One of the more interesting contests on the November election calendar this year is the one for the District 31 state Senate seat between Republican incumbent Brent Taylor and Democratic challenger David Weatherspoon.

Given the relentless amount of self-promotion engaged in more or less constantly by Senator Taylor, he is hardly an unknown quantity. His reelection race in District 31, however, may be is his least conspicuous election effort; he is simultaneously a candidate, as the GOP nominee, for the District 9 Congressional seat — the reconfigured version of which he made sure to draw his Eads residence into during the state GOP’s legislative redistricting session this year.

Taylor’s Democratic opponent in the Congressional race is another well-known figure, state Senator Justin J. Pearson, and that race has drawn national attention..

Clearly, Taylor cannot serve in both the positions he is running for, and the state Senate district race is, on the basis of its demographics, likely to be the more competitive of the two.

Democrats have come close in District 31 in recent years —notably in 2018, when Democrat Gabby Salinas nearly toppled then GOP incumbent Brian Kelsey, and they see an opportunity to grab off the seat while Taylor is focusing on his Congressional race.

Their candidate, David Weatherspoon, has been there before, having run a tight race for the Democratic nomination in 2018 against Salinas.

Weatherspoon, who now serves as a chaplain at St.Jude Childress Research Hospital, served notice at a well-attended Memphis fundraiser this week that he is up to and ready for a serious effort against the rough-and-tumble Taylor, who is notoriously prone to use insults as campaign fodder.

As Weatherspoon noted, Taylor’s penchant, in advancing his brand, is to create scapegoats, starting with “our democratically elected DA,” Steve Mulroy, who, with wife Amy, was host for the Wednesday evening fundraiser, and including such other targets as the Memphis/Shelby County school district, victim of state-takeover legislation sponsored ny Taylor this year..

(Mulroy, who famously creates limericks, provided one for the occasion:

‘There’s one thing everyone ought to know:/
It’s time for Senator Taylor to go./

We’ve had enough of Brent.

It’s time fo him to get bent./

So please give Mr, Weatherspoon some dough.”)

Weatherspoon contrasted his training as a chaplain, which requires him to “listen and be present for people” with what he characterized as Taylor’s indifference to public needs.

“”We need trained legislators who know how to listen to the pain of our people,| he said.

He mocked Taylor’s catchphrase “Make Memphis Matter,” contending that the Senator’s goal was only to make himself matter.

Even the redistricting which Taylor participated in so enthusiastically, jiggering the District 9 lines to include his own house in Eads, was a case in point, reducing the effectiveness of government aid by splitting Memphis into fragments of itself, Witherspoon argued..

“Millions of dollars are going to be diluted.

The truth is not in Brent,” he said. He identified Taylor’s top donors as being such special interests as xAI, payday lenders, and the Core Civic prison complex.

Meanwhile, 13 rural hospitals have been forced to close in the state because the GOP supermajority has spurned Medicaid expansion. And Tennessee is dead last among the states in per-pupil education expenditures.

He scorned Taylor’s emphasis on suppression as his only tool for crime control, ignoring the need for intervention and prevention.

Summing it all up, he said, “I’m challenging Brent because I think we need better,”

— the 8th District congressional race, in which Democrat Heidi Kuhn has an opportunity to shine against GOP incumbent David Kustoff:
— the Governor’s race between Republican U.S.Senator Marsha Blackburn and Democrat Jerri Green, an indefatigable human multiverse: Councilwoman, Public Defender, and workhorse candidate.
No sense denying it: No Democrat has been able to prevail in a statewide race since 2006.And all the congressional districts were jiggered by the GOP during legislative redistricting to guarantee Republican electoral majorities.
But here’s a reality, already made clear in the media’s response: Pearson, a political prodigy and celebrity par excellence, not only will command national attention against Taylor. He’ll have funding, largely through his own means, commensurate with that fact.
He’s at $2.7 million already and has an abundance of upcoming fundraisers, in the country at large and on both coasts — including one hosted by

Gloria Steinum.
His Republican opponent, Brent Tarlor, has considerable talent as a huckster, as well as being a fully branded Trump endorsee— a fact elevating his status, for better and for worse. Taylor may be the state Republicans’ preeminent demagogue, but he does not excite wide symbolic interest on the same scale as does Pearson.
Cohen-versus-Pearson, the compelling Democratic primary contest killed off by the GOP redistricting, was itself a major confrontation, but Pearson-v-Taylor, the successor event, is more — a heavyweight championship bout.
The nature of this spectacle in the 9th District and the contours of the attendant arena will both be unimaginably enlarged
There very likely won’t be debate-like direct encounters between the combatants. There won’t need to be. Justin Pearson, as eloquent an orator as American politics has experienced in some while,will have an unparalleled opportunity to be heard.
And his message, on affordability or whatever else, will speak for itself.
Can Pearson win this year in “a Republican district?” Maybe, maybe not. As his predecessor in the old 9th, Steve Cohen, demonstrated every two years against this or that ballyhooed challenger from that district’s majority population, the numbers aren’t static; they don’t conform dumbly to demographics, they rise and fall according to the strength of the performer and the occasion.
Even a closer than expected second-place finish can resonate beyond itself, Think only Lincoln-Douglas 1858.

And, just as a rising tide lifts all boats, so might an excitingly competitive contest in the 9th inflate Democratic hopes in the other key races.
The upset defeat of the GOP’s severely tarnished Andy Ogles by the unblemished if unspectacular Hatcher diminishes Democratic hopes in the 5th somewhat, But Molder, whose fundraising and campaign mechanics have both been sound, remains competitive.
On grounds of relative solvency alone, candidates Kuhn and Green would seem to be up against it vis-a-vis the truly formidable operations of, respectively, Kustoff and Blackburn, but both Democrats are energetic and attractive candidates who proceed from a Shelby County base — it may not be the monolith of the Crump era, but it’s still “Big Shelby” from the standpoint of exposure,and relative voter weight, and Kuhn’s district contains more of it than either of the other two new congressional districts. Both Democrats are well placed to benefit from a general boost of party fortunes.

