Tom Pappert Questions Media Coverage of Competing Tennessee Governor Polls After Blackburn Survey Shows 17-Point Lead

Kaitlin Housler
Marsha Blackburn

Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said the latest internal polling conducted by President Donald Trump’s 2024 chief pollster shows U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) maintaining a commanding lead in Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial primary, while questioning the credibility and media coverage of a competing survey.

Speaking during an appearance Monday on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pappert discussed the poll released Friday by Fabrizio, Lee and Associates, which found Blackburn leading the Republican primary field with 42 percent support, followed by U.S. Representative John Rose (R-TN-06) at 25 percent and State Representative Monty Fritts (R-Kingston) at 22 percent.

Pappert emphasized the reputation of the polling firm behind the survey.

“Tony Fabrizio and his firm…did the poll work for President Donald Trump in 2024. Tony Fabrizio was Trump’s chief pollster, and they’re widely regarded as one of, if not, the most accurate pollsters of the last election, and even going back to 2020. They are simply the best in the country,” Pappert said.

Discussing the survey’s findings, Pappert noted that the results were consistent with previous polling throughout the campaign.

“The results of the poll had Marsha Blackburn leading as virtually every poll, I think actually every poll released since January 2025 has,” Pappert said. “It showed her leading by 17 points. She was ahead, but of course, of John Rose, who is behind distantly at 25 points, and Monty Fritts, who is behind at 22 points in third place.”

Leahy contrasted the Fabrizio poll with a separate survey released by OnMessage Inc. (ONI), arguing that the Fabrizio poll publicly disclosed its methodology while criticizing the ONI survey for not releasing comparable methodological details.

Pappert also took issue with how The Tennessean reported on the competing poll, saying the outlet failed to disclose ONI’s previous ties to Rose.

“I saw that in the beginning of the article, they said there’s some internal Marsha Blackburn polling that shows she’s ahead. But we found this other poll from OnMessage Inc., they call themselves, and that one shows the race in a dead heat, and they did not disclose that interesting relationship that you just said,” Pappert said.

Pappert added that he had recently learned of additional connections between ONI and Rose.

“I think I just saw information this morning that showed that they previously did work for John Rose dating back to 2018,” Pappert said. “So it sounds like maybe it’s not the same level of official internal poll as the Rose campaign, but they described it as though it is just a poll that came up out of nowhere, and it has no history or no connections to any of the three candidates whatsoever.”

The Fabrizio, Lee and Associates poll surveyed 800 likely Republican primary voters in Tennessee between July 26-28 and reported a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Thursday’s Republican gubernatorial primary will determine the GOP nominee for governor.

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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
Photo “Marsha Blackburn” by Marsha Blackburn. 

 

 

 

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