In November of 1998, I was celebrating the end of a successful campaign season. The year before, I abruptly quit my job and started a business as a general and direct mail consultant.
Two rumors had begun to circulate in Republican circles. The first was that Governor Don Sundquist, elected to his second and final term, would introduce a major tax proposal to address the state’s declining revenue conundrum. The second was that the Governor’s brash, young aide, Chip Saltman, would be tapped to become the Chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party (TRP).
For a “true believer” like I was at the time, a tax increase was the antithesis of GOP dogma, and the anointing of Saltsman was strategic to prevent an all-out grassroots revolt. Sundquist first proposed a gross receipts tax that the business community squashed before the ink dried. Then he eventually broke his promise to oppose a state income tax and introduced one, leading to the rise of Senator Marsha Blackburn. But I digress.
My response to this “outrage” was to launch an ill-fated campaign against Saltsman (and the Governor) for Chairman of the TRP. I had no clients since 1999 was a “dead” year politically; my wife and I had been married for about 18 months and did not have children yet; and we had a new car. We began traversing the state, literally from Memphis to Mountain City, meeting one-on-one with any GOP State Executive Committee (SEC) member who would give us five minutes.
A week or two before the SEC meeting at which the election would be held, one of my supporters, former State Representative David Coffey (R-Oak Ridge), called to inform me that he had talked to nearly every member of the SEC, and the Governor had the votes locked. I could not win. His advice was to drop out, but because of a desire for the party to appear unified, I should leverage my exit and “get something for it.”
We took his advice, and what I eventually “got” was a job as Political Director of the state GOP. The top job was Executive Director, but I couldn't be hired for that because there had to be a reckoning for challenging the Governor’s will. There is more to this story for another time.
This week was the first time in years that I had thought about those events. I was reminded when news broke that Democratic nominee for Governor Jerri Green’s campaign had asked independent Lauren Pinkston to withdraw from the race. The argument, as it was reported and as Green-supporting influencers have shared across social media, was that Pinkston is only polling at 1-2%, Green is surging, the race will be close, and Pinkston’s share of the vote could be the difference. I have disagreements with each of these points, but I understand the pitch.
Pinkston immediately said no and smartly used the interaction to garner significant statewide media coverage. Predictably, many began to attack her as the “spoiler” and a variety of other nonsensical things. Pinkston, however, made the decision I should have made 28 years ago.
The Blackburn and Green campaigns have the built-in advantage of being the nominees of the two major parties. There are a significant number of voters who will support the candidate simply because of the party label regardless of knowledge of the candidates or their positions. That means an independent must work as hard or harder than a major party candidate to build an organization in a state that is 550 miles from the southwest corner to the northwest corner.
Lauren Pinkston has achieved that, but she didn’t do it alone. Campaign staffers sacrificing their personal lives, political newbies diving headfirst into the fray, and Tennesseans of modest means investing in a candidate who they believe understands them all have a stake in Pinkston finishing what she started.
Like Green, Pinkston is a mother of school-aged children. Kids whose parents seek political office at any level share substantial portions of their parent’s time and energy with the community. The same is true for spouses. As a parent elected twice, I can attest to the many missed moments with family while on the campaign trail. It is a difficult conversation to have with your children about why you are not finishing the task that causes you to be absent from family meals, bedtime routines, ballgames, and recitals. Then there are your spouse, family, and friends who filled the gaps when you were in some distant community marching in a parade, eating catfish for the third time in a week, or delayed in road construction late at night. What do you say to them?
But what about the greater good? If what is best for our state is someone other than Marsha Blackburn, shouldn’t we rally behind the candidate presumed to be the strongest?
Touting this general argument, I saw commenters on social media posts saying phrases like, “We have to save Tennessee from Blackburn!” That’s the rhetoric of MAGA who want to “save” America. Tennessee does not need saving. We have problems to fix and people to be heard, but we have survived for over 220 years. Tennessee will be fine regardless of the results of this election.
What our system desperately needs is authentic representative democracy. It is indisputable that a near majority of citizens have rejected the extreme messages of both the right and the left. Rather than appealing to the middle, both parties have doubled down on divisive fringe views and characters to stoke fear and avoid difficult solutions to real problems. Candidates like Pinkston provide an alternative – a means for the 45% or so who feel like they don’t have a seat at the table to pull up a chair.
It was Pinkston who first publicly called for a statewide moratorium on data center development. Now, candidates across the board, except for Blackburn, are leaning into the issue; people in our rural communities are being heard, and Pinkston helped to elevate that issue to the forefront of the political discourse. That alone is reason enough to want Lauren Pinkston in the race.
If Blackburn wins a close race with Green, some will never be convinced that Pinkston was not the spoiler. These are the people who didn’t get the memo. Regular Tennesseans, some who lean right and some who lean left, are fed up with showing up at the polls, holding their noses, and taking their medicine – it still tastes gross no matter how hard you pinch. This year, if they choose not to vote for a major party candidate, it is no fault of Lauren Pinkston’s. It is because the candidates and their parties failed to convince them that under their “leadership” anything will be different.