Marquita Bradshaw
Marquita Bradshaw, a Memphis environmentalist and activist with ties to national labor groups, is entering the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Lamar Alexander.
Bradshaw joins Nashville attorney and veteran James Mackler in seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 election. The winner will face the Republican nominee, the race for which includes Trump-nominated former ambassador Bill Hagerty and Vanderbilt surgeon Manny Sethi. Bradshaw filed campaign paperwork with the Federal Election Commission last week.
Bradshaw, a board member of the Tennessee chapter of the Sierra Club, was previously an organizer with the American Federation of Government Employees, the AFL-CIO and the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, among other groups. She also worked with police accountability group Memphis United and traveled to Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of Michael Brown’s 2014 death.
“Because I'm an environmental justice activist at my core, I want to make sure that policies ensure that people have healthy and safe places to live, learn, work, worship and recreate,” Bradshaw tells the Scene. “We need all of those to be a whole individual.”
Bradshaw’s family members are no strangers to politics (though this is her first run for office) — her uncle is state Rep. John DeBerry (D-Memphis), and her mother Doris has been fighting for environmental justice in Memphis for decades. Marquita Bradshaw was by her parents’ side for much of the fight against a government-owned Superfund site in Memphis.
With less than a year to go before the primary, Mackler, who announced his bid in January, thinks he has the edge. Mackler briefly ran for U.S. Senate in 2017 before dropping out when former Gov. Phil Bredesen decided to run. Though he has had nearly a year to build his campaign, it has not attracted the attention and dollars seen by federal Democrats in other states like Kentucky, where Senate candidate Amy McGrath raised more than $2 million in her first 24 hours in the race to unseat Republican Mitch McConnell.
“Because I have Gov. Bredesen's support, because my story has really resonated across the state, the money we've built, the story I've told … I truly believe there's no longer a pathway forward for a Democratic primary challenger,” Mackler told the Economic Club of Nashville on Tuesday, before Bradshaw’s candidacy was public.
The race could set up a split between Memphis and Nashville, the two largest Democratic vote centers in the state, and the respective homes of the two candidates.
“If she can win Memphis, she can potentially win the nomination,” says Holly McCall, chair of Emerge Tennessee, a group that trains Democratic women to run for office. “It’s a majority-minority city with a history of many strong black women running and winning, so I think she fits that mold.”
But the winner in the Democratic primary faces long odds against a Republican nominee like Hagerty, with his financial resources and Trump endorsement. After Bredesen — well-funded and well-known — lost by 10 points to Republican Marsha Blackburn in 2018, and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Karl Dean lost handily to Republican Bill Lee, many Democrats are focusing instead on state House races in 2020, according to McCall.
“That showed us that we’re probably not going to pick a state win up for a while,” she says. “We’ve got redistricting coming up. We’ve got to get out of the superminority.”
That’s not scaring off Bradshaw, though.
“The path to victory is all about truth-telling about what's going on in the community and being the type of representative that can listen and serve all the people in Tennessee,” she says. “What's going on in the Senate is that socially and economically, they don't represent what the constituents of Tennessee look like. The majority of Senate members are millionaires, and I'm a working-class single mother. There are other working-class people across Tennessee, and sometimes when those policies come down, they have unintended consequences that hurt working people.”
