- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by, the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- A look at the local election results, tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Toby Sells, News Editor at the Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks for having me, sir.

- Abigail Warren is a reporter covering Germantown, Collierville and sometimes the other suburbs for The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks for having me back.

- We will try to get through this without Bill Dries who's under the weather this week but as we look at the local election results, we won't touch too much on national things.

There's plenty of other people doing that right now.

But let's start, Toby, with, I think, the biggest thing it felt like to me locally in terms of local impact was probably the guns in Memphis, the three referendums.

Those referendums, all of which passed by 80 to 85%; requiring a handgun permit within the city of Memphis; banning assault rifles within the city of Memphis, with some exceptions, but essentially banning them.

And then red flag laws which would give government, courts, more ability to intervene when someone seems to be at risk.

They have a gun, go get that gun before something bad happens.

None of these go into effect, right, Toby?

They are all part of a kind of a wishlist frankly that is still very dependent on the state's reaction.

- That's right and, you know, I think if anybody in Memphis, we knew that those results on these, which were basically polls of the city of Memphis, knew that those results were coming, right?

We know that we have a gun problem in Memphis, we know that we have a crime problem related to those guns in Memphis.

And, you know, hopefully we can take these results to Nashville, to these, you know, state lawmakers and say, "Hey look, you know, people down here, they know we have a problem with this.

Can you help us out?"

But I doubt that's gonna get any traction because as we already saw back in, or earlier months before they went on there, state leaders, Cameron Sexton, the Speaker of the house, he said, "Look, you know, if you even think "about putting these on the ballot in November, "we are gonna come and take some of your state tax dollars away from Memphis for even trying to consider this."

The City Council dug in, they sued, they won, got it on the ballot.

And, you know, we see what happens now.

And like you said, these only go into effect if state law changes.

And from what I've seen so far, I think this will only probably make state lawmakers dig in deeper on the issue and not change a thing.

- Yeah, next step is JB Smiley, the chair of the Memphis City Council, needs to move forward if he chooses to, to put it on the agenda.

The City Council votes, it becomes an ordinance, a sort of ordinance in waiting.

It's also known as a trigger law, which is kind of a unfortunate euphemism that, again, waits for any change with state law that allows cities to do carve-outs and so on.

And business leaders and politicians have pushed for that for years for carve-outs up at the legislature.

One interesting thing is that the, so we don't know what's gonna happen.

We also don't know, I think when JB Smiley was on before the election, you know, he said, "It's pretty clear they can't really take legally our state sales tax money."

But the city, the county, business leaders, advocacy groups go to the state every year asking for hundreds of millions of dollars to support things.

You know, Beale Street or the Grizzlies or FedEx or you know, schools and so on, the suburbs as well.

What will happen?

Those are things that the state doesn't have to do.

You know, they don't have to provide that money.

Those are, you know, votes they just don't have to put on the floor.

So it remains to be seen.

The other thing that was interesting for me was that a year and a half ago in the lead up to the City Council and city mayor's race, we did some polling with a third party firm that found numbers were basically the same.

Do you support common sense gun laws?

It was 80% or so in the city, and it was roughly the same outside the city and still in Shelby County.

And so, again, and I would say too, for people who are listening and throwing things at the screen, 'cause they're opposed to these, I mean, I'm hard pressed to think of a law enforcement official of any background, a very few politicians who've been on this show who haven't been in favor of some amount of restrictions on guns.

We did a big series at The Daily Memphian, the "Point of Impact" series about the ramification, the changes in state law.

So, again, it just seems one of those things that's overwhelmingly popular in this area.

- Yeah, and I'll just jump back in and say, having watched this over many, many years, the thing that we need the most on this gun issue is something we're not very good at in the state and that's nuance.

I mean, we've gotta know, I mean, you know, these state lawmakers are coming in, they're trying to make a big statement.

We get that.

How many, you know, MPD directors and police chiefs need to go and talk to and say, "Look, you know, we have an issue here "that's different in Shelby County "than it is in Robertson County or in Warren County "or all these different places.

It's different in the city than it is the country."

You know, and we need somebody to get in there and that speaks all the languages.

And I know I've said on this show before but we need somebody that can kind of speak country, city, suburban, and get people together on these issues.

Or we're not left with many options here in Memphis or the other big cities.

- We'll come back to some of the other referendums, we'll talk a bunch about state races, but I wanna get Abigail in and talk about, I dunno know, where do you wanna start?

- Collierville.

- Yeah.

Let's start with Collierville.

