More than 31,000 Memphians had voted early through Tuesday, Sept. 26, passing the totals for the same period during 2015 and 2019 city elections.

The 31,367 total votes cast represent 8.4% of the city’s 373,091 registered voters, according to the Shelby County Election Commission’s September report on voter registration. 

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The Tuesday total is 1,584 — or 5.3% — more early voters than the same point in 2019 early voting and 783 more — or 2.6% — than in 2015.

A total of 52,718 early and absentee ballots were cast in the 2019 and 51,840 in 2015.

The highest turnout day in the last two city elections was the next-to-last day of the early voting period, a trend in most Shelby County election cycles.

That would be this Friday, Sept. 29, the same day the Memphis Area Transit Authority is offering free service throughout its system to encourage voting.

Early voting in the last two city elections was about half of the total turnout, which includes early, absentee and election day votes.

Total turnout in the 2015 election, when Mayor Jim Strickland upset incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, was 28% — or 102,176 of the city’s 364,451 registered voters at the time.

For Strickland’s 2019 re-election, 26.7%, or 96,959 of the city’s 362,535 registered voters, cast ballots.

Turner’s blue wave quest

Several progressive political action committees are working to transform mayoral contender Van Turner’s campaign into the kind of “blue wave” seen in the 2018 and 2022 countywide elections.

Democrats swept every countywide office and increased the Democratic majority on the Shelby County Commission in each of those elections.

Among those speaking to the group of 50 including Turner campaign workers fresh from early voting sites was Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris.

“We’ve got one last race left,” Harris told the group in linking Turner’s blue wave quest in nonpartisan city elections to the earlier Democratic sweeps in the partisan county government elections.

“If we can do that, I think that’s the death knell to all of this idea that all you have to do is get the corporate community behind you in order to win,” Harris told The Daily Memphian later.

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“If Van Turner wins this, it will prove once again — for the last time I hope — that what matters is the people,” he said. “That’s what happened in 2018 and that’s what happened in 2022.”

Harris was elected county mayor in 2018 and re-elected in 2022 — each time running a campaign that linked arms with other partisan county races.

The Democratic sweeps came after Republicans swept every countywide office on the ballot in 2010 and every countywide office except Assessor in 2014.

The Republican sweep was a matter of recruiting candidates able to get crossover votes from Democrats and independents.

The Democratics sweeps that followed in 2018 and 2022 were built on a reformation of the local Democratic party in 2016.

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That was followed by emphasizing the Democratic majority in the county in a more politically polarized national and statewide political environment.

“I think it took us a while to unify — that’s the reality. Just as a matter of leveraging power, I think progressives in town were not as unified as they should be,” Harris said.

“We’ve seen lots of tumult in the local party for example, lots of splintering, lots of debate, lots of long meetings, lots of failure to execute what are obviously Democratic objectives,” he said. “I think a lot of that faded away in 2018.”

Harris thinks 2022 saw an expansion of the Democratic reach even as the state remained red — or Republican — especially with Democrat Steve Mulroy upsetting Republican incumbent Amy Weirich in the race for District Attorney General, by running on a platform of criminal justice reform.

“He was able to bring in all of the national Democratic partners to support the campaign,” Harris said of Mulroy. “We spent more money on our side (than Republicans) in a people-powered campaign.”

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If there is a blue wave in the city elections, it could accelerate a move by some Democrats on the City Council who want to put a city charter change to voters next year that would allow partisan primaries starting with the 2027 city elections.

Partisan primaries are specifically barred currently in the city’s charter.

The thinking of City Council chairman Martavius Jones is that city elections have become nonpartisan only in not having such primaries.

Jones believes the lines between Republicans and Democrats on the council are already a political fact of life without formal party labels on the ballot.

Some on the council favor a move to instead reinstate a runoff provision in the mayor’s race over allowing primaries.

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They aren’t ready to vote for a charter referendum just yet, with the current council leaving office at the end of this year and the new council taking office in January.

But they see the need for some kind of change to narrow the nonpartisan fields in the race for mayor that with no runoff makes it possible to win without a majority of the votes cast.

Several critics of making city elections partisan have cited the 17-candidate field for mayor on the October ballot as an incentive to put some kind of structural change to voters.

But they don’t favor primaries.

That includes some supporters of Turner, like council member Jeff Warren, who was among those who spoke at the Wednesday event.

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Warren is running unopposed for a second term and will be part of the new council in January.

