So looks like we won Shelby County (duh) and flipped some offices there, good. Of course we won, it takes disaster tier dem candidates to lose a majority black county lol, but the margins we got out of shelby tonight were absolutely pathetic, We should be winning by more than teen mov's in Shelby County TN.
The margins don't matter because....
ITT Tender shows his lack of understanding of Southern politics and primaries.
In the vast majority of TN - both geographically and population-wise - the GOP rules. Everywhere else, Dems already dominate; virtually no competitive areas. That's important to understand in the context of primaries, as many voters from the opposing party vote in the dominant party's primary for influence. However, throughout most of the South, it's a one-way affair; i.e. GOP voters in Democratic areas vote in the GOP primary, and DEM voters in GOP areas also vote in the GOP primary. That's because the GOP top-ticket contests are always either important or contested, whereas the DEM contests aren't. That's why GOP ballots are 43% in Shelby County, 70% in Knox County, 74% in Williamson County and 5-15 points more GOP than in general elections everywhere else.
With nothing remotely competitive at the top of the ballot in the Democratic primary, of course practically every GOP voter + like one-third of Dems are going to pull a GOP ballot. It's very important to also point out that a huge element of this trend has nothing to do with whether DEM/GOP primaries have contested top-ticket races: much of it is fueled by local offices. People want to influence who is going to represent them, and in the vast majority of TN, that means voting in the GOP primary to pick the de-facto winner. This happens almost everywhere in the South, and it's nothing new.
A little-known secret is that 20-25% of Southern GOP primary voters in open states are actually Democrats, lol.
