10/5 Primary Preview

Memphis, all Memphis

Nashville’s mayoral and council elections have wrapped up and winners have been sworn in, so naturally it’s time for another off-year off-season Thursday-instead-of-Tuesday municipal election in Tennessee’s other big city, Memphis. As if that wasn’t enough, Memphis also does weird shit with how they structure and elect their entire city government. (Tennessee, please, we are begging you to at least move your elections to the right day of the week, you’re the only Americans who ever vote on Thursdays.)

Mayor

Carnita Atwater vs. Jennings Bernard vs. Floyd Bonner vs. Joe Brown vs. Kendra Calico vs. Karen Camper vs. J.W. Gibson vs. Reggie Hall vs. James Harvey vs. Willie Herenton vs. Michelle McKissack vs. Brandon Price vs. Justina Ragland vs. Tekeva Shaw vs. Van Turner vs. Derek Winn vs. Paul Young

WELL. Memphis elects its mayors without runoffs, so whoever gets the most votes will be the city’s next mayor, even with a tiny plurality. A few candidates have emerged from the scrum as the likeliest potential winners.

Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner probably has the best chance of anyone, but he’s also one of the most appealing candidates for conservative voters and carries the endorsement of the city’s police union. He’s running as a fiscally conservative centrist whose policy solution for most things is to throw more cops at the problem—think Eric Adams, if Eric Adams wasn’t a crook who’s completely off his rocker. As sheriff, he’s overseen an increase in jail deaths; as a candidate, he’s taken a lot of incoming fire from his rivals, who seem to perceive him as a frontrunner.

Former Mayor Willie Herenton led Memphis through the 1990s and 2000s, only to throw his career away with a perplexing saga where he said he’d resign from office shortly after winning another term in 2007 but didn’t get around to resigning until mid-2009. He later ran for Congress in 2010 and mayor in 2019, losing badly both times. That might make him sound like a spent force, but if he holds on to most of the 28% of Memphians who voted for him four years ago, it could very well be enough to win back his old job.

Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner, the president of the Memphis NAACP, might be the candidate most directly appealing to liberal and progressive voters. Most candidates are pretty short on endorsements due to the crowded field and limited policy differences, but Turner is an exception. U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, Tennessee Three member state Rep. Justin Pearson, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, numerous lower-ranking Democratic officeholders, the Memphis and West Tennessee Council of the AFL-CIO, and Planned Parenthood’s advocacy arm are all in his corner. If he were the only candidate making this sort of broadly liberal pitch, we’d think him a clear favorite—but he isn’t.

Downtown Memphis Commission President Paul Young is running as a liberal technocrat, and has forced his way into the top tier of candidates by outspending the competition. Young’s rise probably comes at Turner’s expense, and he is the only other candidate with the Planned Parenthood seal of approval. According to recent polling, Young surged into either first or second place over the summer.

Memphis-Shelby County School Board Chair Michelle McKissack, a former longtime TV news anchor, isn’t really a good fit for liberal/progressive voters given her enthusiastic support for more remotely-operated police surveillance cameras. (Memphis calls its more than 2,000 police-operated surveillance cameras SkyCops; in addition to the very dystopian feel, they haven’t worked to reduce or deter crime, though they did catch Memphis police brutally beating Tyre Nichols to death.) However, the rest of her “Whole City” platform is generally alright, if vague; she names defending LGBTQ Memphians against a hostile state government as a priority, and decries the state’s abortion ban for its detrimental impacts on women’s health.

Businessman J.W. Gibson is your obligatory self-funding Chamber of Commerce-type candidate. If you love pablum and public-private partnerships, he’s your guy. We wish we had more to say, but that would require specific goals and clear statements for us to pick apart; like many a Business Candidate before him, Gibson is 95% vibes.

State Rep. Karen Camper should be making more of a mark, considering she’s the leader of the Democratic caucus in the Tennessee House, but she’s faded into the background as Bonner, Herenton, Turner, Young, and McKissack have dominated the conversation.

