Given this year’s harsh winter weather here in Memphis — not to mention unrelenting chaos in the nation’s capital and a tragic St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Broward County, Florida — we head into spring looking for sensible distractions. Take a moment, then, to consider next fall’s Shelby County mayor’s race, an election that surely will determine the future shape and direction of our local politics. A prospective battle royal, involving at least four local eminences, has already gotten started.
The field of party candidates running for county mayor became final on February 15th, with four well-known candidacies intending to participate in the Republican and Democratic primary elections on May 1st. Along with independents who may declare, the two primary winners will participate in the county general election on August 2nd. That date is paired with the Democratic and Republican primary elections for statewide and federal office; this year’s November 6th elections will include all nine U.S. House of Representative seats in Tennessee, one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats, and a replacement for term-limited incumbent Governor Bill Haslam.*
But the fun begins here in Shelby County in early May, when Republican and Democratic voters choose their party nominees in 13 county-wide races, most notably their nominees for Shelby County mayor. Because Memphis city government generates so much local media attention — after all, 70 percent of the county’s population lives in Memphis — the fact that our county government is ordained by the state constitution and ultimately has fiscal sway over important matters of both daily life and essential services often escapes notice. Never forget that the annual budget of county government normally exceeds that of the city by as much as half a billion dollars.
Terry Roland
The current position of county mayor dates from the Shelby Country Restructure Act of 1975, which also created the 13-member Shelby County Commission, which serves as a mini-legislature for the county. A serious disagreement over disposition of funds developed during the 2015 budget season, and since then, now-outgoing Mayor Mark Luttrell and a bipartisan commission majority have been battling furiously over the right to maintain control over that budget.
Ironically, one of the three serious Republican candidates for county mayor this year is Commissioner Terry Roland, who, along with GOP colleague Heidi Shafer, has been a leader of the lengthy revolt against Luttrell. Roland, who effectively has been running for mayor for over two years now, claims that the reforms he has been seeking provide more fiscal oversight to the commission, weakening the power of the mayor’s office.
Roland, a one-time rodeo roustabout who operates a tire store in Millington and possesses an admittedly shaky command of basic grammar, even when debating aspects of school policy and administration, is, to say the least, an atypical candidate for county mayor, or, for that matter, political office of any kind.
At least three colleagues on the current commission — all, as it happens, fellow Republicans — have reported being the object of physical threats from Roland after arguments over the commission’s agenda items. Said GOP colleague Mari Billingsley: “Terry has threatened to beat me up in front of several county staffers in the hallway. He consistently displays bullying behavior. Anybody who disagrees with him about anything is met with great hostility. That’s unbelievably unprofessional. There’s no place for it in government, and it sets a very poor example for a community that already has too much hostility on its hands.”
And former Democratic Commissioner Steve Mulroy, a professed liberal whose day job is that of University of Memphis law professor, had repeated showdowns with Roland during the one four-year commission term they shared, a pattern that culminated one day in the commission library when, according to Mulroy, Roland approached him with fists balled up and these words: “You and I are never going to agree. There’s only one way to settle things. We’re going downstairs, and I’m going to whip your ass!”
It must be said in the Millington roughneck’s defense, however, that, over the course of his nearly eight years on the commission, he has sanded down some of his rougher corners, even as his politics has evolved from rants against gay rights and citified liberal spendthrifts to ever more centrist positions. While serving as commission chair in 2015-16, he took the lead in putting the commission on record against school vouchers and for Governor Bill Haslam’s unsuccessful efforts on behalf of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee. And the erstwhile bad-boy populist has become a dependable advocate for any and all initiatives benefiting county employees. So unexpectedly smooth and conciliatory was his conduct as chairman that Roland, upon relinquishing the office after his year in charge, received two separate standing ovations from his colleagues.)
