WKNO TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (Host): The votes have been counted and new Tennessee lawmakers will soon be getting ready for work. With us for the second time this week is political analyst Otis Sanford. Good to see you again.
OTIS SANFORD: Good to see you again. Glad to be here for the second time this week.
BLANK: You know, if voters were concerned about things like gas prices and the economy, our governor-elect Marsha Blackburn seemed to not notice. Here's where her head was during the campaign.
MARSHA BLACKBURN: It doesn't take a fortune cookie to figure it out. Here in Tennessee, we're going to stop Communist China and protect Tennessee land.
BLANK: Her promise has always been a Trump-style government in Tennessee. She's even proposed bringing Elon Musk's DOGE here to slash government jobs and funding for nonprofits. What would a state-level Trump administration look like?
SANFORD: Well, it would be a top-level tone-deafness to what most people in Tennessee really want right now. Marsha Blackburn, obviously and clearly, did not hear what the voters were trying to say on Tuesday night. They are not happy. And she only won by 2.5 percentage points, which is the narrowest election for a Republican that I can recall. And to bring in what Donald Trump has enacted, which is so unpopular, I feel that she is going to get a wake-up call here and a lot of pushback.
BLANK: Do you think voter dissatisfaction in Tennessee is purely around the price of gas, or is there also a concern from voters about Republican leadership? You know, no one expected Texas to go as blue as it did. Tennessee lawmakers borrow a lot of their policies and and style of government from Texas.
SANFORD: Well, that's true, and you make a good point there. Of course, I do believe that there was a lot of dissatisfaction around gas prices, but it was it goes far deeper than that. It goes to the corruption that's going on in this administration. And so to say that I'm going to bring DOGE-style politics into this government, I think that's the wrong way to go because I do think Marsha Blackburn as governor is going to get a lot of pushback, even from people in her own party.
BLANK: Well, one last thing on Blackburn. She said she wants to pick her successor in the US Senate. Is there a prime contender for that, and do you see any red flags already?
SANFORD: What I've read is not very comforting for me, because I've been reading about Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, being interested and possibly in the running for this. That would be a disaster. Even die-hard Republicans would say thanks but no thanks to this. I really, really hope that Marsha Blackburn is a little bit more deliberate in picking her own successor, which I have a problem with also.
BLANK: Locally, Republicans had much closer elections than in past years. John Gillespie lost his house seat. Rep. Mark White won by just a couple hundred votes. State Sen, Brent Taylor, the biggest voice for state interventions in Shelby County, is now going to Congress. Do you think we'll see the same push for state oversight of Memphis Democrats after what happened in the Midterms?
SANFORD: I don't see that there's going to be that much of a change, even though there were some negative differences in this election for Republicans. Democrats picked up some seats came close to eliminating the supermajority, especially in the House. So you have to hope that Republicans got the message, but I'm just not sure that they have. I think it may take another election cycle and continued efforts and push by Democrats to get that message across that you need to stop messing with Memphis and Shelby County.
BLANK: Well, finally, Otis, low voter turnout seems to come up every election. Less than half of our registered voter base takes part in democracy in Shelby County. And now that we see how close Rep. Justin Pearson came to winning the 9th district, low voter turnout is really Republicans' biggest advantage moving forward. If Democrats are really serious about making Memphis count politically, how should they -- or can they -- get 100,000 more Shelby County voters to the polls in 2028? That is the number one reason why Justin Pearson and even Heidi Kuhn, believe it or not, lost their congressional races. 44% turnout in this election, which was without question the most important Midterm election that I can ever remember, and to have just 44% is atrocious. You know, my analysis is that if Memphis and Shelby County had had the 55% turnout that it had for the presidential election two years ago, both Heidi Kuhn and Justin Pearson, they would have won because the the vote count was so close in both of those elections. So going forward, you got to hope that if you're a Democrat, that they put egos aside, bickering aside, and unite because they can make a difference in local elections, local and state elections, if they would only mobilize and stop the bickering and the divisiveness.