Former Shelby County Commissioner James Harvey would worry us more if he had been the obvious conservative choice from the start. Luckily, conservative city councilman Frank Colvett was kind enough to stay in the race until mid-summer, so Harvey—a former Democrat now more closely aligned with the GOP—wasn’t even the biggest name in the right lane until a few months into the race.

TV’s Judge Joe Brown is on the ballot, and could collect votes on name recognition, but hasn’t made the mark on this race that you’d expect from a daytime TV fixture and has become an afterthought.

City Council

The city of Memphis is divided into seven single-member city council districts. Each contains a roughly equal amount of people and elects one person to the city council. Overlaid on the Memphis City Council’s standard seven single-member districts are a pair of “Super Districts.” Each covers about one half of the city and elects three members to the city council. Super District 8 takes in western, northern, and southern Memphis, the mostly Black, overwhelmingly Democratic half of the city; Super District 9 takes in the mostly white, fairly conservative central and eastern remainder of the city, and tends to elect Republicans. Like the mayoral race but unlike the regular district-based races, the super districts are plurality-winner elections. We’ll start with the normal single-member-district-based council seats, which will have runoffs in the event no candidate achieves a majority.

District 1 (Northeast)

Rhonda Logan (i) vs. Kymberly Kelley

Memphis can be a conservative city, and Councilmember Rhonda Logan is a testament to that. Not even the worst member of the Council, she's fought for youth curfews, and thinks the solution to transit problems is rideshare apps.  Her opponent, financial secretary Kymberly Kelley, has no online presence and has raised almost no money. Not only is she unlikely to win, it's unclear whether she'd even be an improvement. 

District 3 (Southeast)

Ricky Dixon vs. James Kirkwood vs. Kawanias McNeary vs. Towanna Murphy vs. Pearl Walker

The five-way field for this open seat includes Ricky Dixon, brother of once-powerful state Sen. Roscoe Dixon, who left office in the mid-2000s to serve a years-long federal prison sentence he earned for taking bribes in the Tennessee Waltz scandal that also took down a member of the Ford family (foreshadowing for District 6). Incidentally, Ricky says the city’s greatest challenge is crime.

Radio host and Democratic official Towanna Murphy seems like a standard liberal, and has the endorsement of AFSCME, one of the only few unions allowed to exist in the South. But it’s NAACP Environmental Chair Pearl Walker who has endorsements from City Council members and the Sierra Club. Cop James Kirkwood has the GOP endorsement and Kawanias McNeary is running a ghost campaign.

District 4 (Central)

Jana Swearengen-Washington (i) vs. Teri Dockery

Jana Swearengen-Washington's sister held this seat until last year, when she left it for a county office. While Jana won the special election to replace her easily, in the interim, Teri Dockery was appointed to fill the vacancy. In the few short months she held the position, she managed to act so abusively towards the Council staff that she was no longer allowed to even email them.

District 6 (West)

Edmund Ford Sr. (i) vs. Keith Austin vs. Larry Hunter

The once-formidable Ford Empire has been reduced to only two members still in office: Edmund Ford Sr.—a City Councilmember from the 90s who washed out after two terms and a federal sting operation that nearly put him in prison, but returned to office in 2019—and his son, who serves on the County Board. Edmund may be the slimiest member of a notoriously slimy political family—and that’s without factoring in the fact that he runs a funeral home business and was fined for reusing caskets without bothering to change the lining.

His challengers this year are brewery employee Keith Austin and pastor/nonprofit director Larry Hunter. Something we really like about Austin is that most of his website, including his Issues and About pages, is devoted to calling the Ford family corrupt. What we like less is his total lack of specificity about what he wants to do when he’s elected. He told the Daily Memphian, “It’s a little radical. I don’t want to say what I want to do off the top,” regarding his plan for managing growth along Third Street. Hunter may also be light on details in his campaign, but he has a legitimately frightening record. While his nonprofit is respected in the city, Hunter himself is virulently anti-gay: speaking to the city council in 2012 about the scourage of homosexuality being allowed in public spaces, Hunter said “I don’t walk to walk nowhere and see two men hugging, two men kissing.” He’s also taken to calling himself a prophet. All things told, Ford and Hunter are both so odious that Austin is the only reasonable choice, even given how little we know about him and how unspecific he is about what he would do in office.