The form sheet still favors the Republicans overall, but the irony of the GOP’s redistricting is that it forces the Democrats to build a ground game in rural areas they have neglected in recent years.
It’s a question of sooner or later, and the pyrotechnics of the 9th, all by itself, could expedite things.

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It is newsworthy when a politician issues a slur against an opponent in an ongoing political race. The problem is how to report the slur without passing it on.

This is true even when the subject of the slur is somewhat fast and loose himself with invectives against adversaries.

To wit: Brent Taylor, the Republican state Senator whose descriptors against political rivals are sometimes borderline in their implications and sometimes way over the border.

Taylor, a candidate this year both for the newly-reshaped District 9 congressional seat and for reelection to his legislative seat,, recently published on Facebook several photos and videos from his current campaign tour of the 9th District.

One of these showed Taylor and Luke Cymbal, his driver and traveling companion, returning to their car after an event on the road. Cymbal, the former vice chair of the Shelby County Republicans, is a well-known party activist who frequently serves as a spokesperson for GOP candidates and causes.

This post became the occasion for an attack, also on Facebook, by a declared opponent for the GOP nomination for the seat, one Charlotte Bergman, a veteran Republican and a perennial candidate for the District 9 congressional seat, both in its previous configuration and its current one.

Bergman is s an African American who advertises that fact to suggest herself as a way of restoring the potential for Black representation presumably lost with the GOP’s recent redistricting.

Not exactly the most astute analysis, given the meager Republican proclivities among Blacks in the newly formed district. But a gem of straight thinking compared to the text of her attack post, which is virtually guaranteed to make her persona non grata with her would-be constituency.

Verbatim: “Brent Taylor, who’s is this person you are getting in he car with? Was this :Luke Cymbal (He/She) seen leaving the KWAM debate last might. . . .?”

In case anyone misses her point, Bergman followed that up in short order with another post, showing a facsimile of a marriage license enabling matrimony between Cymbal and his partner of record. Theirs is a same-sex marriage — a type of union recognized in 39 countries and by the U.S Supreme Court.

Thouigh same-sex unions in our time are fully sanctioned, it is clear enough that Bergman’s attitude was not one of acceptance or of simple fact. She means to present Cymbal’s personal circumstances and opponent Taylor’s relationship with him as the stuff of outrageous scandal

Her post was a slur and one recognized as such by numerous angry respondents, to whom Bergman, defensively. offered this expiatory explanation: “The Democrats definitely know. They will use it in the general election.”

No, Charlotte, they won’t. You have this one all to yourself, and the feedback you are getting from it should be a clear indication that you have miscalculated, and that you have crossed a line, to the detriment of your own reputation, which up to this point has accorded you a minor place in the political firmament but a generally respected one.

Remedial action, beginning with a cessation of further charges and a no-holds-barred apology, is in order.

.

The Republican primary contest for Governor of Tennessee has taken some genuinely strange turns.
The two major candidates — Congressman John Rose and Senator Marsha Blaclburn — have certainly been inventive in their identification of political evils.
Surely no one — no Republican,anyhow — had previously thought of Starbucks as being especially villainous, but the Congressman, in a TV ad, exercised remarkable venom and energy against the chain’s stated intent to locate a headquarters in the state — dashing a cup of coffee — wickedly and visibly black, to be sure — into a trash can as he deplored the corrupting potential of the Starbucks DEI policy.

Not to be outdone, Blackburn in several commercials has demonstrated her own ability to, er, break new ground —redefining the notion of a yellow peril by railing against the ongoing menace of purchase of land in Tennessee by Chinese and personally vowing to personally “hunt down” any “Chinese Communist” brazen enough to do so.
A third GOP candidate, state Representative Monty Fritts, has so far been relatively slow off the mark, though,other inventive possibilities surely exist — a crusade against Irish potatoes, perhaps?

As he would put it later on, after he had formally suspended his campaign, “I had been looking for yellow-dog Democrats out there, and all I was discovering was yellow-dog Republicans.”

Kyle was not wrong. Famously, the voters, a dependable support of Democrats for generations, would in 2010 return a hefty Republican majority in both legislative chambers, building on the slim edges attained by the GOP two years earlier, when Republicans had gained a one-vote majority in the state House,to go with what was already their slim margin in the Senate.

That 2008 outcome was explained away by many Democrats at the time as the result of an untimely visit by Republican presidential candidate John NcCain to nearby Bristol, Virginia, in the waning days of the 2008 campaign. The idea was that enough media attention had bled over the state line to cause a narrow upset win by Republican Tony Shipley over Democratic incumbent Nathan Vaughn in state House District 2, a border area.

If the 2010 Republican victories had not sufficiently undermined that convenient explanation, it would be conclusively dispelled by the overwhelming GOP margins of the 2014

legislative races, which created a Republican supermajority in both chambers, one that endures to this day.

The ironic — and unflattering — truth seems to be that voters in Tennessee, for so long a bellwether state capable of swinging in either party’s direction, had followed the rest of the South in going over altogether to the Republicans, and the primary motive seemed likely to have been connected to race — specifically, the election in 2008 of an African-American president, Barack Obama, an event that, among other things, refocused the image of the Democratic Party.

There were other factors as well — notably the adoption by the national Democratic Party of various social positions. Pro-choice on abortion back in the day, along with significant amelioration in LGBTQ-related matters. Progressive as all of this was, it was not paralleled by equally significant actions in the economic sphere — the kind of imbalance framed by the late philosopher Herbert Marcuse as “repressive desublimation,” (The recent electoral successes of Democratic Socialists might be seen as something of a corrective reaction.)