What happened there?

And frame it up for people who maybe aren't following Collierville but its politics, a big chair in the mayor's race, the mayor's seat, et cetera, et cetera.

- So in Collierville there, Mayor Stan Joyner has been the mayor since 2008 and decided in June that he was not gonna seek reelection, to not pull a petition.

And so for the first time in 16 years, they will have a new mayor.

Mayor-Elect Maureen Fraser, who's currently an alderman, will take office in December.

She got 57% of the vote.

Her opponent was her fellow alderman, Billy Patton, who's been an alderman since 2010.

Well Collierville has a resign to run rule.

So they both had to resign from their alderman seats effective at the Oath of Office which is in December.

The date's still a little bit up in the air.

So they are gonna have to appoint two alderman to their seats at the beginning of the year.

But they can't do that until one of the alderman races is decided.

John Worley decided not to seek reelection in his position.

They had three people run for the seat.

And the charter states if no one gets more than 50% of the vote, then you have to go to a runoff.

So on December 10th, Collierville will have a runoff between Chad Lindsay and Nick Robbins.

Chad Lindsay got 46% of the vote, Nick Robbins got nearly 30%.

They both have a background in construction.

Chad Lindsay, he works with Alston Construction which is more general contracting, warehouses, industrial.

Nick Robbins does more residential renovations.

And John Worley's been a home builder and is on the Planning Commission.

So it's kind of nice to have someone that has those tools in their wheelhouse to take, if the board chooses Nick or Chad to go to the Planning Commission, it would be nice to see that.

But once Nick or Chad is chosen, then Collierville will be able, and after the Oath of Office, that's when Billy Patton's resignation is effective.

And so then, once that's done, once the Oath of Office is done, they have 30 days to decide who's gonna go in those seats.

That's right around Christmas.

So the timing is really interesting there.

So they haven't really- - Can they appoint themselves?

- Can they appoint?

- Yeah, I mean- - Can they appoint Billy?

- Yeah- - Billy has been clear that, he told me Tuesday night he's not gonna apply.

And he even said in his resignation letter that it would be unwise to appoint any alderman who resigns.

- Gotcha.

Gotcha.

- So he said he's gonna not do that.

It'll be interesting to see.

There was a couple of school board races and John Stamps who's also an alderman won 69% of the vote.

Tom Bailey, who's gonna be on school board.

Not the journalist Tom Bailey, a different Tom Bailey.

A different Tom Bailey.

He got 52% of the vote for the remaining two years of Keri Blair's term.

So he'll be there until 2026.

- Keri Blair resigned.

- Keri Blair resigned after she was arrested for shoplifting charges.

Those charges were later dismissed.

That was earlier this year.

- There's a lot of intrigue on that Collierville school board, right?

I mean, and this is, I remember my first job in journalism, my first job outta college was in a, you know, small town in Connecticut.

And school board races, school board meetings were heated then.

That was many decades ago.

And they're heated now.

I mean, it's no small thing who's on that board.

And it's a small community.

I'm sure being on the school board in Collierville and trying to go to the grocery store is difficult.

I mean, really!

- For sure, and since, since COVID, there's a lot more attention on school boards, not just here but across the state, you'll see that.

- Well and nationally, right, I mean- - Nationally as well.

- Choices on restrictions and it just highlighted then also, you know, things around books and what books can be in the schools.

- Exactly.

- And all that kinda stuff.

Anything else on Collierville?

I know we've got some other suburban stuff but I'm gonna come back to you for that.

But I think that's Collierville for right now.

The other, it's interesting that the runoff that Abigail described, Toby, in Collierville, we will now have mayoral runoffs back to the other three referendums that maybe didn't get quite as much attention but are pretty significant changes in the wonky way in which we elect mayors.

Mayors, if you remember, what, a year ago when Paul Young won, he won with 28% of the vote.

Floyd Bonner was not far behind him at about maybe 24, 25.

I should have looked that up.

And there were two other candidates right around 20,000, Herenton and Van Turner.

But Paul won them, you know, the most.

So he won.

Now, going forward with the next Mayor's race, there'll be a runoff if anyone gets under 50%.

So again, going back to last year, that would be, you would have had Paul Young and Floyd Bonner in a second runoff, as Abigail described in Collierville.

We used to do that, I think, back in the '70s.

Where's Bill Dries to fix all my mistakes?

And City Council is that way right now but the mayor's race wasn't.

Thoughts on that?

It's a big change actually.

- It is a big change and it's a housekeeping thing.

