Tennessee after Trump
Where state Republicans go from here in the wake of his election loss
Donald J. Trump is out of the White House, and Democrats now have the upper hand in Washington.
But in Tennessee, the Republican Party — today fueled by Trump’s populist, anti-establishment message — is as strong as ever.
“Tennessee has always been a populist state, regardless of which party is in charge,” said Brad Todd, a national Republican strategist and Tennessee native. “When the Democrats were at their apex in Tennessee, it’s because they were the populist party.”
The Volunteer State is now a red fortress for the GOP, unlike the neighboring southern states of Georgia and North Carolina, where upcoming statewide races will pose a difficult fight and require significant resources.
While some submit officials here could stand to dial down echoes of the former president’s provocative rhetoric, there is no practical reason for the Tennessee Republican Party to shed Trump.
In interviews with a dozen Tennessee Republican politicians and operatives – including Trump supporters and critics – The Tennessean heard from a state party that will continue to embrace Trump’s message and agenda even as he eventually fades from public view.
Todd, who served as the Tennessee GOP’S executive director in 1997, after Trump’s election co-authored “The Great Revolt,” a book on the populist movement in America.
“That realignment that happened in American politics is not going away because Trump is no longer president,” Todd said. “It will endure in Tennessee.”
‘Howard Baker didn’t have a Twitter’
The tenor of the Republican Party has changed, and Tennessee is no exception.
In years past, Republicans needed to capture moderate and rural Democratic support to win statewide in Tennessee. But as the GOP seized power in the state, rural former Democrats joined their ranks.
In 2000, around 230,000 voters cast ballots in the Tennessee Republican presidential primary. On Super Tuesday in 2016, 850,000 Tennesseans pulled GOP ballots.
“Those people who came into that primary were not the people who had been picking Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander,” Todd said. “As the Tennessee Republican Party grew, it got more country and less country club.”
Some critics of U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty over the past year have said the staunch Trump allies were unlike Tennessee’s Republican senators of the past. The names of U.S. Sens. Howard Baker and Bill Frist are frequently invoked in those conversations. Each went on to become U.S. Senate majority leader.
But Chip Saltsman, a longtime Republican political consultant, argues the comparison doesn’t hold up. It was already a major feat for Baker in 1966 to win a U.S. Senate race as a Republican, something that hadn’t been done in Tennessee since Reconstruction.
“He changed our party like nobody ever could,” Saltsman said of the late Baker. “But it’s not fair to compare him in today’s terms. It was a plus 15 or 20 percent Democrat state back then. A Republican winning statewide? It’s like Jim Cooper getting elected statewide today.”
Cooper is a moderate Democratic congressman representing Nashville.
Former Gov. Bill Haslam also noted the environment in which past Tennessee Republicans were elected was drastically different from today.
“The Howard Bakers and the Lamar Alexanders, they first got elected when Tennessee was a Democrat state,” Haslam said. “So they had to be able to persuade people on the other side.”
That’s no longer a skill Republicans need to employ in Tennessee to win elections.
“The nature of what it takes to get elected statewide has changed dramatically,” said Haslam, a two-term Republican governor who gave serious consideration to entering the 2020 U.S. Senate race.
The state’s August Republican primary for Alexander’s seat proved a bitter contest of Trump loyalty. It would have likely been uncomfortable for Haslam, who in 2016 announced he could not bring himself to vote for Trump.
While Baker’s legacy underscores his efforts to promote bipartisan cooperation and civility in the U.S. Senate, Saltsman said the intense focus on today’s elected officials’ incendiary comments – rather than their policy work – is due to the cycle of social media and cable news.
“Howard Baker didn’t have a Twitter,” Saltsman said.
Given Tennessee’s makeup at the time and the state of national politics, Baker and Frist were considered conservatives during their terms in office.
And despite the comparisons of previous senators to Blackburn and Hagerty, Saltsman argues the state’s Republican leadership today is an accurate reflection of its current voters and party activists.
“They compare Bill Frist’s 12th year as majority leader of the United States Senate to Bill Hagerty’s first month,” said Saltsman, who previously served as a senior adviser to Frist. “Very rarely did I hear what an amazing statesman he was when he was still in office.”
Will the Tennessee GOP still revolve around Trump loyalty?
Former U.S. Sen. Bob Corker is among the leading critics from within about the effect Trump has had on the party.
“I know that I’m out of step today, generally speaking, with many Republicans in the state,” he said. “At least that would be my sense.”