In any case, it is what it is, and substantial alienation — if not an actual divorce — has transpired between the Democratic Party and rank-and-file Tennesseans, to the point that, as Ripley Mayor Craig Fitzhugh recently noted about his West Tennessee bailiwick, Republicans are now numerous and diverse enough to make party primaries necessary in rural areas.

Fitzhugh, a former Democratic lion of the legislature, made that observation at a fundraiser in Memphis for his son-in-law, Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder, now vying for the Democratic nomination in the freshly gerrymandered 5th district.

As it happens, Molder is generally conceded to have the best prospects for election of any of the Democrats running in one of the gerrymandered districts containing portions of the city of Memphis.

His electoral victory in Columbia, like that of Fitzhugh’s in Ripley, was achieved in a constituency that had previously voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

Back in the mid-Twentieth Century, a call for “a two-party system” was one of the rationales advanced by Republicans to gain traction in what was then, ancestrally, a Democratic Solid South.

The same imperative can be said to exist again, this time in reverse,

The situation that concerns most people in these parts is that of the three newly configured congressional districts that have been peeled out of the old 9th district.
It may be too much to ask that the November outcomes all remain in doubt. The point pursued by Tennessee’s GOP legislative supermajority in their redistricting was to eliminate the prospect of a Democrat, even a single one, in the state’s congressional delegation, and the demographics in all three cases — the 5th, the 8th, and the revamped 9th — are such as to maximize that goal of supposedly reliable Republican majorities in all three cases.

Even so, Democrats are making an effort in all three, and their efforts are not to be discounted.
Granted, the winner of the Democratic primary is unlikely to prevail in the new 9th,which hugs the state line in the south rather than the Mississippi River in the west. That rural land mass seems ever so clearly to have been expressly designed to suit the conspicuous ambitions of the GOP’s reigning demagogue, state Senator Brent Taylor — especially obvious since the northern limits of the district seem to have been almost unnaturally zig-zagged so as to incorporate Taylor’s mansion up in Eads.

The Democratic field features a mano-a-mano between two of the party’s leading lights — legislators Justin Pearson and London Lamar. Lamar, an up-and-coming state senator, has accomplished more in her chamber than state Representative Pearson has in his, but his moment in the limelight, a protest in favor of gun-safety legislation, was energetic enough to get him temporarily expelled from the General Assembly while gaining him quasi-heroic status as well as national celebrity — and beaucoup financial backing.
He surely knows that, if nominated, his chances of prevailing in the general are minimal, especially as compared to the fair chance he had of prevailing against incumbent Democrat Steve Cohen in the now defunct Democratic 9th.
So why does he run?
Perhaps it is to keep his name in circulation — or his ability to keep raising funds. Perhaps (to give him the benefit of the doubt) it is because he strongly believes in the issues that motivate him, and he needs to keep giving them voice. Perhaps it is a mere question of staying in practice, the way a competitive runner is compelled to keep hitting the track.

And Lamar? Her career path is well-established. Ditto her bona fides. Though she is widely considered the underdog in the duel with Pearson,she has garnered more establishment endorsements than he has, and this is her chance to cement her place in the political firmament with a win over him or even a strong showing.
Heidi Kuhn is similarly situated as a Democratic contender in the 8th District. Circumstances did not prove propitious for her recent Shelby County Mayor’s race, where she was crowded out by bigger

spenders, but she was a hard-working and innovative Criminal Court Clerk, and if she emerges from the current pack of largely unknown Democratic primary candidates, she will provide an interesting contrast to incumbent Republican David Kustoff in the general, where she’ll be out-spent again and up against his well-established incumbency.
By general consensus, Democrats have their best chance of prevailing in the 5th District, where their likely nominee is Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder, previously dealt with in this space. Well-known in his Middle Tennessee base, where his candidacy has been active for upwards of a year, Molder has prior connections as well in the western part of the district — notably in Shelby County and Lauderdale County.
Molder has the kind of youthful dynamism and all-around appeal that will play well in a contest with the GOP’s Andy Ogles, whose troubled ethical history and eccentric positions (a crusade against homosexuals??) may prove too much even for devoted MAGAites.
This has just been a once-over. More about all of this anon.

Slowly (and. paradoxically, at blinding speed as I follow the nonstop action) I am beginning to get it. Yes, there are longish intervals between scores, but there are in life as well, now, aren’t there? Truly, the effort seems to be its own reward .

if and when I get my computer fixed ( this is being written on my phone). I’ll dilate further.

The very notion that the game — and its peculiar set of rules — has drawn the enthusiastic participation of all mankind is inspiring in and of itself

Chaz Molder in Memphis. May 22, 2026

Mayor Chaz Molder of Columbia, speaking in Memphis on Friday, made a compelling case that the Republican legislative supermajority may have outwitted itself when it redistricted Memphis into three reconfigured congressional districts.

Molder, who seeks the Democratic nomination in the newly contoured 5th District was already running in the 5th before it was shifted westward to incorporate significant portions of Memphis — the entire riverfront and numerous of the city’s landmark areas,, including Handy Park, where he met the press, and the Rendezvous restaurant where he addressed a sizeable group of supporters

Molder is no stranger to town. As he noted at the Rendezvous, “After my wife and I got married, we came to Memphis to live here and go to law school, and when I look back on my life . . , the three years that I spent in Memphis, Tennessee, on Linden Avenue in Midtown were three of the most formative years. . . . I never thought that I would have the opportunity to represent this city on a stage such as this.”

Molder was a resident of Memphis during one of the city’s most exciting — and painful — moments, when ihe University of Memphis basketballers challenged, and fell just short , in a quest for the NCAA national title in 2008. He was in the arena for the heartbreaking overtime loss to Kansas and still regrets that the Tigers didn’t foul on purpose to prevent the three-point shot that tied the game and forced it into overtime.