“That I think is going to take discussion among us on what we think is a better way than just partisan politics,” he said during a Tuesday council committee discussion on the proposed ballot questions. “I don’t think partisan elections will help our body. I think it just divides people.”

Warren also wants to explore possibly changing the structure of council districts.

Turner was not present at Wednesday’s rally and fundraiser in Midtown that was about the broader ideological reach of the political action committees.

“You can’t coordinate with them,” Democratic state Representative Justin J. Pearson told the group of 50 referring to direct ties and coordination between the PACs and specific campaigns.

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“So Van can’t come here because then I would go to jail,” Pearson said of the rally by his “Movement for Justice” PAC and the “People for Fairness and Justice” PAC.

The joke about jail is a reference to the illegal coordination behind former Republican state Senator Brian Kelsey’s recent guilty plea and jail sentence on federal campaign finance charges stemming from his 2016 bid for Congress.

Gershun Freeman

Mayoral contender and Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner Jr.’s Sept. 20 “Behind The Headlines” interview signaled a new campaign offensive.

In the interview and a press conference later the same day, Bonner said the March video release of Gershun Freeman’s fatal encounter with jail deputies in October was “illegal.”

Bonner accused Shelby County District Attorney General Steve Mulroy of “handpicking” Nashville DA Glenn Funk to handle the investigation into Freeman’s death. Mulroy said he did not handpick Funk and left the choice to the state’s DA conference. 

Bonner also announced a grand jury had indicted nine deputies in the case while expressing his support for those deputies.

Several of Bonner’s mayoral rivals were quick to react.

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After the interview and press conference, Michelle McKissack, a Memphis-Shelby County Schools board member who is running for mayor, called for a U.S. Justice Department investigation of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.

“I am gravely disturbed that Floyd Bonner is claiming that upholding the law is a political attack. Someone died. Multiple officers were charged with that death,” she said. “It is unconscionable that Bonner’s ego wants to make this about his political career. This is about the culture Floyd Bonner has created in the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office and our jail.”

State House Democratic leader Karen Camper, who’s also a mayoral candidate, called Bonner’s response “an alarming tone deafness.”

“We must come clean with the public about whether or not there was wrongdoing,” she said. “Since 2019, 40 inmates have died while in custody at the Shelby County Jail. I believe Sheriff Bonner owes it to those families and our community to provide answers and transparency instead of hiding the truth.”

Kiel vs. Spinosa

The District 5 city council race, the most expensive of the 13 City Council races on the October ballot, now includes an endorsement by outgoing Mayor Jim Strickland.

Former council member Philip Spinosa and University of Memphis School of Public Health community engagement director Meggan Kiel are battling for the seat that term-limited Worth Morgan is leaving.

Each had more than $100,000 in their campaign finance accounts as the summer began.

Luke Hatler, a White Station High School senior, joins Kiel and Spinosa on the ballot in District 5.

Strickland endorsed Spinosa via a mailer that showed up in mailboxes this past week.

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The mailcard does not cite any of the attacks Spinosa has made against Kiel in other mailers, alleging that she favors “defunding” police, which Kiel and her supporters have denied.

The Shelby County Democratic Party endorsed Kiel, a cofounder of the social justice group MICAH, in the nonpartisan race.

Local party chairwoman Lexie Carter cited Strickland’s Spinosa endorsement — as well as his earlier endorsement of Republican state Senate nominee Brent Taylor in the 2022 race for the District 31 seat — as the impetus for endorsing Kiel.

Taylor beat Democratic nominee Ruby Powell-Dennis.

The Tennessee Democratic Party censured Strickland, a former Shelby County Democratic Party chairman, for his backing of Taylor.

Strickland said he backed Taylor because the district is majority Republican and because of Republican super majorities in the state House and the state Senate.

Carter said it is “unusual” for the party to endorse in a primary or nonpartisan race.

“The City of Memphis demographically has a Democrat majority of voters,” she said in an emailed statement. “It is imperative that there is no ambiguity surrounding the political persuasion of candidates when outside influence is applied.”

As part of that effort, the local Democratic party has also endorsed Benji Smith in the council Super District 9 Position 1 race where incumbent Chase Carlisle is seeking reelection. The Shelby County Republican Party has endorsed Carlisle.

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Democrats also endorsed Brandon Washington in the Super District 9 Position 2 council race where incumbent Ford Canale is seeking reelection. Canale, also, has the county Republican party endorsement. 

District 5 is one of the seven single-member council districts that have a runoff provision.

If no one in the race gets a majority of the votes cast, the candidates with the top two vote totals advance to a Nov. 16 runoff election in that district.