Corker laughed as he said so.
“I’m a Republican because I believe in limited government and fiscal responsibility and America’s role in the world and appropriate trade. Secure borders,” Corker said. “What’s happened in our party is that it’s been very personality focused.”
Trump’s demands of fealty from elected Republicans, he said, is “incredibly unhealthy.”
Haslam believes elements of Trump’s style and priorities will stay, though the former president himself will likely fade from prominence over the next several years.
“Everybody has gotten addicted to the idea that Donald Trump is president,” Haslam said, adding that news media closely covered his antics, Democrats found an ideal target and many Republicans became attached to his personality.
“Once you leave office, the world moves on without you,” he said. “It just does.”
Tennessee Republican Party chairman Scott Golden said only time will tell if loyalty to Trump remains an issue Republican candidates in the state continue to press, even with him out of the Oval Office. In recent years, candidates for the state legislature and even county commissions incorporated support for Trump into their local campaigns.
“We still include Reagan in our literature pretty prominently,” Golden said. “Forty years after the fact, Reagan is still invoked at nearly every Reagan Day dinner.”
While the Reagan and Lincoln Day dinners have been longstanding annual fundraisers for county Republican parties, some counties began Trump Day dinners as early as 2018. Golden guesses the trend may stick in parts of Tennessee, a state where Trump in November won at least 75% of the vote in 58 of 95 counties.
Trump called into question long-held Republican orthodoxy on issues like trade, foreign relations and immigration, said Chris Walker, a Republican strategist and former communications director for Gov. Bill Lee.
In the future, Tennessee Republicans will have to work to ensure Democrats don’t gain the type of traction they’ve recently found in Georgia. That means creating a party “where people who voted for President Trump and are passionate about President Trump, and people who may not have liked his style as much both have a home,” Walker said.
There are still a small number of suburban and urban legislative seats Tennessee Republicans can fight for. But even with Democrats again holding the power in Washington, the Tennessee GOP has nowhere near the opportunity for the kind of growth it experienced after former President Barack Obama was elected in 2008.
“When you’re in a supermajority Republican state, it’s tough to get even more,” Golden said. “There’s not any more adjectives to describe it after that. Super-duper majority?”
They’re looking at county-level positions now.
In 2022, Golden is anticipating “the largest number of Republicans to seek election in the history of the state of Tennessee,” he said.
Every judge, district attorney and public defender position will be up for election, something that happens in the state every eight years. Tennessee Republicans want to make even more gains there.
“It was a different place eight years ago and certainly when some of the judges were elected 16 years ago, Tennessee was absolutely a different state.”
If Trump remains focal point, GOP could find trouble in suburbs
Most counties in Tennessee remain solidly red.
Tennessee Republicans haven’t yet articulated, though, their strategy to keep suburban areas from sliding toward the Democrats, a trend that has played out nationally, although to a lesser extent here.
The Trump message wasn’t one that thrived organically in Williamson County, an affluent, Republican suburb south of Nashville and the only county in the state Trump didn’t win in the 2016 Republican primary. Marco Rubio was their choice.
Cheryl Brown, chairwoman of the Williamson County Republican Party, still maintains that local activists should continue to lean in to Trump.
“The party has grown because of Trump’s honesty,” Brown insisted, noting Williamson County Republicans added a smattering of more racially diverse members. Brown is the first Black woman to chair the county party.
“One thing I know is how to bring people in,” she said. “People want honesty.”
But Trump’s support slightly slipped this fall in Williamson County, dropping 2 percentage points while the Democratic nominee gained 7 points there since 2016.
And in neighboring Rutherford County, Democrats also began to close in the margin in the presidential election, though the minority party in November was unable to win state legislative seats in the area that had been considered to be in play.
Rep. Brandon Ogles, R-franklin, said he believes Republicans – certainly in his suburban county – should come across as inclusive.
“There’s a reason Williamson County was the only county in Tennessee not to vote for Trump originally,” said Ogles, who was among the 2016 Rubio supporters. “It’s because of the messaging. You can say the right thing and say it the wrong way, and you’re not heard.”
While Ogles said he often agreed with Trump’s positions, the entertainment factor of the former president’s incessant insults and inflammatory comments has proven to be “the epitome of what’s wrong with politics today.”