And I think we kinda learned a lot from that last mayoral race.

Another referendum on there was, you know, residency requirements for folks, you know.

And so, well that one was, you know, now, according to the referendum that passed, you have to live in Memphis for two years before you can run for the mayor of Memphis, which was an issue that came up in the last election with Bonner and Van Turner having lived outside of Memphis.

And voters basically said, "Hey look, you know, if you're gonna represent "Memphis in the biggest seat that we have, "you need to live here.

"You need to understand what it's like to live in this city "and kinda get out there and feel the people and hear what's going on in the street."

And so, you know, both of those are just kind of housekeeping things that we said, "Hey, this is who we wanna represent us and how we wanna pick them."

- And that one also passed, if I didn't say it, by 80% of people voting in the city election.

That was about 165,000 people who- - Wow.

- The one interesting thing, and I assume this will happen in Collierville, Abigail, is, you know, voter turnout in those runoffs tends to fall off.

The races become more expensive 'cause there's two races.

Is that the case in Collierville with the runoff, you expect to be fewer people?

- It is.

Four years ago was the last time they had a runoff and turnout was very, very low.

It really becomes a race of, who can get their people back out to the polls?

- Yeah.

- It is expensive.

So the Shelby County Election Commission has not voted on early voting and those kinds of things but I know town staff was hoping that they might be able to have one, maybe the Cox Community Center, as an early voting site to help limit the cost so that it wouldn't be an extra cost to the town.

- The other one, we may not have said, that Memphis City Council will now be able to set its own salaries.

I guess it already sets key positions within the administration.

That passed by 70%.

Currently, City Council is a part-time position that's paid $37,000.

And that number is indexed to the County Commission salaries.

We'll shift a little bit to the state races and the state House races.

There were 14 of 15 incumbents in Shelby County who won.

The new one is Gabby Salinas who ran unopposed in this election.

She was opposed in the primary.

And they all won.

Of those 14 incumbents who won 12, yeah, 12 of them won by 70%-plus.

They weren't particularly competitive except two races.

Mark White, who's a state House member, covers east Shelby, parts of Germantown, I believe, kind of the Poplar Corridor.

He won 58 to 41 over Noah Nordstrom.

And John Gillespie was in a very tight race with very much, a whole lot of time, money, and effort put into the candidacy of Jesse Huseth, excuse me if I pronounced that wrong, a Democrat.

John Gillespie won by 52%.

And I think both those are interesting.

I'll start with you, Toby.

Mark White and John Gillespie, both known as more moderate Republicans.

I mean, just as an example, Gillespie, there was a precinct within his district that voted 53% for Donald Trump for president.

But Gillespie got 62% of the vote in that precinct.

John Gillespie has been on the show I think a number of times.

He's tried to carve-out this moderate space, tried to talk about a little bit what you said of what, you know, Shelby County, Memphis, needs different things than the rest of the state.

He's tried to be that voice.

It is an irony of it is, I don't know if it's good or bad, is that when you are moderate, then you suddenly you become a target- - Exactly.

- For being, you know, oh, we've got a district that's more moderate, so maybe we can get a Democrat in there.

I don't know what to make of that.

Mark White, a little bit of the same thing.

- Yeah, and Gillespie of course is really tough on crime.

It's kind of his central focus and, you know, he's gotten criticism on both sides of that issue which is incredible.

But I think in both of those districts, there was some kind of, you know, a democratic confidence maybe, you know, that these things could be flipped and they would get in there and they became more competitive than the others.

We saw kind of the way the wind blew on those.

And then of course, Mark White, you know, education is really his central focus.

And he's taking a lot of heat on both sides of those issues too.

But all in all, as we saw, a lot of these incumbents get in there.

The way that the districts are drawn, not a whole lot of surprises in there.

- You mentioned education and it looks like, as we sit here on Thursday morning, Abigail, this impacts the whole state, is vouchers.

But it's very much a hot button issue.

We mentioned Mark White focused on education.

Very, very controversial issue in the suburbs of Memphis and the independent school districts there.

The voucher bill, Bill Lee, Governor Bill Lee, has been pushing for this and pushing this.

He did a kind of a test pilot project type voucher bill.

Again, vouchers, you get money that you can then take to an approved private school.

Collierville, Germantown, which are your primary beats, are not too happy about the prospect of this happening, why?

- There's a concern of how many.

You get funding based on the number of students you have.

And so if a bunch of students leave your district, that's state funding that you don't get.

And the majority of funding the suburbs get is from the state.

