GERMANTOWN, Tenn. — Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn holds her first sustained lead in the race for an open Tennessee Senate seat, catapulted ahead of Democrat Phil Bredesen by the partisan battle to confirm newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The Kavanaugh clash has awakened complacent Republicans and motivated conservative voters blase about President Trump to rally around the GOP flag. The development is hobbling Bredesen, a popular former governor, undercutting his crossover appeal with rank-and-file Republicans and diminishing the Democratic Party’s critical enthusiasm edge.
“Bredesen was an outstanding governor,” said John Miller, a middle-aged investment executive from suburban Memphis who typically votes Republican and plans to pull the lever for a straight GOP ticket in the midterm elections.
Blackburn cruised past Bredesen in two public opinion polls conducted at the apex of the Kavanaugh controversy. The fresh data suggests the episode has nationalized the Tennessee contest and led Republicans open to voting for the Democrat to retreat to their partisan bunkers. In one survey, Blackburn topped Bredesen by 8 percentage points; in another, she was in front by 5 points.
A few days before the Senate voted along party lines to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, his nomination was the dominant topic of conversation as professionals mingled ahead of a weekly Rotary Club luncheon in Germantown, an upscale suburb and key Senate race battleground situated about 20 miles southeast of downtown Memphis.
Rotary is strictly nonpartisan and those interviewed declined to allow their names to be published. But it was evident that a crowd inclined to vote Republican — Trump won Tennessee by 26 points — had been deeply affected by the uncorroborated allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh and Democratic attempts to wield the accusations to derail his nomination.
“I thought they were both eligible candidates,” said a Republican voter here who identified himself as the former president of the Germantown Rotary Club. “I was a bit iffy. I now know I’m going to vote for Diane Black — Marsha Blackburn.”
Lack of statewide name identification has been a significant vulnerability for Blackburn. So, this voter confusing her with Black, a Republican congresswoman from Tennessee who came up short in the state’s gubernatorial primary, perhaps revealed just how costly the Kavanaugh drama might be for Bredesen — despite his joining Blackburn in supporting Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Bredesen, 74, is something of a unicorn. Even as Tennessee has grown more reliably conservative, Republicans recall his tenure in the governor’s mansion fondly. Against this bona fide record of centrism, Blackburn, 66, struggled to convince a substantial segment of Republican voters to back her, even as the GOP nominee for governor, businessman Bill Lee, jumped out to a big lead.
Blackburn appears to recognize the magnitude of the challenge.
She has labored to poke holes in Bredesen’s reputation, insisting on the one hand that it was a Republican-controlled state legislature that forced him to cut a centrist path, while claiming on the other hand that his moderate approach to governing won’t survive in a Democratic caucus run by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
The Kavanaugh row has made Blackburn’s sales pitch a heck of a lot easier, crystallizing the stakes for many Republicans here.
“If he were to go to D.C., Chuck Schumer would be his boss and Chuck Schumer calls the shots,” Blackburn said in an interview with the Washington Examiner at her campaign’s Memphis headquarters. “You can look at two Virginia senators who said they were moderates and been governors and went to the U.S. Senate and what did they do? They immediately went left.”
Blackburn was referring to Virginia Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, two Democratic former governors who won as centrists but have voted in the Senate as liberals, in line with the agenda of the national party.
Much could change with four weeks to go until Election Day.
Bredesen is running a sharp campaign with high-quality television advertisements and an extensive grassroots operation — and that’s according to Republican operatives in the state. The ex-governor has opened more than 20 grassroots headquarters across Tennessee, including four in greater Memphis. He even won a rare political endorsement from singer Taylor Swift, for whatever that’s worth.
With Nashville and Memphis popular magnets for transplants (especially Nashville), Bredesen could see a bump in support as soft Republicans in the suburbs, especially women, rally to him in a midterm election shaping up nationally as a backlash against Trump. Anna Smith, 40, a college-educated, married mother of two young children who lives in suburban Memphis, is one of them.
Smith is a registered Republican who always voted for Republican until 2016. She has lived in Lakeland, a leafy enclave about 25 miles east of downtown Memphis, off an on for the past five years, and said she most likely would have voted for Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., had he run for re-election.
But the self-described “John McCain Republican” is unhappy enough with Blackburn and the state of the GOP, that she is volunteering for the Bredesen campaign, knocking on doors and making phone calls in West Tennessee. Smith’s beef with Blackburn? It’s not her support for the $1.3 trillion tax overhaul, vote to repeal Obamacare , or decision to back Kavanugh; it’s the congresswoman’s loyalty to Trump.
“I didn’t know her name before the race, so I did my own Googling and what I see is that she’s finding it advantageous to be a Trump supporter,” Smith said. “I imagine she thinks that aligning herself completely with him will help her to win the race but that’s not what I want.”