One thing hasn’t changed in Molder’s candidacy for District 5. He is still on a mission to oust the controversial GOP incumbent, Andy Ogles, a MAGAphile who, as Molder noted, “has been under federal investigation his entire congressional career, who stole money from a children’s memorial garden, who has lied about his resume. . . . . When I launched my campaign in September, I made a promise to the fifth congressional district that I was going to go fight for them, and I was going to put Andy Ogles out of office. “

Molder’s campaign is no small-time affair. He has already raised some $2 million and claims significant connections in parts of the district where Democrats have been starving for a champion to revive the party;s lost glory. Like Lauderdale County, home of his father-in-law, Ripley mayor and former influential legislator Craig Fitzhugh.

Touting his own mayoral credentials, Molder said,”You might wonder, how does a guy get elected mayor of a community that elects Donald Trump with 54 percent of the vote? Truly, we live in a very rural, conservative area of Columbia, Middle Tennessee, but we won because we talk about issues that are important to people.. . . .When the legislature did what they did, they didn’t realize that they were drawing a district in a lot of ways that was made for a guy like me.”

Recognizing the resentment in Memphis over the redistricting and the “bad rap” the city gets from its critics, Molder vows to give Memphis “the last laugh.”

And, based on the animated feedback Molder got from the attendees at his Memphis events, he has a local audience that seems ready for just that.

“They don/t like me [pause] but they hate Justin Pearson!” That comment by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen late in what amounted to his farewell press conference on Friday stands out as a commentary, not only of his feelings, but about the topsy-turvy status

of Tennessee’s redrawn political calendar.

By ‘they“ Cohen meant the state’s Republicans, who, having managed to scuttle the contours pf what had long been a Memphis-based and Democratic-dominated congressional seat, had presumably rid themselves of one political foe. Cohen. but, weirdly still faced another, Pearson.

It is surely no surprise that Cohen chose to bid adieu from his long and accomplished political career, having found himself ousted from his accustomed constituency and forced to run or not run in one of three newly created districts, all of which seemed clearly to have substantial GOP majorities.

The surprise is that Pearson, who, like Cohen, lives in what is now the 5th Congressional District, would continue his candidacy in the new 9th District, which was so clearly designed by the Republican legislative supermajority to be the bailiwick of obstreperous GOP state Senator Brent Taylor.

What indeed are Pearson’s motives? To fight the good fight? To maintain his credentials in the old 9th in hopes of a judicial deus ex machine? To raise funds for another effort elsewhere down the line?

Whatever his reasoning, it is seemingly futile for him to continue running for Congress in the new rump 9th District, which is the most disproportionately Republican of the three new ones that involve Shelby County.

That was the fact that faced Cohen, and it faces Pearson in equal measure. It needs to be remembered that while, yes, the redrawing of district lines constituted a revival of Jim Crow, that particular ignominy is less the work of the legislature than it is of the Supreme Court. What the supermajority in Nashville set out to do was to legislate Republican district lines. No more, no less..If they had had a viable MAGA-style Black candidate in West Tennessee on the order of Byron Donalds in Florida, they would presumably have carved out a district that facilitated his candidacy. Charlotte Bergman, as dedicated to the local GOP as any white, who has been running perennially the old 9th should feel slighted.

Still, it is true, as Cohen said, that Republicans bear a special animus toward Justin Pearson, whose attitude toward them has been one of impassioned and unrelenting zeal. Cohen was otherwise, both as state Senator and Congressman. There was no purer exponent of Democracy or foe of authoritarianism, but, like such legislators as London Lamar (one of many local African-American officials who took Cohen’s part against challenger Pearson) he could work across the aisle and bring home the proverbial bacon.

Cohen spoke to his place in the scheme of things — and his city’s — in his leavetaking remarks on Friday, levying praise on both the Africam-American and the Caucasian populations of his vintage Memphis district. It is arguable, after all, that the veteran Congressman had, in his 10 previous undefeated elections been uniquely able to achieve the elusive political goal of post-racialism.

And he had every right to contend that the effect of the Republicans’ eleventh-hour redistricting efforts had been tp “beat me, to defeat me.” Not a specific race of people, really, but himself, the one outstanding example in all these years of political striving, of a voting pattern entirely free of racism. Cohen’s first congressional election, in 2006, had ben achieved through the serendipity of a racial split. He’d had the good fortune of being opposed by a rough dozen or so of name Black rivals in that race. And, predictably, they had gobbled up each others’ votes in such a way as to leave him ahead.

But ever since, Cohen had been opposed in his successive reelection campaign by a single, usually well-financed, usually well-known and handsomely heralded member of Memphis’ teeming supply of able African-American candidates. And he turned them all away, usually by enormous margins — perhaps the best example being a four-to-one primary thrashing in 2010 of Willie Herenton, the city’s first elected black Mayor, and an historical figure, no less, who that year was coming off his own unbeaten streak of five consecutive mayoral victories.

Before the Supreme Court lowered the boom on what was an ongoing 9th District showdown between incumbent Cohen and challenger Pearson, Cohen was generally being assessed as leading once more, helped out by a huge lead in accumulated iinancial resources, to be sure, but mainly on the strength of the veteran’s impressive record of service to both major components of his district’s home constituency.

Memphis was Cohen’s base, and the Congressman knew all parts of it well — its rich supply of music-makers, athletes, and other cultural figures well as the John and Mary Does of its working classes and the icons of its boardrooms.

In a way, the inevitable media ocus on the patent racial injustice of the redistricting process has served to obscure the meaning of Cohen’s career and his achievements.

And bully , for that matter, to Pearson’s determination to carry on in the unaccustomed buttermilk flats of the reconfigured 9th, only a thin sliver of which links to Memphis and to Shelby County. It would serve the Republicans right if the young African-American upstart does well enough there to embarrass both their greed and their contempt for. political tradition.

Responding to the Supreme Court’s decision in a Louisiana case, eliminating race as a criterion for establishing district lines, the well-watched showdown in the 9th between Democratic incumbent Steve Cohen and his primary challenger Justin J, Pearson is no more. In its place is a new 9th in which GOP firebrand Brent Taylor has staked out a claim.