David Lenoir
Even so, Terry Roland remains combative, somewhat in the vein of a local Donald Trump, whose Shelby County campaign chairman he was in 2016. A constant object of his verbal attacks these days is County Trustee David Lenoir, who has been in Roland’s rhetorical gunsights ever since it became obvious, a year or two back, that Lenoir, too, hankered to be county mayor.
During the last budget season, for example, Roland made a point of charging Lenoir with padding the trustee’s payroll and hiring employees who weren’t required to do any work. He also has referred to his rival publicly as “Mr. Drysdale,” the unsympathetic moneybags character in the old The Beverly Hillbillies TV sitcom. This was his way of saying that Lenoir, a financial-industry veteran and a fairly conventional personality close to the center of gravity of the Shelby County Republican establishment, will raise more money in his mayoral race than anybody else and consequently will have more to spend.
Such would definitely seem to be the case, given end-of-2017 financial-disclosure reports that show Lenoir leading the pack of county-mayor candidates by a hefty margin — $345,438 on hand, versus $210,055 for County Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos, running second in money-raising, while Roland has lagged behind his rivals in terms of dollars, with but $16,319 in his coffers.
Conceivably, Lenoir has also benefited from the recent public endorsement he received from popular incumbent Mayor Luttrell. For all his affinity for the GOP establishment, Lenoir may also have crossover potential, since he has kept the county’s level of revenues up while introducing several user-friendly mechanisms in the Trustee’s Office for delinquent or confused taxpayers.
Despite his apparent advantages, however, and despite a résumé that includes his once having been a starting defensive end for Alabama’s Crimson Tide, David Lenoir has a modest and relatively laid-back personality that will no doubt be put to the test by the more rambunctious Roland, whose modest campaign funding at this point is somewhat alleviated by his unrivaled ability to press hot buttons and grab free media. Lenoir’s challenge is to enhance his name recognition as the campaign warms up.
Joy Touliatos
Doing better in the name game is also an imperative for the third member of the Republican triad, Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos, who recently has taken concrete steps to solve her anonymity problem, having sent out two polished mailers on behalf of her candidacy. She also has the distinction of having been the first county-mayor candidate to go billboard, with large signs advertising her name and countenance at several strategic points on local thoroughfares.
Like David Lenoir, Touliatos belongs to the Republican establishment, and, like him, she has a reputation for competence at her job. In a sense, she is in competition with Lenoir for the core dollars available from longtime Republicans. In this unusual year of #MeToo and #TimesUp adjustments to the patriarchal universe, Touliatos’ gender itself also may well become a political advantage. She herself has a beguilingly American story, as the daughter of Greek immigrants who, as a young girl growing up, did the dishes and other grunt work that helped establish the family business, the Fairview Drive-In on East Parkway, a favorite stop on the fringe of Cooper-Young for students and families during the 1970s and 1980s.
From a practical point of view, Touliatos has already done some useful on-the-job political training, as a member of current Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s brain trust, serving as campaign co-chair during the latter’s successful upset campaign of 2015. Early on in her own campaign, she also availed herself of the services of Stephen Reid, the consultant and sometime pollster who guided Strickland’s win; subsequently, she has enlarged her campaign staff, taking on Jordan Powell of Dallas-based Red Right Strategies as a digital strategist, and Patrick Lanne of Virginia-based Public Opinion Strategies as her pollster. Also on board are such veterans of the local political wars as former city councilmen Brent Taylor and John Bobango as treasurer and co-chair, respectively.
Two of Touliatos’ campaign themes — public safety at all costs and the streamlining of county government — are reminiscent of the bottom-line simplicities that Strickland used to ride into City Hall in 2015. And while she’s expected by many to finish third among the Republicans, the judge may well have the makings of a sleeper candidate, one capable of raising relatively big bucks and slipping ahead of the big boys somehow. Roland in particular has to treat her as a second front. So, for that matter, does Lenoir.
