One of the biggest surprises of the 2022 statewide election season was the near-defeat in the Republican primary of state Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson of Franklin, who barely survived a challenge from the relatively unheralded Gary Humble, a conservative GOP activist.
Recently, according to Tennessee Journal editor Erik Schelzig, Johnson and political consultant Gregory Gleaves, who had run his campaign, deconstructed their efforts at a Republican party caucus and determined for the record that in significant ways affecting well-established campaign strategy, the times they are a-changin’.
One of the lessons the two said they learned was that voters over the age of 65 — “baby boomers” in demographic jargon — are no longer the most dependable source of funding and electoral support for candidates pitching to the conservative mainstream. Gleaves reportedly determined that, in the case at hand, Generation X voters — those whose birth years ran from the mid-’60s through the late ’70s, roughly — were a more numerous portion of the Republican voting bloc.
And what are the generally reputed characteristics of Gen Xers? Among them are independent-mindedness in the realm of ideas, up-to-date attitudes toward the high-tech universe, and a general broad-mindedness in the cultural sphere. Keep in mind that the demographics of an upscale mid-state community like Williamson County would pretty much erase the distinction between a Republican primary and general election (in the same way that, in the old South, victory in a Democratic primary was said to be “tantamount to election”). All things considered, we’re talking about the same corner of the general population that accounts for the so-called “soccer mom” suburban constituency that both major political parties, and independents as well, appeal to for votes these days.
Another point noted by Messrs. Johnson and Gleaves in their candid postmortem, in preparing Johnson’s mailer list, they depended too heavily on habitual voters, those used to voting in election after election. But relative newcomers — “ones and zeroes,” as consultants measure past voting habits — cast ballots in unprecedented quantity.
To bring all this closer to home, the Gen X constituency, which blurs the usual hard-and-fast boundaries of inherited loyalties, seems to have been important in the unusually diversified vote that just boosted Mayor-elect Paul Young to office in the city’s most recent nonpartisan race.
• Meanwhile, the outgoing Memphis mayor, Jim Strickland, who relinquishes power at year’s end, has seen his legacy burnished by a vote of the city’s legal fraternity. The Memphis Bar Association has conferred on him the Judge Jerome Turner Lawyer’s Lawyer Award. Turner is the late federal jurist who presided over several of the most significant trials in local history — among them former Congressman Harold Ford Sr.’s acquittal for bank fraud and Dyersburg Judge David Lanier’s conviction for sexual harassment — and who in 1991 established the current judicial requirements for city elections.
• Strickland aide Dan Springer, who served as the mayor’s deputy operating officer, will become program manager for the MFA Program Management firm in January.
• Members of both local parties are saddened by the unexpected death of longtime GOP activist and cycle enthusiast Paul Houston, who had just announced plans to run for the position of General Sessions court clerk next year.
Among those who have pulled petitions for that office are incumbent Joe Brown, Rheunte E. Benson, Shelandra Ford, and Tami Sawyer (Democrats), and Republican Lisa M. Arnold.