And so there's talk about hold harmless and what that looks like in the first few years.

But there's a state representative and the Germantown School District says, you know, if they're saying it's hold harmless, they intend to harm you at some point.

And you're not sure when that is.

But there's reasons they have that in place because at some point, it could harm you.

In the 2025/'26 school year, it's limited in the current version of the voucher bill, which was filed by Senator Jack Johnson and Representative Lamberth in the House.

And so it's very limited in the 2025/'26 school year, but in the 2026/'27 school year, it's wide open.

And so there's a lot of concern of what that looks like.

That was talked about a little bit with incumbents in Germantown who ran unopposed.

They really think what they provide, the product that they provide, there's not gonna be that students who leave, but it's still a concern in the back of the mind of what that looks like for funding.

Is their funding that they don't get because now that funding is going to private schools?

Also, the accountability, what that looks like.

You know- - What an approved school is and how those schools are held accountable for public money going into them?

Keep going.

- What an approved school is, what an approved test is, and, you know, there's so much mandated testing that the public schools have to do.

The private schools are not being held to that same standard.

That same standard is a little bit of concern to the school boards and superintendents.

- Yeah, I mean it's a reminder that not all private schools are the same, right?

I mean, you know, it's different.

I don't know, thoughts.

I mean, Memphis Shelby County Schools I think is pretty resistant to this happening.

They don't wanna see any more funding.

- Absolutely.

- Any, Toby, thoughts at all.

It's just a huge issue with a lot of people.

They don't wanna see public money going to private schools and that's gonna be the issue going forward.

But I think with this new bill, I don't think we're gonna see the, you know, reaction to it that we saw the last session.

I think a lot of the GOP had time to get on the phone in between sessions, fix some of the issues.

They filed these bills on the very same day.

This is bill number one in both the House and the Senate.

It seems like they've teamed up on this thing.

And going forward, I kind of predict a smoother ride for this thing going forward.

We'll see what happens at the very end but it's got a smooth ride this year.

- Yeah.

More thoughts?

- It's important to note that there are a lot of Republican lawmakers who lost their primary.

So there's gonna be a lot of new lawmaker- - Oh, incumbent Republican lawmakers.

- Incumbent Republican lawmakers who lost their primaries.

So there's gonna be a lot of new lawmakers in Nashville who are looking at this for the first time.

And it'll be interesting to see what they think on the discussion.

- It is one of those things too where people, where you kinda get sometimes a city/rural partnership and saying, "Whoa, wait!

"These are the kinds of things that take money out of our school system in small towns and in big cities."

But Governor Lee, you know, he's been pushing it very, very hard.

We'll know more on that, we'll be writing about that, I'm sure The Flyer will as well, as the timing of that vote and that bill and all the details come together.

I think I went through most of the state House races.

We'll segue into the statewide races.

Marsha Blackburn won 64% over Gloria Johnson, the Democrat.

David Kustoff, who covers east, parts of East Memphis, east Shelby County and beyond, seventy-three percent over Sarah Freeman, a Democrat.

Steve Cohen goes back with 71% over longtime candidate Charlotte Bergmann, a Republican.

You know, there's not a lot to say, right, Toby?

I mean there's just [chuckling], this is the way it tends to work in Tennessee, you know.

We've literally focused on two of the most competitive statewide or, you know, state House races.

There were no, really no competition.

Gloria Johnson did better coming off the Tennessee Three and the protests last year, but it's still only, you know, some 35% of the vote.

- Right, and I think if you've watched Tennessee elections at all, you know there's no surprises in here, you know.

Maybe that Cohen's kept his seat because a lot of the folks that, you know, I've read on the Democratic side of all this, they say, "Well of course there's no surprises "because the GOP has gerrymandered "this state so much that, you know, they've architected a win over here."

And if that's true, I mean, they've done a great job.

I'm not saying it's true but I'm saying that's what they're saying.

- Yeah.

- So, you know, it's kind of politics business as usual going through here.

And we didn't see any surprises on the ballot.

- And, you know, the gerrymandering happens in blue states where they're, you know, dominant blue; you know, Democratic legislatures and they gerrymander there.

And I wish it just was more interesting, competitive.

I mean, as Bill wrote in one of his stories, the turnout, what have I put here?

The lowest turnout in Shelby County, fifty-four percent of eligible voters, the lowest since 1968 in a presidential year, which generally, you know, tends to run up the number of people voting more.

And this was a hotly contested, very prominent, unbelievably expensive national campaign for presidency.