The results in recent Shelby County
elections have been so favorable to Republicans that the GOP has a certain headiness of expectation going into the 2018 fray. Even though Shelby County now has a narrow African-American majority (52.7 percent), Republicans have swept most countywide elective positions this decade. Statewide, there has been a red tide of GOP control, with Republicans now owning super-majorities in both the state House and state Senate, and Republicans firmly in control of the executive and judicial branches of government as well. One-party Republican government has become the norm in Shelby County.
Yet it used to be the other way. For well over a century, Democrats dominated everything in Tennessee, state and local, until the Civil Rights era relatively quickly swung a majority of white Southerners out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican. Today, however, the basic demographics of Shelby County — growing numbers of white progressives in the urban core along with an overwhelmingly Democratic African-American community — should provide the raw numbers for victory. But that can only happen if the Democrats figure out how to marshal their resources effectively.
National events — particularly the growing resistance to a distrusted and doubted president — may create 2018 opportunities across the state for Democrats in open races for governor and U.S. senator. Democratic hopefuls like ex-Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh are plausible candidates for governor, and former Governor Phil Bredesen, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate, has already demonstrated, in two victorious gubernatorial races, his ability to buck the Republican wave. These will be the ticket-heading shock troops this year hoping to boost a Democratic renaissance at lesser elective levels.
An impressive number of fresh faces and young unknowns are challenging every seat available in the legislature, on the county commission, and in several available judgeships; at least some of them have a good chance to stick, the way Democrat Dwayne Thompson did two years ago in ousting an entrenched and over-confident Republican incumbent in suburban District 96 of the state House of Representatives.
And Democrats should have a decent shot at the county mayor’s job as well. State Senator Lee Harris — a professor at the University of Memphis Law School — is now the leading Democratic candidate for that position, having spent his formative political years battling the leftovers of the erstwhile Ford Machine, first in the winning of a city council seat and, in 2014, his present seat in the Tennessee Senate, where his abilities so impressed his mere handful of party colleagues there (the state senate currently consists of 27 Republicans and but five Democrats) that they promptly elected him to serve as Minority Leader, days after he took his oath of office.
Lee Harris
Going into the county mayor’s race, Harris, an African American with a Morehouse/London School of Economics/Yale Law School pedigree, sees himself as a potential crossover candidate, with progressive-enough views to excite a youthful rank-and-file that may combine with his record of bipartisan relationships in Nashville to convince middle-of-the-road conservatives of his bona fides. He has reason to count on the loyalty of his party’s black voting core, and, potentially as well, to middle-class independents and moderate Republicans.
All this points to a kind of dilemma, of course — one that was illustrated in the course of a recent meet-and-greet in suburban Lakeland, when he was asked, point-blank, if he was “the liberal candidate.” The literal answer to that would be yes — among other things, Harris had been the sponsor on the city council of an anti-discrimination ordinance on behalf of the city’s LGBTQ community and, in the General Assembly, of economic-empowerment legislation aimed at the social under-class. In answering, however, Harris softened the edges of his politics, keeping to the profile of a Democrat who had co-sponsored bills with Republicans — notably criminal-justice reform measures introduced in tandem with the likes of arch-conservative GOP state Senator Brian Kelsey.
Harris has been no slouch on the financial front, his end-of-2017 disclosure form showing that he had raised $108,846 in the final quarter of last year. That contrasted with the meager fundraising of his one declared Democratic rival, longtime political broker Sidney Chism, who raised $10,555. Chism, the last county commissioner to serve consecutive terms as chairman, still has longstanding allies from his decades in the Teamster movement and a loyal following of sorts in South Memphis, but he has been reduced in stature from years of having to fight private battles, over the right to vote on the commission for wraparound services for his day-care centers, for example, or over his propensity to cozy up publically to Sheriff Bill Oldham when members of his own Democratic Party were seeking simultaneously to unseat that Republican office-holder.
