It’s been a very busy week on the primary front, with a block of midwestern states — Kansas, Michigan and Missouri — on Tuesday and Tennessee on Thursday. In all four states, a heavy menu of Republican primaries dominated the landscape, with a few notable Democratic tilts.
I did a reasonably thorough summary of the Midwestern primary results for P-Fix on Wednesday, so I’ll focus today on Tennessee.
With Mike McWherter — son of popular former Gov. Ned McWherter — being unopposed for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, the GOP contest drew the most attention. As expected, Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam, scion of the Pilot Oil fortune, used a big financial advantage and a low-key “competence” message to soundly defeat two opponents, Chattanooga Rep. Zach Wamp and Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who both tried to outflank Haslam on the Right. Haslam drew 48 percent of the vote (Tennessee does not have runoffs), with Christian Right favorite Wamp finishing second with 29 percent and Ramsey third with 20 percent. Haslam carried most of the state outside Wamp’s district and a few northeast counties in Ramsey’s base.
The real fireworks in Tennessee involved four highly competitive Republican U.S. House primaries. In Wamp’s 3rd district, which is heavily Republican, self-funded radio talk show host Chuck Fleischmann (backed by Mike Huckabee, whose 2008 campaign manager, Chip Saltsman, ran Fleischmann’s campaign) edged Robin Smith — a former state party chair — who was backed by a host of DC-based conservative groups, most notably the Club for Growth (which was embarrassed when a “for more information” phone number in an anti-Fleischmann mailer turned out to connect callers to a phone sex service).
Two other competitive GOP races were in potential pick-up districts where Blue Dog Democrats are retiring. In Bart Gordon’s 6th district, State Senator Diane Black won a very nasty three-way contest against fellow state senator Jim Tracy and conservative activist Lou Ann Zelenik. Zelenik heated up this race with repeated ethics allegations against front-runner Black, but made national news by opposing construction of an Islamic mosque in the college town of Murfreesboro (she claimed it would be a base for the imposition of Sharia law in Tennessee, believe it or not). In the end, it came down to geography, with Black heavily winning her state senate district while Tracy and Zelenik split the vote in their base county of Rutherford. There was also a competitive Democratic primary in the 6th, won by decorated war veteran Brett Carter, who edged the underfunded but evocatively named Henry Clay Barry.
In John Tanner’s West Tennessee 8th district, where veteran state legislator Roy Herron easily won the Democratic nomination, Republican put on what is reported to be the most expensive House primary in the country. Nationally-recruited farmer and gospel singer Stephen Fincher battled two massively self-funded opponents, broadcast entrepreneur George Flinn and physician Ron Kirkland in a race where total expenditures ranged up towards $8 million, with $3 million spent by Flinn alone. Despite concerted attacks on Fincher for receiving millions in farm subsidies, he won easily with half the vote, dominated his opponents in the areas of the district most remote from Memphis.
And in the Nashville-based 5th district, eleven Republicans competed for the right to wage an uphill battle against Rep. Jim Cooper in a district comfortably won by Barack Obama in 2008. The best-financed candidate, David Hall, defeated Huckabee-backed home-school activist Jeff Hartline and Sarah Palin’s latest “Mama Grizzly,” entertainment attorney CeCe Heil.
Finally, it wasn’t really a competitive primary, but it got attention: 9th district Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen drew a second consecutive opponent who claimed the district required African-American representation. But former Memphis Mayor Will Herenton was widely regarded as an embarrassment, and after Cohen was endorsed by President Obama, former 9th district congressman Harold Ford, Sr., and the Congressional Black Caucus, Cohen breezed to a 79-21 win.
Next Tuesday primaries are being held in Colorado, Connecticut and Minnesota, along with a runoff in Georgia. Colorado features very competitive Senate primaries in both parties (Bennet v. Romanoff among Democrats, Buck v. Norton among Republicans), and a strange GOP gubernatorial primary overshadowed by the meltdown of front-runner Scott McInnis and the third-party candidacy of Tom Tancredo. Connecticut has a close Democratic gubernatorial contest between 2006 Senate nominee Ned Lamont and Stamford mayor Dan Malloy, along with a multi-candidate challenge to Republican Senate front-runner and former wrestling executive Linda McMahon. Minnesota has a very competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary, in which the best-known candidate is former U.S. Senator Mark Dayton. And Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial runoff has become a vicious cage match, with first-place primary finisher, Karen Handel, backed by Sarah Palin, battling former congressman Nathan Deal, backed by Newt Gingrich and a big majority of Georgia Republican congressmen and state legislators.
I’ll have previews of all these events next Tuesday.