Avoiding the Obvious

The Commercial Appeal has a story about new poll numbers in the County Mayoral race. In a nutshell, Democrat AC Wharton has 46%; Republican George Flinn has 27%; 23% remain undecided. The poll surveyed 600 Shelby Countians with a margin of error of 4%. It did not survey likely voters.

The story tries to make much of Wharton's "support from a more diverse population." It also quotes Rhodes College polisci professor Michael Nelson, a sometime media expert, in a rehashing of Flinn's recent and recurring ad distancing himself from the "backroom deals" that shoved through the new NBA arena. Nelson calls Flinn's ad a "Hail Mary pass. He's transformed himself into a kind of anti-establishment populist."

Well, duh! Republicans saw the writing on the wall this year: that demographics make it a near certainty that the County will elect a black mayor. They also read the tea leaves of blame: the next mayor will be stuck with some very hard choices regarding city-county consolidation and repayment of the County's $1 billion-plus debt. It's a no-win scenario for the winner. They had tremendous difficulty finding a good candidate and finally got the game Larry Scroggs to make a go of it. Flinn, sensing an opportunity, decided to jump into the race, flattening the indifferent Scroggs in the process and royally angering the Republican establishment with his victory. Flinn's always been the "anti-establishment" guy!

AC's been damned near unbeatable since Sir Isaac Ford (His real name, we swear.) dropped his quixotic run as an independent. It's a simple, obvious fact of Memphis politics that the black vote is almost always monolithic and the white vote diverse. Ford's dropping out ended any potential splitting of that monolith. With blacks making up somewhere between 55 and 60% of the County's population and voting 95% Democratic, with the white population divided into Democrats and Republicans about 1 to 3, an AC victory has been all but assured for weeks now.

It would take a real catastrophe for AC to lose, but he's been remaining low and seldom saying much beyond boilerplate. The CA hasn't done much in the way of stories on him, other than the usual profiles. While they have been making great hay of Flinn (see the above story), they seem not at all interested in Wharton's history of legal clients, which might upset or anger a lot of white and black voters. FOX13 News has a debate scheduled for Thursday of next week, so something may come of that.

In the meantime, the CA continues to pretend there's a contest here. Mostly to hype the story and sell papers. Partly to bash on Republicans.

Until next time, that is all.