That district, which formerly claimed the Mississippi River as its western boundary and contained much of urban Memphis along with parts of Tipton County, now hugs the southern state line of Tennessee almost all the way to Chattanooga.

Besides state Senator Taylor, whose domicile in Eads is hooked in to the north, the new race in the 9th has so far attracted another Republican, state Rep. Todd Warner of Chapel Hill. State Rep. Pearson has indicated he will continue to run as a Democrat in the 9th, though his residence, on Coro Lake, is now in the 5th district, which, as reconfigured, follows the Mississippi all the way northward to the Kentucky state line and extends into Middle Tennessee.

Another Democrat, state Senator London Lamar, has picked up a petition and may also run in the 9th. No word yet from Cohen , other than to say he awaits the result of an emergency suit to block the redistricting.

The 5th District, meanwhile, which used to encase all of Democratic Nashville until the state capital was carved up and absorbed by adjacent GOP districts after the last census, has a new set of contestants. Former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher will oppose incumbent Republican Andy Ogles.

Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder will run as a Democrat. Molder is the son-in-law of Ripley Mayor and influential former legislator Craig Fitzhugh of Lauderdale County, which has been redistricted into the 5th, Molder , coincidentally, is no stranger to Memphis, having recently been feted by Rendezvous owner John Vergos at a fundraiser here. Yolanda Cooper-Sutton, a member of the Memphis City Council, is another possible Democratic contestant.

Incumbent Republican David Kustoff in the 8th District faces numerous possible challengers, the most prominent of whom is Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn, a Democrat who recently ran for Shelby County Mayor.

Provisional deadline for filing in the three districts is this Friday.

The special legislative session transforming the structure of Tennessee’s nine congressional districts , including, crucially, Shelby County’s 9th District, is a done deal — though that fait accompli remains to be litigated in court.

Meanwhile, more redistricting may be in the offing. That’s according to Terry Roland, the former County Commissioner and Millington Chamber of Commerce head who has been a leading Republican figure in county politics for well more than a generation.

Roland, who twice headed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign efforts in Shelby County, is dedicated to the MAGA cause and to various other political efforts associated with it, and he foresees renewed redistricting efforts at the state electoral level.

“The next thing is, we’re going after the legislative district lines,” says Roland, evoking the redistricting prospect further, to the point of altering districts which are already top-heavy Republican enough to constitute a GOP super-majority.

But that’s not all, according to Roland, who says there will be serious efforts to revive an almost-forgotten concept of secession from Shelby County. Back in the early ‘90s, there had been such a movement in Shelby County’s suburban communities. The idea was to avoid a then threatened school consolidation by forming a new county.

The process, according to state law, would involve squeezing out at least 775 square miles from Shelby, taking care to leave at least 500 square miles in the rump county. That crisis expired without the secession taking place, but there were moments when it seemed dead serious.

The pretext now would be the simple fact that the current majority-Black [read Democratic] demographics of Shelby County preclude any serious competition for countywide control by Republicans.

The new county (perhaps to be called Neshoba after the first secession attempt) would be sufficiently GOP-dominant to amend that deficit. If the prospect seems far-fetched, so did congressional redistricting until last week. And does anybody doubt that the supermajority in Nashville would be open to the idea?

Not Marie Feagins’ supposedly bombshell mayoral candidacy. Not the putative fight to the finish between Mickell Lowery (who won in a walk) and JB Smiley. Not the supposedly epochal shift to a professional mayor’s office in Germantown.

All in all, the most recent election was a snoozer. No excitement, no tension, no surprises. Really, no dramas.

The most fraught situation on the year’s calendar

— the showdown between incumbent Steve Cohen and challenger

Justin Pearson in the Democratic primary for the erstwhile 9th congressional district — became a de facto cancellation, thanks to the Supreme Court.

Pearson is now making the rounds decrying his lost chance of victory when the fact is, he had yet to prove he could defeat the white incumbent he faced.. Most realistic estimates had him running behind.

Perhaps there is a sea change in all this. Batack Obama became the nation’s first black president by scoring strong with the country’s white constituencies. Ironically and tragically, though, the election of this fastidious moderate seemed to serve as a terminal sign to Democrats of the southern hinterland, who transferred their loyalty in state after state to the Republicans almost overnight.

If there is a silver lining in the Supreme Court’s Louisiana ruling,. and the purging of majority-black districts which it has generated, it may be the creation, in the old Confederacy and elsewhere, of a sea of antiseptically raceless congressional districts in which Democrats are free to contest for power with Republicans on a strict party-to-party basis, and in this new crucible, the Democrats of the South might regain the purchase on voter loyalty which they had seemed to have lost forever.

New Baracks to stir the soul and soar across the racial line. Or, to give him his due, more Steve Cohens to serve as credible and dependable surrocates for yearning and needy populations, regardless of race.

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G.A. Hardaway has been gone more than a week now, and, by the uncharacterustic grace of a state government that he was so often at odds with, got to lie in state at the Capitol.

I didn’t get up to see him there. Which is one regret; another is that on my last previous trip to Nashville, April of last year, I had been expected, at his request, to join him for lunch. And much as I wanted to, I was pretty much ruining on empty by the time I hit the state Capitol (essentially on a mission to see my daughter Julia, a reporter these days for the Tennessee Journal), I was preternaturally bushed and had to beg off.

What I have to remember G.A. by, other than his great good nature and his stout speeches on behalf of his constituency on the floor and elsewere, are the myriad of his online selfies made with people everywhere he went (I was happily in several) and a long trip home from Washington I made with him on the morrow of Barack Obama’s inauguration in Washington.

On that trip he had emphasized for really the umpteenth time his commitment to the somewhat orphaned and unfashionable issue if paternal rights. Divorced himself, he had no trouble making the case that fathers lacked equal justice in child custody matters. So intense were G.A,’s feeling on the issue that I had been concerned he would end up afoul of the highly active feminist lobby.