District 7 (Northwest)

Michalyn Easter-Thomas (i) vs. Jimmy Hassann vs. Edward Douglas vs. Jarrett Parks vs. Dee Reed vs. Austin Rowe vs. Larry Springfield

Michalyn Easter-Thomas ran in 2019 as a union-backed alternative to a conservative incumbent, and won by an astounding 75-25 margin. Her main opponent for reelection is Larry Springfield, a musician and restaurant owner backed by the city’s business community and the police.

Austin Rowe is a realtor running on the platform of being a realtor and little else. Cop Jarrett Parks is running a quiet campaign and lacks the support of the police union, while having the support of state Rep. Justin Pearson, a member of the Tennessee Three. He’s probably better than your typical cop candidate. Dee Reed is a beautician who refreshingly seems to be as worried about lack of services, high rent, and limited community resources as she is about crime. Unfortunately, she’s raised almost no money. Edward Douglas is a basketball coach with almost no campaign to speak of. Finally, Jimmy Hassann is a clothing store owner running on his business experience. Hassann and Springfield ran in 2019, getting 9% and 7% of the vote, respectively.

As a purely extraneous note, we’d like to share the most recent post from Jimmy Hassann’s campaign Facebook page:

Super District 8 Pos. 2

M. LaTroy Alexandria-Williams vs. Davin Clemons vs. Janika White

M. LaTroy Alexandria-Williams is a real character. The businessman and perennial candidate has long been a part of the crew of Memphis Democrats who have tried and failed to primary Rep. Steve Cohen in election after election. (Alexandria-Williams even got himself criminally charged over an election interference scheme in September 2020.) In 2022, he ran against the congressman himself, losing 88%-12%. Those primary challenges have always been loosely to Cohen’s right, but mainly about the fact that Cohen is white and Jewish in mostly Black, deeply Christian Memphis; the fact that Cohen’s mostly Black and Christian constituency keeps electing him by lopsided margins has yet to meaningfully deter these challenges, even though the first and most notorious one was in 2008. His son, M. LaTroy Alexandria-Williams Jr., looks to carry the family’s mantle this year. Suffice it to say he is not the ideal winner of this race. That’s fine, because attorney Janika White seems like a solid favorite. White, now the managing partner at her own law firm, practiced for years alongside legendary Memphis attorney and civil rights icon Walter L. Bailey Jr., most famous for representing Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike. She was last seen losing the 2022 Democratic primary for Shelby County DA to Steve Mulroy, a criminal justice reform advocate who went on to defeat Republican incumbent Amy Weirich. Police department employee Davin Clemons, who is gay, has the Planned Parenthood seal of approval, which White also has, and a rote endorsement from the LGBTQ Victory Fund, but no faction in city politics is going to bat for him. Progressives, labor, Black clergy, conservatives, the police union, everybody’s behind White. She doesn’t need a majority, but she may very well get one.

Super District 8 Pos. 3

Berlin Boyd vs. Lucille Catron vs. Yolanda Cooper-Sutton vs. Brian Harris vs. Damon Curry Morris vs. Jerred Price vs. Paul Randolph, Jr.

Berlin Boyd is the conservative city councilman who Michalyn Easter-Thomas defeated in 2019, so we already know he’s bad news. Like in the other Super District 8 race, one candidate is the clear choice of a broad cross-section of city politics; Memphis City Beautiful Commissioner Jerred Price is that candidate here. Corporate executive and previous candidate Brian Harris is the third candidate to watch here; what he lacks in notable supporters or policy specifics, he makes up for with money. Local activists Yolanda Cooper-Sutton and Damon Curry Morris, OB-GYN Dr. Paul Randolph Jr., and Beale Street redevelopment advocate Lucille Catron round out the field.