It was another tough Election Day for the Tennessee Democratic Party.
Sure, Joe Biden outperformed Hillary Clinton in the state, but Donald Trump's vote share stayed roughly the same as 2016 at 60.7 percent. Biden won the same three counties — Davidson, Shelby and Haywood — as Clinton.
In the Senate race, Marquita Bradshaw won the same three counties and was crushed by Bill Hagerty, who landed roughly 62 percent of the vote.
There were some hopeful whispers that Renee Hoyos might make some headway against Tim Burchett in the Second Congressional District. Burchett won by 36 points. Outside of the safe seats of U.S. Reps. Jim Cooper and Steve Cohen, the best performing Democratic congressional candidate was professional C-list #Resistance chatterbox Christopher Jolly Hale, who adopted the bizarre (some would even say dim-witted) strategy of telling voters in the 4th District that scandal-ridden Rep. Scott DesJarlais — a man who a former Tennessee Republican Party operative once told me was a "terd" [sic] who he regretted "push[ing] ... across the finish line in 2010" — was not conservative enough. Thus, Hale — a Democrat, remember — said people should vote for him in 2020 so they could eliminate DesJarlais' incumbency advantage and vote for someone more conservative in 2022, offering a parade of horribles that included loony Islamophobe Lou Ann Zelenik and monorail enthusiast Joe Carr. Hale got a third of the vote.
Democrats failed to flip any seats in the state House, either in the suburbs or in more rural areas where the party made a play at, among others, Craig Fitzhugh's old seat in West Tennessee. John Mark Windle of Livingston and Johnny Shaw of Bolivar remain as the only Democrats representing nonurban districts (although Shaw's district does include parts of Jackson).
The lone bright spot for the Dems was Heidi Campbell defeating Steve Dickerson for a Davidson County Senate seat, growing the Senate Democratic Caucus to six.
Obviously, Democrats in Tennessee face certain structural disadvantages. In a state where a wildly popular moderate former governor can only win three counties and 44 percent of the vote in a Senate election, as Phil Bredesen did in 2018, it's hard to argue that any change in electoral strategy or fundraising tactics or leadership would make that much difference. And super-duper-majority control of the legislature gives Republicans redistricting power, which of course they'll use to their advantage, just as Democrats did for years (and frankly, despite Sen. Jeff Yarbro's annual legislative effort to pass the Fair Maps Act, would if they could again).
Things just aren't easy for the party, we get it. And sure, the TNDP is easy to dunk on for various reasons. (Some wry Twitter user had a nice crack about the party's inability to win its own primaries, for example, that got some chuckles here at Scene HQ.)
And every two years, the TNDP and its loyalists go through the wailing, the gnashing, the self-examination, the calls for a new chair, as if just one change at the top can suddenly reverse the fortunes of a party that's been flagging for decades — as if party chair Mary Mancini has anything to do with a political realignment that started 50 years ago, or the fact that a third of the state was a Republican stronghold for 100 years before that. Perhaps her strong "Alas!" energy isn't particularly helpful, but it's hard to pin too much blame on her.
But to paraphrase a successful salt-of-the-earth Democrat, the buck's gotta stop somewhere.
If Mancini gets another shot at leading the party or if the executive committee goes in another direction is none of my business, not that that's ever kept me from offering some advice, so here's some.
Find more Heidis Campbell.
Whether the TNDP meant to or not, it found a winning strategy with the former Oak Hill mayor. In fact, it found a strategy the TNGOP found decades ago. You have to build a bench, and you have to have people start somewhere. In Campbell's case, it was first as a city commissioner and then as mayor of a tony enclave of 4,700 people. She did her time, grew her support, made a name for herself and then took the next step.
Starting in the ’80s, this is what the Republican Party in Tennessee would do. Find attractive candidates with ties to their communities and run them for city council or school board or county commission. Have them grow their support and make a name for themselves, and then put them up for bigger races that are winnable. This was an especially effective strategy for Republican women, including now-Sen. Marsha Blackburn, former U.S. Rep. Diane Black and a host of current and former state legislators.
On the other hand, the Democrats find an attractive candidate (say, James Mackler) who no one's ever heard of outside of a Jackson Day Dinner and then throw them up for a statewide race. (Mackler, of course, finished third in the U.S. Senate primary behind Bradshaw and Robin Kimbrough.) Sometimes, they try even more bizarre things like running supporting actors from long-forgotten Richard Mulligan vehicles. (In this case, the anointed frontrunner lost in the primary to Mark Clayton, who was ultimately disavowed by the TNDP.)
Outside of the big cities, no one except overexcited weirdos who need to spend some time outdoors care much if their city councilmember or county commissioner is a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian or a Democratic Socialist or whatever — so long as they get the potholes fixed, keep the parks green and maybe exercise a little discretion with the taxing authority.
Even some of the reddest suburban counties — Wilson, for instance — have Democrats on their county commission. Do their constituents know? Maybe. If they do know, do they care? Not particularly, probably.
These are the training grounds, the realest of the retail politics. There's no need to nationalize an Oneida city council race. A Biden-backing longtime middle school principal in Dover may not know anything about critical race theory or all the mechanics of single-payer health care, but damn it, the people know who he is. And if he sticks around in local government long enough, they'll see he can get things done and work hard for their families, and maybe even the MAGAiest man in Stewart County will give him a shot at the state House.
And after a few terms, maybe one of these folks gets some traction and runs for Congress. Maybe not, but in the meantime, you put more and more of these Quiet Democrats in city halls and county courthouses and then push for them for bigger things. Someday, one of them'll catch fire.
You do what you always do: You get what you always got, and for the past two decades for Tennessee Democrats, that's been a helluva lot of not much. Insofar as there's been a strategy, it seems to be finding candidates palatable to the party apparatchiks and activists rather than, y'know, the voters they have to convince to pull the proverbial lever.
If the D next to the name is such an obstacle to overcome — and admittedly, right now it is, just as the R was for years for the other side — make it irrelevant by making the name itself one that people already know and already trust.