But he avoided any trace of patriarchal chauvinism and threaded his concerns artfully into a weave that incorporated women’s issues so well that his good faith could not be questioned.

On this trip I would get to witness his conviction first-hand.We stopped off at Brownsville, where his son — G.A. Hardaway, Jr, — was living with his mother. The two were allowed some time together, and I could see with my own eyes how real and how serious was the mutual affection between father and son and how personal and serious G.A.’s feelings were on the question

Yet he was no one-issue lawmaker. He continued to pursue legislation providing fairness to fathers in custody cases, but he pushed for fairness in every species of legislation for his entire constituency, I never heard of any pushback from my several friends for whom women’s issues are paramount. He was a tireless civil rights champion and civil libertarian to beat the band. He was a sweet guy, dedicated to all the things you’d want a lawmaker to be. His passing was lamented by all, across the aisle. Across all aisles.

Blackburn’s call for a special session, in line with the current national redistricting competition between the parties, is based on the Supreme Court’s ruling in a Louisiana case that appears to strike down requirements for racial quotas, such as those that make the 9th District majority-black.

And Blackburn’s current standing as a presumptive winner of this year’s Governor’s race is bound to be persuasive to GOP Governor Bill Lee — not to mention the Republican legislative supermajority that has already redistricted Memphis’ 9th District once in recent years and, even more recently, carved up Nashville’s longtime Democratic 5th District, apportioning the pieces to adjoining GOP-dominated districts. Net result: one less Democratic congressional district in Tennessee.

To obtain the same result in the Memphis area, and , in particular, in the 9th District, currently represented by Democrat Steve Cohen, would be difficult, on account of the large African-American population — monolithically Democratic — it contains. Almost certainly, the adjoining 8th District, represented by Republican David Kustoff, would have to shed some of its rural GOP population, though obviously not enougn to weaken the GOP hold on that district.

In any case, the contours of the 9th District would change, and there would have to be other adjustments, such as new filing deadlines for members of both political parties , The ongoing Cohen-Justin Pearson Showdown might not survive the revised situation.

As I wrote last year in the Memphis Flyer (“The Supremes Versus the 9th,” November 19, 20250, all of this was foreseen by Cohen, who, aware of the then pending Louisiana case, foresaw such consequences as those that now seem imminent.

The high-profile races are, as usual those for County Mayor and Sheriff and County Mayor, and not much has happened to alter the assumptions and probabilities with which those contests began. Most of the action resides with the Democratic races for the simple and obvious reason that Shelby County has a majority-Black population, and the slant of its electorate in countywide races is accordingly and demonstrably Democratic.

COUNTY MAYOR

The Democratic field is a somewhat evenly contested affair, with several name candidates vying, though most estimates consider the co-leaders to be City Councilman JP Smiley and County Commissioner Mickell Lowery, each of whom has raised considerable sums of money and has deployed it tellingly, most recently in well-placed television ads. Not to be discounted, either, are Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn and County Assessor Melvin Burgess. County CAO Harold Collins has name recognition, as well. The outlier here is one Rusty Qualls., who has struggled to become better known and trails in resources, as well.

A special case is that of former Memphis/Shelby County schools superintendent Marie Feagins, who is, in every sense of the term, the wild card. Feagins owes her chances, which some rate as considerable (and no one knows exactly how to calibrate) to the extraordinary public fervor, pro and con, which attended her tumultuous and brief reign as superintendent, from which she was summarily fired by the MSCC Board. Bizarrely, she has pockets of support across the ideological landscape.

There is one candidate in the Republican primary, as well — former Democratic legislator John DeBerry, whose conservative views on social issues cost him his Democratic bona fides and who has served in recent years as an aide to GOP Governor Bill Lee.

SHERIFF

The race for Sheriff began with current Chief Deputy Anthony Buckner the favorite, in the Democratic field, and so he remains, by most if the usual measures, specifically including that of his fundraising, which has far surpassed those of his party rivals, who include:

Reginald Hubbard
Ricky Pollard
Michael D.Pope
Keisha Scott

Longtime legislator and former Democrat John DrBerry is running as a Republican.

There are two candidates competing for Sheriff in the Republican primary. They are:

Brad Less
Marco Yzsguirre

Some of the most coveted jobs available in county elections are the several

clerkships and county department heads. In theory these jobs are apolitical., requiring only the faithful oversight of this or that applied branch of county government, but people involved in politics — especially veterans who have toiled in it for years— see a clerkship as the end of all their striving. The awkward fact is that , for many such seekers, a clerkship is something of a sinecure, The concept of a clerk who plays golf while his CAO keeps the department running is not just a fiction. It has happened often enough in reality.
This is not to say that there aren’t elected clerks .who work hard at the job and deal conscientiously and successfully with its needs and complications. There are many of those es well, and this year’s mayor’s race has two such well-credentialed officials – Assessor Melvin Burgess and Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn. And the season’s clerk races have attracted a good supply of experienced and well-credentialed candidates — some from other avenues pf government, some from the private sector, and some seeking promotion from within the ranks of the departments themselves.

With no further ado:

COUNTY CLERK. (Democratic Primary(

Myra Charles
James “Jeff” Fuller
Arielle Gipson-Martin
Bob Green

LaSonya Hall
Ed Holt Jr.
Bennie Smith
William Stovall
George “Dempsey” Summers

Britney Thornton
Michael R. Williams

Clearly, there are several well-known figures in this list. LaSonya Hall

Has held prominent positions in county government< Bennie Smith is an Election Commission vet, Michael Williams is a former Police Association head and former mayoral candidate. And Britney Thornton, newly controversial because of her vote to scuttle a County Commission-funded suit agent the pending school takeover. Has good name recognition as a Commission member.

PROBATE CLERK

William Chism Jr.

