Will voters choose gun-toting Republican or mild Democrat?

NASHVILLE >> The easternmost bit of Tennessee is the epicenter of 2018 politics. Its U.S. Senate race will reveal whether, for Republicans, fealty to the president isn’t only necessary but sufficient, and whether a seasoned, temperate Democrat can be palatable to voters who are distant from the left and right coasts of the country.

If you created a Republican suited to this year in this state — Donald Trump won 92 of 95 counties — the result would be Rep. Marsha Blackburn: Female, feisty and pleased as Punch with the president. If you asked central casting for a Democrat with a contrasting political temperament, you’d get Phil Bredesen. He’s as exciting as oatmeal.

Pistol-packing Blackburn — a Smith & Wesson .38 is her preference — in 2009 co-sponsored a bill that would have required presidential candidates to prove they are “natural born” citizens, a propitiation of “birthers.” She promises to be a Trump stalwart.

It’s what many congressional Republicans feel duty-bound to be: A Republican congressman (Florida’s Ted Yoho) said in defense of a fellow Republican, a committee chairman accused of excessive subservience to the president: “You have to keep in mind who he works for. He works for the president and answers to the president.” This team-loyalty-over- institutional-responsibility politics vitiates the separation of powers by reversing Madison’s objective: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

Both Blackburn and Bredesen have contributed to Tennessee’s remarkable success with “entrepreneurial federalism:” Luring businesses by not making other states’ mistakes. As a state legislator, Blackburn helped stop Bredesen’s predecessor as governor, a Republican, from removing Tennessee from the list of nine states without a tax on non-investment income. As governor (2003-2011), Bredesen reformed TennCare, removing hundreds of thousands from the state health plan whose runaway costs were making an income tax seem inevitable.

Bredesen stresses local worries (e.g., protecting Tennessee waters from Asian carp) more than national Democrats’ current ideological flights of fancy (e.g., rehabilitating socialism’s reputation).

Blackburn understandably wants the race nationalized: A vote for Bredesen will make Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer happy. Bredesen said: I expect Democrats to be in the minority. Besides, “I’m a Democrat ... but it’s not a religion.

... I don’t believe that if Chuck Schumer gets mad at me I will go to hell automatically.”

His problem is that the national Democratic Party — “Abolish ICE!”; “Medicare for all!” — seems determined to repeat in 2020 its 2016 role in electing today’s president. For a while, the Tennessee Democratic Party’s website greeted visitors with a militant shout: “Join the resistance.” Now it says: “Rebuilding Tennessee Together.”

Bredesen hopes to be the first Tennessee Democrat elected to the Senate since 1990.

He got many Republicans to vote to make him mayor and then governor, but he hasn’t been on the ballot since 2006 and politics has become much more tribal since then. The president will come clomping into this tight race to remind his tribe that although Tennessee’s first congressman didn’t use a Smith & Wesson .38, he killed a man in a duel: Andrew Jackson wasn’t oatmeal.