Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Clint Brewer in-studio to discuss the race in several different Tennessee congressional districts.
Leahy: In-studio, recovering journalist, public affairs specialist, all-around good guy, Clint Brewer. Clint, the 7th Congressional District now contains parts of Davidson County, parts of Montgomery, parts of Williamson. I don’t have all the details of it because all of the heat has been on the 5th district.
But now we have this announcement that Odessa Kelly is challenging the incumbent, Mark Green, a Republican. It’s gone from an R plus-42 district to an R plus-21 district.
Odessa Kelly, for some reason, chose to challenge an incumbent in an R plus-21 district, the new 7th district, when she could have challenged somebody who’s not an incumbent in the 5th District, which is now part of Davidson County and part of Wilson and Williamson.
Brewer: She’s a Nashville native. It could be an honest decision. She may just live there, right?
Leahy: Good point.
Brewer: I mean, she is a Nashville native. We talked a lot about new people. Now, I’ll say this, the listeners here are probably not familiar with Odessa at all. I don’t agree with a lot of what she believes and her political views, but I will say this: she’s a fierce competitor.
Leahy: She’s a fierce competitor. She played ball at Tennessee State.
Brewer: She was an all-American at Tennessee State.
Leahy: Was she an all-American?
Brewer: She was.
Leahy: That’s pretty good.
Brewer: She played in the WNBA.
Leahy:Â When did she play in the WNBA?
Brewer: I don’t know the exact years, but I know she was on a roster for the WNBA for a while. She made a team. She’s gone back to school. She’s very well educated. Again, I have a lot of respect for her as somebody in the political realm.
Leahy: Do you think she’d come in studio, talk to us?
Brewer: I don’t know.
Leahy: Probably not.
Brewer: I don’t know.
Leahy: We’ll invite her. She’s a Lefty. Her whole campaign is, I’m gay, I’m all for LGBTQ. That’s my big issue. And she loves the Green New Deal.
Brewer: I think her big issue, too, is …
Leahy: She hates guns.
Brewer: The economics of Nashville a little bit. She’s very pro-union.
Leahy: But Nashville, it’s only maybe a third of that district is Davidson County, maybe a fourth.
Brewer: The nonprofit that she founded and helped found, Stand Up Nashville, was really built around not those issues you just listed, but it was built more around finding a way to create working-class wages, living wages for working-class folks in Nashville.
Now, a lot of that was built around the concept of creating union jobs. But just having encountered her in the public sphere on various things, is she statistically going to put up a fight with Congressman Green?
I don’t know that in a district that hard … if she’s going to really make a dent. But, I mean, she will compete and she will have a lot to say. And it will be a campaign with some prices.
Leahy: She’s raised half a million bucks, but she’s only got $162,000 left. She’s going after Mark Green. Mark Green’s got plenty of money in the bank, and he’s going to raise money off of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenges.
Brewer: Yeah, he is.
Leahy: I don’t see her necessarily being able to raise a lot of money going forward.
Brewer: I think there was a lot of energy around her campaign with the more progressive end of Nashville just because Jim Cooper had been there so long. And he represented a lot of things that the more progressive side of Nashville is tired of seeing. And I think there’s a lot of energy around her campaign when she was in a primary against Jim Cooper. Now, IÂ just don’t know.
Leahy: It doesn’t seem like a lot of energy.
Brewer: Yes. I think that it’ll still be a very well-run campaign. I think that she will still make a lot of news and a lot of noise. I think it will be well done. Now, will it be competitive statistically when the polls come in? I don’t believe so.
Leahy: Probably not.
Brewer: But I’ll say this. There’s a prevailing thought in Metro government circles that she’s continued to stick with the congressional race to run for something else, possibly mayor of Nashville.
Leahy: That would make sense.
Brewer: It would make sense.
Leahy: Now, that actually would make a lot of sense.
Brewer: Yeah, it does, actually.
Leahy: To set her up, to get her name ID out there and then run for mayor of Nashville.
Brewer:Â I mean, she’s a shrewd player and she’s got good people running her campaign. You know how I feel about campaign staff.
Leahy: And she’s a far-Lefty, Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez-new-Green-Deal, LGBTQ supporter.
Brewer: But she’s not a carpetbagger.
Leahy: Absolutely! That’s very good.
Brewer: She is as far from being a carpetbagger as she could be. She grew up here.
Leahy:Â And I’ll bet you Odessa Kelly could name every single interstate.
Brewer: I bet Odessa Kelly could ask you some questions about Nashville that you don’t know.
Leahy: I bet you she could name every road in Nashville. Is she like the Parks Commission director or something? She works in the parks.
Brewer: She did.
Leahy: Let’s take a look at the 6th Congressional District. They divided Davidson County up into three parts. And it looks like there will be no challenge to the U.S. House.
It looks like to me. No federal court challenge on it. There’s still some time left, but probably if they haven’t filed a challenge by the filing deadline of April 7, there probably won’t be one.
Brewer: This is the court challenge to the redistricting plan at large.
Leahy: They challenged it in North Carolina and Ohio, and it’s been a mess everywhere.
Brewer: There’s a state court challenge here, as I recall there was an unfavorable ruling.
Leahy: A state court challenge. Has there been a ruling on it?
Brewer: I kind of thought there was. Maybe not.
Leahy: Unfavorable to what? To the challenge?
Brewer: To the challenge. Well, that would make sense and it wasn’t really a top-level legal team going after it. They were challenging the redistricting plan for the state legislature, not for the USA.
Leahy: Let’s talk about John Rose in the 6th Congressional District. He’s got part of Davidson County and then he’s also got parts of Wilson County and parts of other counties to the east of Nashville. I don’t think there’s any Democrat looking to challenge him from what I can tell.
Brewer: I can’t imagine there is. It’s a solidly Republican district, as you’ll find.
Leahy: I wasn’t so sure who he was and what he was about. He was challenged by Bob Corlew and he won by about a dozen points. But I think he turned out to be a very down-home and steady conservative vote in Congress.
Brewer: No, I’d agree with that. I’m a very friendly guy. Former state commissioner of Agriculture. He’s a business guy. He’s from Cookeville. He’s really maintained his roots in Cookville.
Leahy: He has.
Brewer: Always been a big proponent of agriculture in the state.
Leahy: So here’s the question we’ve been looking at the carpetbaggers galore that are jumping into the Tennessee 5th district. This David Vitalli character from Orange County, New York, who was bragging about his house there in May of 2021.
He had a helipad there that could get [him] to Manhattan in 15 minutes. Moved here and bought a house in June, registered to vote in June. He’s not going to make it on the ballot, I don’t think. And by the way, he said in that interview if he got elected here in Congress, he’s going to run for President. 2024. That sounds like a plan. (Laughs)
Brewer: We got 18 of them. Let’s have a carpetbagger-versus -Tennessee-natives softball game.
Leahy: The carpetbaggers versus the Tennesseans. I think I go for the Tennesseans in that one. But to just shift gears, who’s going to run on the Democratic side in that district?
Brewer: I couldn’t tell you. I just hadn’t heard any names. I really haven’t.
Listen to the full interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Odessa Kelly” by Odessa Kelly for Congress.