Sidney Chism
At his late-fall campaign opener, Chism unloosed a stream of invective against Harris, whom he described as one “chosen by the fat boys that make the decisions for this town” and whom he resolved to “beat up on: morning, noon, and night.” It remains to be seen whether Chism has the means to do anything like that. More likely seems a scenario where Harris, who has artfully squeezed in bouts of campaigning during time off from his legislative obligations, will be fixed at the end of the primary cycle with enough spare change and political support to hold his own against whichever of the three Republicans survives their shootout with enough left over in the exchequer to make a general election race feasible.
At one time it seemed likely that another Democrat might run for county mayor in 2018. This would have been Harold Byrd of the Bank of Bartlett Byrds, a true gentleman of the business/political breed who, as president of that family-owned institution, has long been at the helm of a core suburban enterprise, which over the years has endowed many a successful politician with the means to success.
Byrd himself served several terms in the state House of Representatives and made an unsuccessful race for Congress before preparing to run for county mayor in 2002. He had gotten fairly along in that endeavor when some of the powers-that-be went out and recruited Public Defender A C Wharton as an alternative Democrat candidate. Byrd would eventually drop out as the dollar ante kept rising, but, ambition-wise, he was left with uncooked seeds.
The popular Byrd seemed to be a cinch to run and win in 2010, but that was a year in which his bank was still dealing with the aftermath of the Great Recession, while he himself was unexpectedly preoccupied with a battle against cancer. In the pink of health this year, with the bank business unthreatened, he took another extended look, but saw too many other candidates holding a piece of his platform, and regretfully decided against a last chance to finish cooking his seeds with another run this year.
If Byrd was a potential candidate past his time, another last-minute dropout was a candidate who may be well ahead of his. This would be Shea Flinn, member of one of the more unusual father-son political combinations to be found anywhere. He’s conspicuously more at ease, both in his own skin and in public circumstances, than his father, George Flinn, who has been hugely successful as a radiologist and broadcast executive but conspicuously less so as a Republican in several self-financed races for public office. Shea Flinn is universally considered the natural politician of the pair.
Flinn the Younger served a brief interim term as a Democratic state senator (thanks largely to his father’s service at the time on the Shelby County Commission, the body charged with filling vacancies), and maintained good relations on both sides of the aisle despite a penchant for proposing legislation significantly ahead of its time (like a proposal to legalize recreational marijuana outright). Shea Flinn was then elected to two terms on the city council, serving all of the first and most of the second as an influential, deadlock-breaking member before resigning in 2015 to accept a position as vice president of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce.
There he has remained, and may well stay for some time to come, having considered a county mayor’s race this year as an independent before finally abandoning that long-odds idea early in February. An avowed independent, his deadline would have been April 5 — but, to Flinn’s mind, the handwriting was already clear and legible on the wall. As a would-be apostle for the idea that only bipartisan elections can redeem the Founders’ small-d democratic dream, he explained his decision, “It became obvious to me that the partisan fever was not yet ready to break.”
Indeed, Flinn sees 2018 in the same way as the nation’s established punditry does, as a typical off-year opportunity for voters to levy judgment on the results so far of the previous presidential-year victor. The situation, as he perceived it, with known-quantity Democrats prepared to contest Republican dominance in major statewide races and with a flood of young Democratic unknowns ready to contest down-ballot races, was the mirror image of the Republicans’ party-building enthusiasm in the latter part of the previous century and with the Tea Party in more recent times. The Democratic candidacy of U of M law professor Harris more neatly fit into that pendulum-swing thesis, and, with clear reluctance, Flinn dropped back in the end — perhaps, as Byrd did this year, to check his options again at another later time.
So the county-mayor field is set. Three strong Republicans — Roland, Lenoir, Touliatos — will conclude their elimination contest in May, with one of them left alive and kicking, and maybe with enough money left to take on the Democrat Harris. It may or may not be a change year politically, but it certainly does look to be an entertaining one. Stay tuned.
Jackson Baker covers local politics in the Memphis Flyer; you can keep up with his 2018 election coverage at memphisflyer.com.
