Sethi calls for debate in heated GOP Senate primary
Two weeks ahead of the Aug. 6 primary, Tennessee’s heated Republican U.S. Senate race is showing no signs of simmering down.
Frontrunners Bill Hagerty, the former U.S. ambassador to Japan, and Dr. Manny Sethi, a Nashville trauma surgeon, have pivoted in the past week to negative ads as the gap between the two opponents has narrowed significantly.
Outside groups allied with each candidate have also started to launch attacks over the air, while Sethi has called for Hagerty to agree to a debate — a challenge Hagerty’s campaign says they’re uninterested in accepting.
Public polling in the last two weeks has shown that Hagerty, endorsed by President Donald Trump, has lost his sizable lead over Sethi, who was trailing by double digits as recently as early June, according to the Sethi campaign’s internal polling.
The primary race in Tennessee could become a measure of Trump’s influence, as the president makes robo-calls this week on Hagerty’s behalf while U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-texas, on Wednesday announced his support of Sethi. Cruz will travel to Tennessee this week to stump for Sethi, his campaign confirmed.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-kentucky, has endorsed Sethi and traveled to the state last weekend on his behalf, while U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-arkansas, will come to Tennessee on Friday to help campaign for Hagerty.
Meanwhile, Tennessee’s Republican U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, with whom the winner of the Republican primary will likely serve alongside, on Wednesday officially weighed in on the race to endorse Hagerty.
Much of the same team that led Blackburn’s successful campaign in 2018 is also running Hagerty’s.
Blackburn called Hagerty the “true conservative” while proceeding to speak negatively about Sethi, pointing to various attacks the Hagerty campaign have made against Sethi in the past week.
On Monday, Louisiana-based JMC Analytics and Polling released the results of a statewide poll conducted over the weekend, finding 30% of likely Republican primary voters support Hagerty, while 27% favored Sethi, a lead within the poll’s 4% margin of error.
The poll, which surveyed 600 people through text messages and calls to landlines, found 32% remained undecided in the race, while 3% were for George Flinn and 8% for another candidate. Of the respondents, 372 reported they were certain they would in the primary.
Hagerty’s campaign sought to discredit the poll, noting that JMC uses Victory Phones to contact respondents, a company of which Sethi’s general campaign consultant Jordan Gehrke is a part-owner. In an email to reporters, Hagerty’s campaign called into question who paid for the poll.
John Couvillon, the pollster, said the polling was “purely done on (his) own dime for marketing purposes” and wasn’t funded by anyone else.
Gehrke said he had no knowledge of or involvement in the poll.
Couvillon near the end of the 2018 Tennessee Republican gubernatorial primary released a controversial poll accurately showing Bill Lee in the lead, the first public poll to do so. Lee went on to win the primary and later the general election to become governor.
In a statement prior to the new poll’s release Monday, Hagerty campaign spokesperson Abigail Sigler said it would be “a misleading poll intended to drive a false narrative” and that “the 2018 gubernatorial playbook isn’t going to work this time around.”
Sethi’s campaign is staffed by multiple former Lee campaign employees, and he has employed Lee’s strategy in other ways by presenting himself as a political outsider and traveling the state in an RV.
Attack ads abound in final stretch of Senate race
On the heels of releasing an attack ad against Sethi last week for a previous donation to a Democrat — to which Sethi’s campaign quickly responded with their own ad hitting Hagerty on the same issue — Hagerty’s campaign on Tuesday launched another negative ad.
The video is part of a series of efforts by the Hagerty campaign to call into question Sethi’s conservative credentials. Meanwhile, Sethi’s campaign has done the same to Hagerty, noting he donated to former Democratic Vice President Al Gore and supported the presidential bids of moderate Republicans Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney.
In Hagerty’s new video, the campaign calls Sethi “Massachusetts Manny,” a reference to him having lived in Boston while attending Harvard Medical School and completing his residency. While there, Sethi was a board member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, “an organization that supported Obamacare,” the new ad states.
It also features an undated clip of Sethi giving a lecture and cautioning students to refer to the federal health care plan by its official name, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, rather than making a “political statement” by calling it Obamacare.
Chris Devaney, the Sethi campaign’s chairman and senior adviser, has referred to the allegations of Sethi supporting the ACA as “desperate” and said Sethi “has always opposed socialized medicine, and his time as a Harvard medical student, as part of a medical society, doesn’t change that.”
While hundreds of people crowded in under an outdoor shelter for an event Saturday evening featuring Sethi and Paul, Sethi’s campaign sent a cease and desist letter to roughly 10 television stations across the state that had begun airing another anti-sethi ad taken out by a super PAC.
The campaign accused the PAC’S advertisement of falsely stating Sethi had donated to a liberal advocacy group, Actblue, which is a payment processing platform widely used by Democrats and liberal organizations. It was the payment processor through which Sethi made the $50 donation to former U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello, D-virginia, 12 years ago, though Sethi never made a donation to Actblue itself.
There is no indication any of the stations have stopped running the advertisement.
Subsequently, a pro-sethi PAC launched an ad highlighting past ties between Hagerty and Romney, noting that Hagerty served as Romney’s national finance chair.
“Three straight polls have shown it’s clear that momentum is on Dr. Manny’s
side,” Devaney said Tuesday. “Across the state, we’re having huge town halls with conservatives hungry for a change in the status quo. The desperate attacks by Bill Hagerty are straight out of the establishment playbook, because they’re losing.”
Devaney was referencing an internal poll the campaign released in early July, along with a public poll days later by the Trafalgar Group that both showed Hagerty with a small lead over Sethi.
Meanwhile, Trump on Friday evening held a 10-minute “tele-town hall” for Hagerty, though supporters were not allowed to ask questions on the call. This coming Friday, Cotton will take part in a lunch at the Clarksville Country Club for Hagerty supporters.
This week, and in response to the recent flurry of ads, Sethi publicly challenged Hagerty to a debate, recording a video in which he spoke directly to his opponent.
“Mr. Ambassador, I think it’s time for you to stop hiding behind these commercials and all these people and be a man and come and debate me,” Sethi said. “I will face you any time, any place, anywhere, because we all know that you’re the D.C. insider and I’m the conservative outsider.”
According to the Sethi campaign, he has twice in the past month showed up to debates organized by outside groups, though Hagerty did not attend. No debate has taken place between the two candidates.
Sigler confirmed on Tuesday that Hagerty was not interested in scheduling a debate with Sethi.
“With just 16 days to go until election day, our focus is sharing Bill’s positive conservative message with actual Tennessee voters, not partaking in political stunts with a desperate candidate who should be running in the Democrat Primary,” Sigler said in a statement Tuesday.
“Tennesseans cannot trust Massachusetts Manny Sethi, who has been out on the campaign trail masquerading as a conservative when in reality he is the most liberal candidate in the race. Bill Hagerty is the only true Trump conservative.
“President Trump endorsed Bill because they’ve worked together for years, and Bill has proven to be a trusted ally since day one.”
While Hagerty was a delegate for Jeb Bush in 2016 before eventually overseeing Trump’s transition team, Sethi maintains he cast a vote for Trump in the crowded Republican primary that year.
Early voting began Friday and will continue until Aug. 1.
Reach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.