet Rogers says PAC money isn’t the only problem.
“It seems so simple, you know? Be a decent human being. Have open conversations. Don’t be so partisan. A good idea is a good idea, no matter who comes up with it, and I am very willing to cross the aisle and have productive conversations.”
Does that mean Rogers is implying that Casada is not a decent human being?
“Glen Casada is not very well-liked,” Rogers replies. “I am focused on being a decent human being, and I try to live my life always doing the right thing. Glen Casada has made a lot of enemies, and he is in this for himself, and I can say that very firmly, being a constituent of his for seven years.”
Rogers says she thinks she’s in a stronger position to beat Casada than he suspects, although a source who has seen Republican internal polling says Casada’s numbers are high. Casada spent less than $9,000 on the race in the third quarter, but in early October, he purchased a $14,000 cable ad buy, showing he’s at least a little aware of the challenge.
District 65 — Sam Whitson (R) vs. Holly McCall (D)
Durham’s former seat, District 65, has political newcomer Sam Whitson, a retired Army colonel, as the heavily favored Republican over Democrat Holly McCall. But it remains unclear how much Whitson actually wants the job.
“This has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” says Whitson about campaigning, 30 seconds after the Scene sits down with him. “You know, I thought Iraq was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but this ...”
Whitson was recruited by Tennessee Department of Transportation Commissioner John Schroer last winter to run against Durham before all of Durham’s scandalous behavior became widely known. Whitson says he’s a moderate Republican, more in line with Gov. Bill Haslam’s positions than Casada’s.
Whitson says his big issues are education and transportation. Although he received sizable backing from the pro-charter Stand for Children PAC in the primary, Whitson says he doesn’t support anything that takes money out of public schools — at least, from Williamson Council public schools.
“It’s not on my agenda to go up there for vouchers or charter schools,” Whitson says, though he won’t unequivocally state that he will not cast a vote in support of either. “You can say this: I worry about anything that takes money away from our public schools.”
Whitson says he also has concerns about the bathroom bill, which is likely to return next session, and he says those kinds of decisions are best left up to local schools, not the state. But he says his best strength as a politician will be the fact that he’s not one.
“I’ve never been in Legislative Plaza. I don’t even know where the front door is,” Whitson says. “It’s not that I don’t understand the system, it’s that I haven’t been corrupted by the system.”
Does that mean that longtime legislators, such as Casada, have been corrupted by the system?
“Uh, don’t quote me on that. That’s not the right word,” Whitson stumbles.
Whitson says he’s a fan of term limits and promises to serve only six years if elected. But does he really want the job, really?
“I look at it as like my public service obligation to do. You know, I’m retired,” Whitson says, with more than a hint of exhaustion in his voice.
If you ask McCall the same question, you get the opposite of exhaustion.
“I’ve got to tell you, I love it,” McCall says about campaigning. “My husband will tell you, it’s the happiest he’s seen in me in several years.”
McCall is equally focused on transportation and education as her top issues, along with health care. She praises Whitson as a “nice guy,” but comments, “I don’t think naïveté is going to be helpful to us at this juncture.”
McCall says her recent polling shows that the district is only 53 percent Republican, implying that she could stand a chance of winning, however narrowly.
“The makeup of the district has changed quite a bit in just the last two years, so many new people have moved in,” McCall says.
But the party seems confident in Whitson’s chances — although with Trump on the ballot with his record unfavorables, it appears that if some Williamson County Republicans stay home, McCall and Rogers could indeed make a dent in a rapidly changing county. —Cari Wade Gervin
The presidential race will continue to reverberate in Tenneessee
Have you ever taken a bottle of soda — or, more likely this election season, a beer — and slammed it down on a table, maybe shaken it up a bit, and then opened it? If you have, you know what happens. The carbonated liquid is sent into a tizzy at the bottom of the bottle, before rushing upward, erupting out of the top and then spilling back down, drenching the bottle and your hand, maybe spraying on your shirt, and staining everything it touches.
Have I gotten too abstract or do you recognize the 2016 presidential campaign?
The destructive candidacy of Donald Trump is not a comet. It did not come from outer space. Rather it is the eruption of a variety of sentiments that have bubbled up from the fever swamps. No doubt, the dire economic straits of some white Americans and their political disenchantment are part of brew. But the core features of the Trump campaign — xenophobia, racism, sexism and conspiracy mongering — are merely subtext made text. Stoke fears of outsiders and tolerate or boost racist conspiracy theories about the first African-American president for long enough, and this is what the base will burp up.
In Tennessee, we’ve been well-positioned to watch this phenomenon as it bubbled up all the way until today, as it’s acid-raining down all around us. In 2008, as Barack Obama was winning the presidency, Tennessee voters elected Republican majorities in the state House and Senate for the first time since Reconstruction. Two years later, Republicans won the governorship, two congressional races and very nearly achieved supermajorities in the legislature, and they got there, eventually. Yes, the anti-Obama wave swept in some Republicans who have little in common with Donald Trump, but it brought in many others too — the kind who would question the president’s citizenship in the halls of the legislature, sound the alarm about virtually nonexistent voter fraud, or more recently, call for settled Syrian refugees to be rounded up and detained. Few can claim to have predicted the Trump uprising, but in hindsight, it seems we were always headed here.
And now that Trumpism has erupted onto the national scene, it has debased the moderate Republicans so long seen as the leaders of the party in Tennessee, in large part by exposing their cowardice and lack of fortitude in the face of their party’s demagogic nominee. Gov. Bill Haslam, having kept his head down as long as possible, announced earlier this month that he would not support Trump, even calling on the nominee to step aside (a meaningless gesture, but an oppositional one, nonetheless). Meanwhile Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander have held onto what typically would seem like an untenable position — repeated denunciations of Trump’s statements and proposals coupled with support for making him president. And that was before the more-than-a-dozen allegations of either sexual assault or sexual harassment against Trump.
With his campaign imploding, The Donald is an all-but-sure-thing to beat Hillary Clinton in Tennessee and lose the election nationally. That promises to be a fact that your children will learn about in grade school history classes decades from now, assuming we still have children, grade schools or history classes in the future. From what national context will they be viewing the dark moment we’re living through now? That’s far less certain. —Steven Hale
