Saturday, May 10, 2008

The "race" for Alexander's Senate seat...or what race?

Many of you may know that seats are up for grabs in the US Senate in states like Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon but there is also a Senate race right here in good ol' Tennessee. Wait, you haven't heard about it? I'm not surprised. The powers that be in the TN Democratic Party are making no more than a whimper challenging Lamar Alexander(R-TN) for his seat, and I can find little, if any information about the race. Here's what we know. Bob Tuke, former TN Democratic Party chair, is running against Alexander, but being a Tennessean, I didn't know he existed until oh roughly 20 minutes ago, and I'm assuming that holds true for most Tennesseans.

This is a race that can be won, even though Alexander is popular, if we run someone that is known state wide and is popular in the state(i.e. Bredesen), yet most people believe that the popular Democrats in the state aren't willing to waste their chance against him and I think they are waiting for Corker's seat to be up for grabs(people in TN still don't know who he is and he's been our Senator for 2 years), or for the 2014 election where, if keeping with TN tradition, Alexander would retire leaving the race open.

It will be interesting to see if the Anti-Republican sentiment in the state will be enough to carry it for Tuke, or if the Democrats have once again blundered an opportunity in this purple state which they all but ignore every single election cycle.

If Al Gore would have carried the Clinton territory of Tennessee, Arkansas, and West Virginia then we wouldn't have had 8 years of George W. Bush.


-Zak

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mike Padgett is also running for Senate, and the last poll I saw had them both (him and Tuke) around 30% with a large majority going who are these people?

One of the things that I found discouraging is the state party is not going to be focusing on this race at all, they want to work on the state legislature.

Zak said...

I have heard they are going to focus on the state legislature as well. It's nice in theory, but we still have a chance to win that Senate Seat.