Election fever is beginning to show not only at the level of mayoral hopefuls but among city council aspirants as well.
A key race will take place in council District 5, focused on Midtown and East Memphis, where former Councilman Philip Spinosa will be seeking a return to office. It won’t be easy for Spinosa, who’ll be opposed by newcomer Meggan Wurzburg Kiel, whose fundraiser Monday evening at the East Memphis home of Frank and Jeanne Jemison turned out well over a hundred supporters. The attendees ran the gamut from the well-to-do, many of them prominent in business and civic circles, to familiar activists of the political center and center-left.
Kiel ran through her extensive résumé, which includes service in a variety of educational missions among inner-city youth and a prominent role in the Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope (MICAH).
She noted that the council was “kicking the can down the road” in setting exact district boundaries, but urged those present to be ready on May 22nd, when candidate petitions can first be drawn, and “we will sign the petition together and have a really good time picking up officially the campaign.”
• On Saturday, some 100 or so cadres of the Shelby County Republican Party had a dissent-free reorganizing convention in which chairman Cary Vaughn, who was re-elected by acclamation, called for “turning the page” and distancing the party from the monolithic influence of former President Donald J. Trump.
As Vaughn commented to the crowd, “We need boots on the ground. We need new people. … We can’t get there with the same core group. … We have to truly look at how we market the Shelby County GOP. … We have to work on the depth chart, right?”
The chairman cited a recent conversation of his with an African-American acquaintance, who told him, “We as African Americans want to be a part of the Republican Party in Shelby County.” Vaughn quoted the man as saying many Blacks were “pro-life, pro-God, pro-business, pro-traditional marriage, [and] believe in core values. But we’re not coming over under the Trump brand.”
Said Vaughn: “We have to find a way to say, look, there is room for everybody at the table with the Shelby County GOP. Now maybe we tear down the silos just a little bit so that we can come together [and] move this party forward.”
That didn’t sit well with Terry Roland, an absentee Saturday and Trump’s local election chair in both 2016 and 2020. Roland reacted with fury. “There are more Trump [voters] than not” among the county’s Republicans, he said, “and we aren’t taking a back seat to anyone. … Most of us won’t support anyone else, so I’m done with the Shelby County party after 36 years.”
• It is remarkable that Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis’ 9th District was the only Tennessean now serving in Congress that MSNBC could find to say something both sensible and sensitive in the wake of Monday’s fatal school shooting in Nashville.
In a lengthy interview, Cohen empathized with the victims and their families, expressed the need for significant gun-safety legislation (while despairing of finding enough Republicans on Capitol Hill to support it), and even doubted the safety of himself and others in the House, given the inclination of some GOP members to try to smuggle weapons onto the floor.
Nashville is a majority-Democratic city, in some ways more so than Memphis, but gerrymandering by the legislature’s Republican supermajority has contrived to split the state’s congressional districts in such a way that Republicans — like Andy Ogles, who sends out family Christmas cards showing everyone toting a firearm — are guaranteed to represent all the larger districts containing fragments of Nashville.
