The Tennessee Star made you a promise about U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) last year — and we’re keeping it.
Although the various political science departments, polling companies and pundits won’t remind you of their consistently flawed polling processes, questionable data and woefully inaccurate assessments during the next election cycle…we will.
We made that promise on November 9, 2018 after Blackburn won the U.S. Senate race against Democratic former Gov. Phil Bredesen by double digits. Blackburn handily won retiring U.S. Sen. Bob Corker’s Republican-held seat by a 10.8 percent margin.
From last year’s story:
Poll after poll, and pundit after pundit, claimed that the Bredesen-Blackburn Tennessee Senate race was “close.” It was consistently portrayed as one of the best opportunities for the Democrats to flip a Red seat to Blue in the mid-term elections. But when voters actually cast their votes, as opposed to pollsters calling a few hundred people who were often targeted for calls based upon flawed data, Marsha Blackburn earned the title of “Senator” by a 10.8 percent margin, leaving pollsters red-faced and Democrats despondent.
An East Tennessee State University poll released just days before the Election claimed the race was a 44-44% dead heat. Vanderbilt said the battle was a “tossup” and had Bredesen leading by one in mid October.
Real Clear Politics moved the race from “lean GOP” to “tossup” on November 5 — the day before the election! They only missed it by double digits.
A new video compilation is making the rounds that underscores how so many “experts” couldn’t see what was actually happening in Tennessee. Despite the best efforts of the pollsters, establishment media and some consultants to undercut the Blackburn campaign at every turn, SENATOR Blackburn prevailed.
Liberals were so despondent about Bredesen’s “unexpected” loss they threatened on Twitter to leave the state, The Star reported.
One has only to visit Sen. Blackburn’s Senate press release page, available here, to view the number of bills she has worked on and causes she has tackled in only one year. All this from a conservative candidate the mainstream media desperately wanted you to believe would lose.
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Jason M. Reynolds has more than 20 years’ experience as a journalist at outlets of all sizes.
What should be remembered about Marsha Blackburn’s Senate race is how the Tennessee Republican Party did what it could to make her primary election a Soviet style election.
Bredesen lost because he blew it with his attempt to out-Republican Marsha Blackburn. He evidently thought that his liberal leftist base of voters would have nowhere else to go and would, thus, stay grudgingly loyal to him while his right-wing strategy would simultaneously woo a hung chunk of rightist voters to his side.
He found out a little different when many leftist and progressive voters decided to boycott his election effort out of disgust towards his disrespect of progressive and leftist voters. He even did worse than Ford, Jr. did against Corker (who was less conservative than Bredesen!). As for the rightist voters, they were going to stick with the G,O.P. anyway.
It did not surprise me that he lost. He should have learned from Jim Cooper’s even bigger loss in 1994 to Fred Thompson.
Bredesen failed to go hunting where the ducks were, to steal a Barry Goldwater quote. Maybe Bredesen was secretly in cahoots with the Tennessee G.O.P. and secretly wanted Blackburn to beat him. In any event, Bredesen’s campaign scarred off a lot of more able Democrats such as Jim Makler from running. Progressives and leftists should blame Bredesen’s strategy for preventing Tennessee from going blue in 2018!
If Bredesen had bothered to look across the state line to Georgia, he would have seen that a leftist like Stacey Abrahms, although losing, still did far better than he in her race!