Early voting for the November 3, 2026, election begins on Wednesday, October 14, 2026. If you care at all who sits in the governor’s chair in Nashville, get ye to the polls.
Voter turnout in Shelby County has hovered between 55 and 64 percent for national election cycles. Is that all? A little more than half of eligible voters in Memphis and surrounding environs could muster up an opinion on whether Trump was better than Biden or Harris. I have a better record when it comes to knowing what’s going on each Super Bowl Sunday, and I’m notoriously apathetic about sports. And the Philadelphia Eagles have never caused national gas prices to rise $1.60 per gallon, at least not that this admittedly not-athletic-person can remember.
For local and gubernatorial elections, the voter turnout situation is more dire. In November 2022, only 34 percent of registered voters made it to their local polling place to cast a vote; for the 2024 primary elections, that number is an abysmally low 10 percent.
Primary elections may not have the big-name contenders and the “fate of democracy is at stake!”-style urgency of national and gubernatorial elections, but they’re just as important.
I understand people who are skeptical of the whole institution, of course. In three different referenda in two elections, in 2008 and 2018, Memphians voted to enact ranked-choice voting (RCV), to no avail. That’s precisely my point, though. If more people voted, could the state legislature pull such a blatantly hypocritical stunt?
In 2023, we elected a mayor who won with less than 28 percent of the vote. I voted for Mayor Paul Young, but those numbers hardly describe a healthy and thriving democracy.
To the many eligible voters who refrain because they think their vote won’t matter because the system is rigged, I would suggest that a system so unenthusiastically engaged with hardly needs to be rigged. Anyway, doesn’t it seem like it’s a lot easier not to give the people what they want if only 10 to 64 percent of the people will say what they want?
I wouldn’t think of telling anyone who to vote for — though I’ll tell you for free that when it comes to successfully keeping a promise to not suck the very lifeblood from me, I trust Shelob, the giant spider from Lord of the Rings, more than I trust Blackburn — but without a trace of shame, I’ll beg every eligible voter to pledge not to sit out this election.
Okay, just one more thing: I might add that in 2018, Blackburn posted a video with University of Memphis cheerleaders in which they cheered in support of the then-candidate for Senate. Of course, public state entities like the U of M are supposed to remain neutral in matters of politics, a fact that Blackburn and her team surely knew. They certainly know it now, since the U of M was forced to ask them to remove the video, leaving the poor cheerleaders and the state school looking like the ones who messed up, when surely the burden of responsibility should have been on the person campaigning for the United States Senate.
It’s the same ethos as the one that’s driven the $3 billion increase in President Donald Trump’s net worth, in just the last year, all while more than half of Americans report feeling financially insecure. It’s a willingness to bend the rules in one’s favor that flies in the face of the spirit of public service.
“No president in U.S. history has used his position of power to profit as immensely as Trump,” writes Dan Alexander for Forbes, in a recent article charting the president’s immense rise in fortunes. It’s difficult not to entertain the idea that Trump’s colossal rise in fortune is, in part or in whole, due to his willingness to ignore the rules.
Remember in 2021 when Governor Bill Lee signed the permitless carry bill into law at a Beretta USA plant? Has that positively impacted your life? Who we choose for governor matters — or at least it does if we want something more than a government that’s worn and worked like the flimsiest sock puppet big business ever designed.
So please, for the love of our Dear Departed Dolly Parton, vote. Remind your friends to vote. Set a calendar reminder on your phone, and do it right now. It’s important, and it’s a project that’s going to require a lot more participation.
Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine.
