The Democratic primary for Shelby County mayor on the May ballot is more than a disagreement on issues between incumbent Lee Harris and challenger Ken Moody – it’s a disagreement on the basic priorities of the office.

Harris has said his priority is to improve the lives of “working class and middle class” Memphians when it comes to access to health care and a living wage.

He’s been blunt that issues like economic development incentives aren’t his priority, referring to some specific uses of the incentives as “corporate welfare.”

“The only thing I focus on is talking to voters and trying to understand what their needs are and trying to convince them that I am the best candidate to advocate for those needs,” Harris told The Daily Memphian in December when he kicked off his reelection bid.

“I don’t talk about corporate interests. I don’t talk about subsidies or any of these issues. I try to go to the mat on behalf of the middle-class families, working families.”

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The interview was a rare instance of Harris talking about his campaign strategy, revealing a tightly-disciplined approach to that strategy down to sticking to his schedule of opening his campaign at the end of 2021.

Those remarks came as other Democrats on the 2022 county ballot expressed concerns privately about the timing.

Harris’ discipline extends to a specific set of issues that are national in scope and defined by sharp partisan divisions.

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Moody doesn’t necessarily disagree with Harris on the issues. He disagrees with them being his primary thrust to the exclusion of others.

“There’s nothing wrong with that. People deserve a living wage. We need to make sure people have affordable and available health care,” Moody said on The Daily Memphian’s On The Record podcast.

“But there are just so many other problems we have,” he said, citing crime, a high poverty rate and children not reading at grade level. “Those are the only two things for the last four years he can highlight that he’s focused on. Our county faces many more problems.”

Harris argues there are also other countywide elected officials outside the county administration he heads who have specific responsibilities in those other areas, including the Shelby County Sheriff and the Juvenile Court Judge.

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This past week, the Shelby County Commission approved $74,700 in funding for three juvenile counselors in Memphis Police precincts to divert children from unnecessary contact with the juvenile justice system.

They would match three counselors already working in police precincts.

Harris and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael announced the move together after Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland – in several speeches – said the court has become a “revolving door” for violent juveniles and that the county should provide more funding.

“No punishment, no intervention, no rehabilitation,” Strickland told the Frayser Exchange Club last month. “County government is 100% responsible for the juvenile justice system and they should provide more resources to the court and the assessment center.”

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Strickland kept his reference to county government general.

Moody, an assistant to Strickland, did not.

“We’ve been screaming for more support to Juvenile Court for more than three years, maybe four years,” Moody said on the podcast. “And I think it is quite coincidental that the response now comes two months before early voting starts. It’s not a coincidence.”

Asked if he has Strickland’s political backing, Moody said: “I will not speak to whether Mayor Strickland is supporting my overall challenge. The mayor and I are in constant conversation. We’ve got a great relationship.”

Strickland also has a practice of not criticizing other elected officials with different views and practices unless or until they politically attack him. He is just as disciplined in that approach as Harris is in his political approach.

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Moody says the same dissatisfaction with an incumbent mayor that led to Strickland upsetting Memphis Mayor AC Wharton in the 2015 nonpartisan city elections is present in the run-up to the May Democratic primary.

“I do know there is a dissatisfaction,” Moody said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m running. … He has not been visible. He has not been responsive. He has not been involved. He has not been engaged.”

The county elections are partisan and Harris ran in 2018 as the leader of a blue wave locally that saw Democrats win every countywide office on the ballot and improve their majority on the Shelby County Commission from seven to eight seats on the 13-member body.

He’s running again as the leader of the Democratic slate in a county that is majority Democratic and where the 2018 blue wave was a significant reaction to the state’s move from Republican red to Trump red two years earlier.

That red is also present in the solidly Republican suburbs within the county but just outside the city limits – the largest Republican base of voters in a single county in the state.

Those Republican voters have one contested county primary on their ballot in May – the Shelby County Commission District 4 primary.

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The juvenile counselors come near the end of a four-year term that saw deep differences between Harris and some of the commission’s Democratic majority on whether to move first on a new juvenile detention center or an assessment center designed to lessen contact with the system for juveniles.

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When the assessment center got off the ground, it was only temporary because of a dispute over whether juveniles would go from custody to the center or would be given the option of going to the center with their parents or guardians later.

Last year, Harris and others hit the reset button on such a center with the city providing the old Raleigh branch library building.

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Republican District Attorney General Amy Weirich has been vocal that the counseling at the center needs to begin as soon as juveniles are in custody.

Moody attributes the problem to a communications gap between Harris and his majority on the commission.

“The challenge he has is because there’s not been cooperation with his legislative partners at County Commission,” he said. “When they hear issues for the first time at the same time that you and other citizens are hearing it -- that’s not respectful.”

“Many of the concerns, not just with this assessment center but just overall, in the way he has operated with his legislative partners requires them to have some pushback,” Moody said.

But Harris has open support from most of the eight Democrats on the commission. Some others who have hit the two-term limit on the commission are staying neutral at least for now as they run for countywide offices this year.

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The only Democrat elected countywide four years ago who is running unopposed this year is Sheriff Floyd Bonner.

Harris’s most vocal critics on the commission have been Democratic commissioners Edmund Ford Jr. and Eddie Jones – in that order.

The differences between Ford and Harris go back to their time together on the Memphis City Council.

Jones’ differences are primarily over budget issues and the traditional friction between the administration and commissioners over how projects in the budget are prioritized.

Harris has said the primary will be hard fought. And if he wins, Harris will face much of the same criticism from Republican nominee and Memphis City Council member Worth Morgan, who is running unopposed in the May companion primary.

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Like Morgan, Moody is a vocal critic of the county’s handling of the COVID vaccine distribution that the state took from the county and moved to the city.

“The county tried to handle it by themselves,” Moody said. “It takes a collaborative effort to bring people together to address an issue. That’s what we did on the city side when we took over.”

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But most of the Democratic county commissioners have said they believe the state overreacted to reports of problems with vaccine distribution and that the dispute had partisan overtones.

Republican commissioners were vocal critics of the Shelby County Health Department’s handling of it and by extension Harris’s administration.

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Moody wanted a one-on-one matchup in the Democratic primary and saw two other Democrats miss making the ballot because they didn’t have enough qualified signatures on their qualifying petitions.

“I know that there are just stark differences between us,” Moody said of the matchup. “And I think that when you’ve got two choices and people can look at each person for their record, for their skill set, for their abilities -- it’s an easier decision for people to make.”