Memphis City Council member Worth Morgan says his exploratory campaign for Shelby County mayor is now official — he is running in the May 2022 Republican primary to challenge Democratic incumbent mayor Lee Harris.

With an email announcement Monday, Oct. 11, Morgan said, “while other communities around the country have thrived, Shelby County has settled for less than the status quo.”

No evidence of vaccine irregularities, Harris says

The announcement didn’t mention Harris by name but pointed to Harris’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview Monday with The Daily Memphian, Morgan went further into vaccine distribution on the county’s watch “and the chaos that ensued under the county’s management.”

State concludes health department needs more training, better chain of command

“The authority of the county to distribute the vaccine was removed by the state government over eight months and it just now has been restored,” he said. “It wasn’t that complicated and the city was able to do it where the county wasn’t. I think that was a major failure of county government early on in vaccine distribution.”

As a council member, Morgan has had issues with some pandemic measures, abstaining on several council resolutions and expressing opposition to state measures that stopped short of mask mandates.

Council member explains his position on resolutions

Morgan said his concern was “the City Council’s authority to weigh in on it” and others “trying to impose themselves in the decision-making process.”

“This goes back to the failure of county leadership where there was a void in leadership and authority I think coming from the county and coming from certain administrations,” he said. “That wasn’t the proper place or the proper government entity to be handling that. But people were getting involved because there wasn’t clear leadership.”

Harris has said Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s administration removed county government from distribution of the vaccine without fully examining a complex vaccine process that began with no firm dates on when more doses would be available in an unprecedented public health emergency.

Harris is expected to seek reelection. He appointed a treasurer for his re-election campaign in 2019, a year into his current term of office.

But so far, Harris has not formally opened his re-election bid.

Harris re-election speculation and ‘People’s Summit’ stir political pot

Candidates in the May 2022 county primaries cannot pull or file qualifying petitions with the Shelby County Election Commission to get on the ballot until Dec. 20.

With Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket in the 2018 elections, Democrats swept every countywide elected position on the ballot that year and improved the Democratic majority on the County Commission from seven members to eight.

JB Smiley Jr. ready to take his shot at being governor

Opposition to Republican President Donald Trump in the majority Democratic county was given partial credit for the sweep four years after Republicans swept every countywide office in the 2014 elections, and in 2010 before that.

“I think and believe and know that local voters are more interested in the person that’s in front of them necessarily than the party politics,” Morgan said of partisan political lines. “There’s a much more human element to elections and solving problems on the ground in Memphis and Shelby County.”

Moody talks challenging Harris in Democratic county mayor’s primary

Meanwhile, Ken Moody, a special assistant to Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, announced last month that he is exploring a challenge of Harris in the Democratic primary. Moody said his candidacy isn’t dependent on Harris being in the race.

County Commissioner Van Turner had been looking at a bid for county mayor in the Democratic primary but only if Harris did not seek a second term.

Turner announced earlier this year that he is instead exploring a bid for Memphis mayor in 2023 under the assumption that Harris will run again for county mayor.

Van Turner weighs 2023 bid for mayor

“You’ll hear this be a theme throughout the campaign, is that we deserve better from our local government, that we simply deserve better,” Morgan said of his message.

“We are not currently getting the level of services that we deserve. We know that the crime rates shouldn’t be as high as they are,” he said. “We know that poverty shouldn’t feel inevitable. We know that our relationships with state government shouldn’t be broken.”

Morgan is serving his second term on the council and is currently chairman of its budget committee — arguably the most critical committee chairmanship on the body of 13.

Complex judicial races and issues bloom ahead of 2022 elections

Morgan, the son of financier and Morgan Keegan & Co. regional brokerage firm founder Allen Morgan Jr., makes his living from his investments detailed in an annual state disclosure required of elected officials.

He won his first term on the council representing District 5 — taking in a lot of Midtown and parts of Binghampton and East Memphis — in 2015 in a hard-fought field of seven that went to a November runoff with Dan Springer. Morgan won by 122 votes in a total runoff turnout of 6,634 voters.

The amount spent by Morgan in the last 4 1/2 months of campaigning that year, including the runoff campaign, was $304,932 by campaign finance disclosures, compared to $70,977 by Springer over the same period.

Bonner kicks off re-election bid for sheriff as others open 2022 campaigns

The six figures spent was comparable to the amount spent on some super-district council races covering half of the county, or even a modest campaign for citywide or countywide office in contrast with the smaller single-member council districts.

Harris reported spending $118,707 in the last month of his winning 2018 general election campaign. Republican mayoral nominee David Lenoir spent $204,213 over the same period.

Morgan said he expected a similar type of campaign to his 2015 council race with or without rivals in the Republican primary. But he declined to say what specific dollar amount he has set for the upcoming campaign.

“I think that would be an aspect of campaign strategy that we are not quite ready to talk about,” Morgan said. “I expect to do something similar but on a much larger scale for this Shelby County race.”