The reminders came in the forms of a knock on the front door and a text message: The Aug. 1 statewide primary election is approaching and fast.
I try not to think about the big election in November. Otherwise, I get depressed and start to speculate about what distant locale might be a good place to spend the next four years. Oaxaca has a certain appeal, and I could brush up on my college Spanish. ¡Que bueno!
But the reminders came from candidates for Congress, which got me wondering: How many Democrats are running for the nine seats allotted to Tennessee? The answer was somewhat encouraging: 19, if my math skills haven’t totally deserted me, along with my hair and 32-inch waist.
Since legislative Republicans legally stole the 5th District a couple of years ago, I tend to think of Democratic congressional candidates in Tennessee as cannon fodder, brave avatars of political sanity destined to be proclaimed losers roughly 12 minutes after the polls close.
The lone exception has been Steve Cohen in the still-safely Blue 9th District around Memphis.
But three hopefuls have signed on for the chance to challenge the Republican incumbent, John Rose, in my newish district. I know very little about Rose, except that he apparently recruited his wife from a high school Future Farmers of America convention when she was 17 and he was 41. (Google it.)
Maybe the multiple Democrats running indicate a perceived weakness in Rose’s power of incumbency. If so, there’s even more perceived in the Eighth District, where five Democrats are competing to run against the Republican incumbent, David Kustoff.
Considering that Kustoff won reelection in 2022 with 74% of the vote, I’m not sure where that optimism would be coming from. Have the 8th District voter rolls been overrun by tens of thousands of blue state émigrés eager to live the good life in Bartlett or Dyersburg? Seems unlikely.
The other districts with multiple Democrats in the primary include the First, with two vying to take on the Republican incumbent, Diana Harshbarger, and the aforementioned Ninth, where three people are challenging Cohen. Cohen had opposition in the Democratic primaries in 2020 and 2022, as well, and won 84% and 88% of the vote, respectively, so I’m not sure what might be fueling challenger optimism this go-round.
The 7th District has only one Democrat in the running against Mark Green, but I will pay attention to it because of who that one Democrat is: Megan Barry. She seems to think that embarrassing herself as mayor is somehow the ticket to higher office. I suspect it isn’t.
The most interesting race is in the rejiggered 5th District, my former home. It has nothing to do with the one Democrat in the running, Maryam Abolfazli. She might be fabulous, but thanks to the creative redrawing of the district lines she has an only slightly better chance of winning than I do.
No, what interests me about the race is the Republican Courtney Johnston, a Metro Council member who is running against the first-term incumbent, Andy Ogles. Ogles has distinguished himself so far chiefly by inflating his resume with bogus claims and sponsoring nonsense legislation like the Go Woke, Go Broke Act and the No Juicing Joe Act, aimed against you-know-who.
Thus the Republican primary amounts to an IQ test for 7th District voters. I’m reminded of the old saying: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
I can vote only in my district, of course, so to help sort out the three Democratic contenders I went to the website for Ballotpedia, which includes answers from candidates to various questions they self-select. If you lean Blue – and if you’ve read this far, I figure you might – I suggest you do the same. For me, it led to a decision to pull the lever for the same guy who knocked on my front door.
You can also read the responses from various Independents in the races, if only for entertainment value. I’m a bit intrigued by a candidate listed as a write-in for the 1st District, Wisdom Zerit Teklay. He purports to represent the Wisdom People Party, of which he is the leader and, perhaps, only member.
Teklay didn’t fill out the Ballotpedia questionnaire for 2024, but did in 2023, when he ran for – something. I’m not sure. He had this to say then about himself: “With my innate brilliance, I stand in a league of my own, making me the wisest man to have ever graced this earth, second only to the divine Himself.”
He is also apparently running for president. I know of a worse candidate.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected]