In pro-trump Tenn., Democrats count on a familiar face
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — President Donald Trump won 92 of Tennessee’s 95 counties in the 2016 election, making this state a seemingly daunting target for Democrats hoping to flip a seat in the Senate.
But a decade before that commanding victory, another politician won an even bigger landslide. The state’s Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen, swept all 95 counties to win a second term.
Now Bredesen is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Bob Corker, and his track record makes him the rarest of Democrats: not an incumbent but nonetheless a formidable candidate in a solidly Republican state, allowing his party to go on the offensive in an improbable place.
“There have to be hundreds of thousands of people who voted for me and voted for Donald Trump,” Bredesen said in a recent interview after meeting with a group of doctoral students from the Bredesen Center, a partnership between the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is named for him. Over breakfast at a restaurant here, Bredesen and the students talked about subjects ranging from nuclear power, supercomputing to research funding.
There is early evidence of his strength, or at least fond memories of his time in office: A poll released this month by Middle Tennessee State University found Bredesen with a 10-point lead over his expected Republican opponent, Rep. Marsha Blackburn. Twenty percent of Republican voters said they would vote for Bredesen.
Republican voters in Tennessee “don’t consider him an evil liberal person,” said Victor H. Ashe, a Republican and former longtime mayor of Knoxville. He predicted a tight race and said Blackburn could not afford to lose a significant chunk of Republican voters to her Democratic opponent.
In a nominal show of support for Blackburn, Corker wrote on Twitter this month that he was sending a donation to her campaign and wished her well in the Senate race. But in a brief interview, he said he would not cam-