Elsewhere in suburban Tennessee,
outside of Chattanooga, Rep. Patsy Hazlewood, Rsignal Mountain, said she wants Republicans moving forward to simply tout their policy record — and as the new state House finance chairwoman, Hazlewood is proud of Tennessee’s fiscal position. Republicans in Tennessee shouldn’t be emulating the “charged” rhetoric and hyper-partisanship seen in Washington, she said.
“I would hope that our party would just focus on the work at hand and not get caught up in the rhetoric and the personalities and those sorts of things,” Hazlewood said.
Lt. Gov. Randy Mcnally, R-oak Ridge, acknowledged there are “bomb throwers” making “incendiary remarks on both sides,” including Trump. But overall, Mcnally said he believes the country benefited from Trump’s time in office.
Mcnally, who was first elected to the state legislature in 1978, said he is opposed to any efforts to make the party “more exclusive.”
More rifts have emerged in the larger GOP in recent months, including efforts in other states and in Congress to censure longtime Republicans for failing to offer complete loyalty to Trump. That includes members of prominent Republican families like U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Cindy Mccain, wife of the late U.S. Sen. John Mccain in Arizona.
Mcnally noted that in Tennessee, some conservative Democrats, which ran the state when he entered politics, eventually folded into the Republican Party.
“We welcomed them into the party, and I think if there’s anything we need to change, that’s what we need to do more of, is welcome people who have most of the ideals that the Republican Party has and give them a seat at the table.”
House Speaker Cameron Sexton, R-crossville, said “people can agree or disagree on how Trump used rhetoric or how he expressed himself.”
Republican House members, based on the makeup of their districts, should communicate with voters about Trump and other issues however they see fit, Sexton said.
The governor’s office declined to grant an interview with Lee to discuss the impact of Trump on the party.
Tennessee’s current GOP leaders weren’t first with Trump — but they are now
While they represent voters who are deeply loyal to Trump, many of Tennessee’s top GOP leaders weren’t ideologically close to him prior to 2016, instead initially throwing their support behind the campaigns of establishment Republicans.
Mcnally was for Jeb Bush, and then for Rubio, before Trump secured the nomination.
Five months before the Tennessee presidential primary, Sexton donated to Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign.
And before Hagerty went on to work for Trump in the general election, Jeb Bush tapped him as a delegate. Hagerty, whose career was in private equity, also contributed to Rubio’s 2016 campaign.
But Trump’s support has remained steady in Tennessee, where he won 60% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. With or without Trump in office, the economic populism, America-first movement that appealed to the “forgotten men and women,” as Trump called them, resonated with Volunteer State voters.
Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, a Republican with a strong libertarian streak, lauds Trump’s ability to mobilize people who felt they had been left behind through establishment politics.
“He was able to really connect. That’s what led to his rise to power,” said Jacobs, a world-champion professional wrestler who performs under the name “Kane.”
“At the same time, the guy’s a fighter. That’s what he does. He would fight when he didn’t have to fight, and he would pick a fight when he really didn’t have to. Of course people love that, because he’s standing up for them.”
Jacobs said he doesn’t believe good government and politics should be tied to a personality. But the movement that swept the Republican Party in recent years should be here to stay, Jacobs said, citing Trump’s ability to win over more Black and Hispanic voters this year than GOP candidates in any recent history.
Jacobs, who plans to seek another term as mayor in 2022, confirmed he has not ruled out a run for Tennessee governor in 2026.
Prominent Tennessee Trump critics recognize the party has gone toward Trump
Haslam said that not only are Americans fairly evenly divided, they’re “mad about it.”
“We’re better off when, instead of yelling at each other, we’re trying to make a persuasive argument about why our side is right instead of just saying the people on the other side are idiots,” Haslam said.
Corker, a former Chattanooga mayor, said he might have been open to running for governor in 2010 had he not won a U.S. Senate seat four years earlier. But he said he isn’t interested in running for governor — or in another statewide race, period — in the future. Running for president isn’t something Corker has ruled out, although he indicated his primary interest is helping influence the tone and agenda of the GOP in the next presidential race.
“There’s going to be a real debate in the Republican Party by the people who propose to be the standard bearers in 2024,” he said. “I want to be a part of that discussion.
“I’ve just never been that person who wakes up in the morning and thinks they’re looking at the next president.”
Corker in November did not vote for Trump, instead writing in the name of a sitting U.S. senator who, Corker said, over the past six months had demonstrated admirable qualities.
Corker said he was unsure whether that man, who he declined to name, has ever considered running for president.
Haslam, who said in 2016 he would be writing in the name of another Republican, didn’t want to discuss how he handled the 2020 ballot.