A thought, after taking a look recently at the county Election Commission’s website with an eye to seeing who was running across the breadth and depth of the developing 2026 county ballot.
At this stage of the game, enough candidate petitions have been pulled by Democrats, Republicans, and independents to create a valid sense of what the field will be as we head into the election year.
Upon scanning the numerous names of petition pullers, it is possible to conclude that, with the major exception of the county mayor’s race, which has engaged the attention of several well-known political figures, the candidate list is unusually heavy with newcomers and political unknowns.
It is almost as though one were looking at a list of candidates in Nashville or some other community.
There are exceptions, of course, sprinkled here and there in the candidate list. But overall, 2026 is stacking up as a “newbie” election, one of those that ushers in a new governing class and redefines local politics for a generation or so.
A good many of the names which may now look unfamiliar — and especially those of the winners of their races — are destined to enter the common parlance and to take their place on a political list of Usual Suspects.
• Last fall, when Memphis was first pinpointed by the Trump administration for imminent inclusion in its sequence of federal interventions, the prospect was greeted locally with all manner of anticipation and nervous speculation. Puzzlement, too.
To be sure, the city fit the administration’s profile of an urban area with a history of crime problems. But it was not, strictly speaking, “blue” in the way that other target areas like Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles were. Yes, the city’s demographics were — and are — decidedly Democratic. Election results in races involving direct partisan competitions spoke for themselves.
But Memphis city elections are nonpartisan. The current mayor, Paul Young, was best known as a local-government technocrat, without any particular history of partisan involvement, and, while he drew very well from traditional Democratic voting areas, he got significant votes in Republican-leaning areas as well.
And Young’s immediate predecessor as mayor, Jim Strickland, had been the very model of partisan ambivalence. A former Democratic party chairman of a generation ago, he had become a pronounced centrist who had been formally censured by his erstwhile party for backing the public campaign of a Republican legislative candidate, the archconservative Brent Taylor.
Another key fact about Memphis that did not square with the Trump pattern of selecting target areas: It lay within an undeniably red state jurisdiction. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, though not exactly a MAGA-ite, was certainly supportive of Trumpian initiatives, and his state government was perpetually engaged in a public show of dominance over local-option areas like Memphis and Nashville.
But if Memphis was not the ideal bête noire in the Trumpian sense, it turns out to have served the President’s purpose by its very unsuitability as a partisan foil. As numerous sources from the mayor to DA Steve Mulroy to the city’s Crime Commission have pointed out with convincing statistical evidence, the curve of violent crime in the city was already spiraling downward.
The present state of general satisfaction with crime levels is, more than arguably, the product of an existing trend, not the fruit of a federal-state task force imposed on it.
Yet here we are in the wake of the appalling hard-line excesses and tragedies of Minneapolis, unable to claim credit for this relative equilibrium ourselves, forced to hear Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem and Trump himself use the city’s name boastfully as justification for policies that elsewhere have been divisive and ruinous.