In 2018, Marsha Blackburn beat Phil Bredesen 1,227,483 to 985,450. Republicans predict an even more lopsided outcome in 2024.
Because how can a Knoxville schoolteacher who’s never been elected to anything but a House seat in the Tennessee General Assembly hope to outperform a two-term governor/ former Nashville mayor/self-made millionaire who’d carried all 95 counties in his most recent race?
With all due respect to the brilliant and accomplished former governor, the difference is this: Gloria Johnson is a different kind of officeholder. She watches. She learns. She inspires. She infuriates the majority party into assigning her to a closet-sized office, refusing to allow her to speak, ridiculing her, redrawing her district and putting her on trial. She perseveres. She connects.
She’s also had to deal with some big health challenges, but the energy I used to see in her Central High School classroom is still flowing. And more kids who have grown up doing active shooter drills are turning 18 every year – if anybody can inspire them to get to the polls, it’s Gloria Johnson.
She will face a primary challenge, which she will take seriously, whereas all Bredesen had to do to clear the field was announce that he was going to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by incumbent Bob Corker (who’d had a bellyful of Donald Trump and was probably going to get primaried anyhow).
Early on, the former governor led Republican contender Blackburn, a member of Congress and a strong Trump supporter, by as much as 10 points. But the race had started tightening by mid-July when Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his intention to retire, and then, in one of those Black Swan events that cannot be predicted, went sideways in September during Senate confirmation hearings for Trump’s nominee Brett Kavanaugh. A California psychology professor who had known him in high school accused him of sexually assaulting her when they were both teenagers, and Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony infuriated Republicans. The fallout affected the Tennessee senate race.
Bredesen attempted to calm the situation by announcing that he would have voted to confirm Kavanaugh if he’d been a member of the Judiciary Committee.
Bad answer. Not only did he fail to slow the backlash, but Blackburn, an accomplished rabble-rouser from her anti-state income tax movement days, had already chummed the waters by tying him to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. So now he sounded like a spineless wuss.
This gravely disappointed his campaign volunteers, many of whom found it impossible to maintain any enthusiasm for his candidacy. The cool, deliberative style that had served him so well in less contentious times was no match for Blackburn’s red-hot demagoguery. Supporters gave up on him and deep-pocketed interest groups canceled ad buys. His campaign circled the drain, and the Big-hair, Don’t Care Mississippi State home ec major beat the crap out of the thoughtful, low-key Harvard scholarship boy.
These tactics won’t work against Johnson, who has had her head stove in enough times to know how to weather attacks. She has enthusiastic volunteers from Newport to Nutbush who are ready to work. Look for members of anti-gun violence groups, who have multiplied in number since the Covenant School murders, to campaign hard for her.
Blackburn, who is notorious for ducking public debate, has never been effectively called to account for opposing price controls on insulin or for protecting the interests of opioid distributors and gun dealers and inhumane animal trainers or for taking credit for popular measures like broadband expansion that she never supported. These issues were around in 2018, but were never effectively examined. Over the coming year, we’ll see how they look in the light of day.
And however this campaign shakes out, Gloria Johnson won’t cut and run.
Betty Bean writes a Thursday opinion column for KnoxTNToday.com.