The chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party says Tennessee got “redder” in the 2020 election year but Scott Golden says the party’s national fortunes are a different matter.

“They are certainly not happy,” Golden said of the mood of Republican National Committee members in Jacksonville, Florida, this month.

The RNC’s winter meeting came the day after Democrats claimed both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia to have a majority of the Senate with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris and the day of the Capitol riot.

“A lot of the campaign in 2020 was centered around who they didn’t like,” Golden said on The Daily Memphian Politics Podcast. “We didn’t really talk about what we were for. As those things start to unfold over the next two years and some of the things that have been talked about recently, I’ve got to believe that a lot of people, at least in the Republican party, are pretty bullish on what our prospects are in 2022.”

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Tempering the loss of the White House and Senate in the November election, Golden points to a narrower margin between the Democratic majority and the Republican minority in the House.

But he had little to say about the impact on the party’s fortunes of the Capitol riot and President Donald Trump’s second impeachment by the House in the space of a year for incitement to an insurgency that left five people dead.

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Golden questioned the path to impeachment without committee hearings.

“At the RNC, there was a working pipe bomb placed outside of it,” Golden said after condemning the riot. “These people didn’t listen to the president’s speech and then go make a pipe bomb and drop it off at the RNC building. … Honestly, the Congress should probably be investigating a little bit more as to what happened before we start making political moves. And unfortunately, they had a vote -- no hearing.”

A pipe bomb was also found at Democratic National Committee headquarters.

The impeachment vote in the House also included the support of 10 Republican members.

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On the campaign trail to the November election, Golden cited 10 years of Republican majorities in the state House and state Senate that have since become super majorities in each chamber.

It’s also been 20 years since Tennessee became a red state with the presidential election results in 2000 when Republican George W. Bush took Democratic nominee Al Gore’s home state.

“We’re still relatively new at this from a state perspective,” he said. “It’s been a relatively short reign of Republican dominance in the state of Tennessee.”

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In the 2020 Tennessee results, there were some suburban areas in other parts of the state that were purple – some mix of Republican and Democratic.

“When you get a different looking map, you are going to get some different issues that are going to be important,” Golden said. “The suburbs are going to be the battle going forward. We’ve got to have a message that appeals to the suburban areas.”

The talk of a shift in Republican strategy comes as Tennessee Democrats are talking of changes in their strategy as well.

Tennessee Democratic Party executive committee members meet online Saturday, Jan. 16, to elect a new party chairman. Outgoing Democratic Chairman Mary Mancini announced election night in November that she would not seek another term.

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The call for a new Democratic strategy and coalition is the result of Republican nominee Bill Hagerty’s win by a wide margin over Democratic nominee Marquita Bradshaw in the 2020 race for the Senate seat Republican Lamar Alexander left at the end of the year.

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Some Democrats question whether the party is ready to challenge Republicans in statewide races or should instead focus on races for seats in the Tennessee General Assembly before moving to credible and better funded bids for governor and U.S. Senate.