Eddie Jones

Eddie Jones, the incumbent, is in good shape to repeat/

CIRCUIT COURT CLERK

Janita E. Swearengen

This incumbent wins without an opponent.

CRIMINAL COURT CLERK
Rheunta E. Benson
Lawrence Denton Jr.
Wanda Halbert
Carla Stotts
Joe Towns Jr.

Wanda Halbert, much vilified during her two terms as County Clerk. Still hasenough name recognition and support to do qwll here, but both Stotts and longtime legislator Towns can say the same.

JUVENILE COURT CLERK
Janeen Gordon

Kenny Lee
Patrice Minner

Incumbent Gordon is heavily favored/

REGISTER OF DEEDS
Willie Brooks
Shelandra Ford

This rematch should see iBrooks repeating his win over then incumbent Ford in the previous county election.

ASSESSOR OF PROPERTY
Javier Bailey
Michael O. Harris

Daryl Lewis

Sonya N. Murphy

Bailey, the current CAO in the Assessor’s office, is ;likely to out-point the hard-working Hattis, but we’ll see.

COUNTY TRUSTEE
Marion Latroy A-Williams
Joseph Lee III
Alexander Perkins

Michael Whaley

Lee is well remembered. For better or for worse, on the basis of former service as MLGW head. Whaley is a well-respected educational entrepreneuir and former County Commission budget chair. Toss-up.T

here are REPUBLICAN candidates as well, though , for obvious demographc reasons, their chances are remote.

SHERIFF

Brad Lee
Marco zagyurre

COUNTY CLERK

Tina MontgomerySome of the most coveted jobs available in county elections are the several

clerkships and county department heads. In theory these jobs are apolitical., requiring only the faithful oversight of this or that applied branch of county government, but people involved in politics — especially veterans who have toiled in it for years— see a clerkship as the end of all their striving. The awkward fact is that , for many such seekers, a clerkship is something of a sinecure, The concept of a clerk who plays golf while his CAO keeps the department running is not just a fiction. It has happened often enough in reality.
This is not to say that there aren’t elected clerks .who work hard at the job and deal conscientiously and successfully with its needs and complications. There are many of those es well, and this year’s mayor’s race has two such well-credentialed officials – Assessor Melvin Burgess and Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn. And the season’s clerk races have attracted a good supply of experienced and well-credentialed candidates — some from other avenues pf government, some from the private sector, and some seeking promotion from within the ranks of the departments themselves.

With no further ado:

COUNTY CLERK. (Democratic Primary(

Myra Charles
James “Jeff” Fuller
Arielle Gipson-Martin
Bob Green

LaSonya Hall
Ed Holt Jr.
Bennie Smith
William Stovall
George “Dempsey” Summers

Britney Thornton
Michael R. Williams

Clearly, there are several well-known figures in this list. LaSonya Hall

Has held prominent positions in county government< Bennie Smith is an Election Commission vet, Michael Williams is a former Police Association head and former mayoral candidate. And Britney Thornton, newly controversial because of her vote to scuttle a County Commission-funded suit agent the pending school takeover. Has good name recognition as a Commission member.

PROBATE CLERK

William Chism Jr.

Eddie Jones

Eddie Jones, the incumbent, is in good shape to repeat/

CIRCUIT COURT CLERK

Janita E. Swearengen

This incumbent wins without an opponent.

CRIMINAL COURT CLERK
Rheunta E. Benson
Lawrence Denton Jr.
Wanda Halbert
Carla Stotts
Joe Towns Jr.

Wanda Halbert, much vilified during her two terms as County Clerk. Still hasenough name recognition and support to do qwll here, but both Stotts and longtime legislator Towns can say the same.

JUVENILE COURT CLERK
Janeen Gordon

Kenny Lee
Patrice Minner

Incumbent Gordon is heavily favored/

REGISTER OF DEEDS
Willie Brooks
Shelandra Ford

This rematch should see iBrooks repeating his win over then incumbent Ford in the previous county election.

ASSESSOR OF PROPERTY
Javier Bailey
Michael O. Harris

Daryl Lewis

Sonya N. Murphy

Bailey, the current CAO in the Assessor’s office, is ;likely to out-point the hard-working Hattis, but we’ll see.

COUNTY TRUSTEE
Marion Latroy A-Williams
Joseph Lee III
Alexander Perkins

Michael Whaley

Lee is well remembered. For better or for worse, on the basis of former service as MLGW head. Whaley is a well-respected educational entrepreneuir and former County Commission budget chair. Toss-up.T

here are REPUBLICAN candidates as well, though , for obvious demographc reasons, their chances are remote.

SHERIFF

Brad Lee
Marco zagyurre

COUNTY CLERK

Tina MontgomerySome of the most coveted jobs available in county elections are the several

clerkships and county department heads. In theory these jobs are apolitical., requiring only the faithful oversight of this or that applied branch of county government, but people involved in politics — especially veterans who have toiled in it for years— see a clerkship as the end of all their striving. The awkward fact is that , for many such seekers, a clerkship is something of a sinecure, The concept of a clerk who plays golf while his CAO keeps the department running is not just a fiction. It has happened often enough in reality.
This is not to say that there aren’t elected clerks .who work hard at the job and deal conscientiously and successfully with its needs and complications. There are many of those es well, and this year’s mayor’s race has two such well-credentialed officials – Assessor Melvin Burgess and Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn. And the season’s clerk races have attracted a good supply of experienced and well-credentialed candidates — some from other avenues pf government, some from the private sector, and some seeking promotion from within the ranks of the departments themselves.

With no further ado:

COUNTY CLERK. (Democratic Primary(

Myra Charles
James “Jeff” Fuller
Arielle Gipson-Martin
Bob Green

LaSonya Hall
Ed Holt Jr.
Bennie Smith
William Stovall
George “Dempsey” Summers

Britney Thornton
Michael R. Williams

Tina Monrtgomery is running as a REPUBLICAN..

Clearly, there are several well-known figures in this list. LaSonya Hall Has held prominent positions in county government< Bennie Smith is an Election Commission vet, Michael Williams is a former Police Association head and former mayoral candidate. And Britney Thornton, newly controversial because of her vote to scuttle a County Commission-funded suit agent the pending school takeover. Has good name recognition as a Commission member.

PROBATE CLERK

William Chism Jr.

Eddie Jones

Eddie Jones, the incumbent, is in good shape to repeat/

CIRCUIT COURT CLERK

Janita E. Swearengen

This incumbent wins without an opponent.

CRIMINAL COURT CLERK
Rheunta E. Benson
Lawrence Denton Jr.
Wanda Halbert
Carla Stotts
Joe Towns Jr.

Wanda Halbert, much vilified during her two terms as County Clerk. Still hasenough name recognition and support to do qwll here, but both Stotts and longtime legislator Towns can say the same.

JUVENILE COURT CLERK
Janeen Gordon

Kenny Lee
Patrice Minner

Incumbent Gordon is heavily favored/

REGISTER OF DEEDS
Willie Brooks
Shelandra Ford

This rematch should see iBrooks repeating his win over then incumbent Ford in the previous county election.

ASSESSOR OF PROPERTY
Javier Bailey
Michael O. Harris

Daryl Lewis

Sonya N. Murphy

Bailey, the current CAO in the Assessor’s office, is ;likely to out-point the hard-working Hattis, but we’ll see.

COUNTY TRUSTEE
Marion Latroy A-Williams
Joseph Lee III
Alexander Perkins

Michael Whaley

Lee is well remembered. For better or for worse, on the basis of former service as MLGW head. Whaley is a well-respected educational entrepreneuir and former County Commission budget chair. Toss-up.T

SHERIFF

Brad Lee
Marco zagyurre

Tina Montgomerynew posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Many lessons here: Among them, the sheer speed of the formation of consensus, in the media and elsewhere. And the durability of the “Me Too” momeent in feminist consciousness , thanks in large part to the ever-increasing stain of Jeffrey Epstein.

Another apercu of the national moment:

What is Iran but Instant Vietnam?— complete with mounting troop involvement, light-at-the-end-pf-the-tunnel-ism; e’re winning all the battles, blowing up everythphenomenal expemditures; spiraling domestic discontent; etc; etc.Wing.. ..why won’t the rascals concede?

Whether or not the audit conducted on state authority (and taxpayer expense) has revealed enough fraud and waste to justify the pending MSCS takeover bil, the point is that it’s literally half-baked.

It’s not even that. It is, by actual measure, only 25 percemt complete, and the stats it has generated are, at the very least, ambivalent enough to warrant caution in taking any extreme and irreversible measures.
In any case, the matter has has been dropped onto the public plate. It has become an issue in the County Mayor’s race, with Mickell Lowery, acknowledged to be one of the leading candidates, approaching the simmering issue with clear distaste.
In a Facebook post, Lowery says of the takeover prospect, “The state already tried this. The Achievement School District took over 30 Memphis schools in 2012. . . .“
The state, he notes, “promised to move them from the bottom 5% to the top 25%. Spent over a billion dollars. Brown University research found it didn’t improve test scores and actually made some worse. The legislature voted to shut it down last year because everyone, Republicans included, admitted it failed. They failed our kids once. Now they want Round Two..” . .

“Meanwhile, MSCS students are outpacing the state average in academic growth in reading and math.. . That progress was built here, by our teachers, our families, and our community.The ‘party of small government’ believes in local control right up until a majority-Black, majority-Democratic county makes decisions they don’t agree with. The federal government is already overreaching into our daily lives. Now Nashville wants in .too.”
Lowery takes a thrust at one of his mayoral-race opponent, Marie Feagins, whom he doesn’t; name directly:
“Let me be clear about what’s happening. Republican lawmakers in Nashville spent $6 million of your tax dollars for a forensic audit of Shelby County schools, not because anyone found wrongdoing. Because our elected School Boardv fired a superintendent with a record of dishonesty whonwas playing into the GOP’s hands. That same superintendent is now running for Shelby County mayor. Connect the dots.”
For her part, Feagins, whose mayoral campaign mainly consists of her well-tendered image of heroine and martyr, has a display ad out showing her in a poised and smiling sitting position next to a Merriam Webster definition of the word “ubderdog.”
What is it they say about sleeping dogs? With two weeks to go until early voting, this one could wake with a ravenous roar if the schools issue flares up big-time in her favor. Or subside into a yelp if it doesn’t.
The legislature has something of a amen corner locally (one prominent member being the Rev. Kenneth Whalum, a former School Board member himself and, to stay with the canine metaphor, a watchdog and perdsistent critic of school management).
But public opinion on the subject is not only fickle, it id hard to gauge.
Although Lowery is the only mayoral candidate so far to take on the takeover issue with force, many opponents of the takeover, most of them active Democrats, are busy making a case against the bill. To sum things up, their argument goes as follows:
The GOP spnsors if the school takeover base their position pn a claim that the audit so far shows a pattern of ‘wastelfuk or abusive” spending by MSCS.

But, say the opponents of the pending legidlation, the incomplete audit , only 25 percent done, reckons such mismanagement as something like 0.02 percent of the annual MSCS budget. Assuming that the 25-percent’ findings are a representative sample, then that extrapolates to 0.08 of the total budget,
Meanwhile, the American Institute of CPAs considers an organization materially guilty of waste it it exceeds the range of 0.5 percent of their total budget. The financial indiscretions of MSCS disclosed so far are well under that definition by an otder of magnitude.
The voters may not be inclined to parse the numbers so carefully.. a;though they should take notes that the statei s spending $6 million to document a $3 million matter. And, anyhow, the voters may be out of the picture.
The GOPll egislature’s supermajority may, by election time, have served them up a meal that, by strict definition, is a Nothingburger — but one that could stick in the public craw for time to come.