I mean, Gloria Johnson had more money than I think many Democrats have had.

Maybe Bredesen did.

But they're just not even close.

And I think it does sort of, this is just me editorializing, not about who wins but it creates more disengagement from the process.

And as we talk about these state House races where, you know, people are winning dramatically, and good for them, by some single digit thousands of people voting sometimes, I mean, they're really important things the state's gonna do this year.

And it's just, I think that the gerrymandering, it lowers engagement.

It may get people the candidate they want, year after year, fine.

But it definitely lowers engagement.

You were gonna say something, Abigail?

No, okay.

Well maybe Toby- - Well on that, I mean, you know, I read Bill's reporting on this and what was 54% of the electorate showed up out there, you know.

A presidential election gets no bigger than the one we just had.

I mean, it gets no more contentious than that, right?

One side versus the other side.

And if that's not gonna get you off the couch on election day, I don't know what's gonna happen out there.

I don't know how to engage these other folks, If they feel helpless in this, that the system doesn't work, I mean, who knows, I mean, this is probably something the political science have been looking at for a long, long time.

But I mean, the lowest since '68, that is disappointing in Shelby County.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

A few minutes left here, let's go back to the suburbs.

Maybe touch on, there was one race in Germantown?

- There was one contested race in Germantown for school board.

Amy Eoff, who's been on the board for eight years, decided not to seek reelection and so the race was between Andy Ellis, who's a parent of current students in the district.

His wife works for the district in the Special Education Department.

He got more than 61% of the vote.

He ran against Vicki Gandee who, her kids have since graduated from the school district.

She got about 38% of the vote.

The incumbents in Germantown were unopposed.

The only switch is on the Board of Mayor and Aldermen; Jon McCreery decided not to seek reelection after one term.

And so Tony Salvaggio will become the alderman.

And his name is familiar because his dad, Charles Salvaggio, was the mayor in Germantown at one point.

- Millington?

- In Millington, the incumbents did pretty well but there is a new mayor.

Larry Dagen took the 62% of the vote over Cary Vaughn.

Larry Dagen is a current alderman.

Cary Vaughn is known as the chairman of the Republican Party, also involved in Love Worth Finding Ministries.

There was kind of a interesting concern that Larry Dagen's son-in-law is Frankie Dagen, who's the new City Manager out there.

And Cary said that was why he ran, because he was concerned about the nepotism.

Well Cary had to move from Millington Reserve into Millington city limits to run to meet the 60-day residency requirements.

So there were, it was interesting to see those concerns rise up as I was covering that.

- I laugh, I make a joke but it's kind of back to what we were just talking about, Toby.

I love that people are engaged.

I mean, there were some thousands, single digit thousand of people who decided the mayor, but people cared a lot.

And same in the education races, the Germantown School Board.

I assume that also is like Collierville where they, I mean, it's hard to go to the grocery store I have a feeling in Germantown if you're on that school board, 'cause of all the kinds of things that they're deciding, they're gonna be up against this voucher bill, so on and so forth.

We don't do a ton of national here.

We were talking a little bit before, The Flyer does, and obviously The Flyer is, you know, is a left-leaning publication in some ways, many ways, right?

- Sure.

- I mean, I need to own that.

In terms of, you know, local impact of Donald Trump winning, potentially, definitely, a Republican Senate, possibly a Republican House, some of those things that he's talked about, how would they have impact here in Memphis and Shelby County?

- It's all speculative as we were talking about before we came on here.

But you know, he said in first day of office that mass deportations, right?

So, you know, if you're an illegal immigrant in Memphis, I would be watching that very, very closely.

He's also talked about "Drill, baby, drill" which I guess means, you know, we're gonna tap into the United States oil reserves and, you know, drill more oil; hopefully get the price of gas down.

Which, if anybody understands the inner workings and the mysteries of OPEC that, you know, makes that price go up and down, let me know.

And then also LGBTQ concerns out there.

You know, he's always said that he was for these issues, but, you know, you've seen Donald Trump change his mind on several things.

And also he's also said that he would never do a national abortion ban.

He, you know, committed to that.

But again, he could change his mind on that.

So it's all speculative and I'm not trying to put any political rhetoric into it.

Just trying to read the tea leaves.

- I think it'll also be interesting to watch, I mean, you think about from the business point of view, if tariffs go forward and he doesn't, the presidency has tremendous latitude to put tariffs in.

Obviously FedEx is here.

It's a huge, you know, global giant, statement of the obvious.

AutoZone here, IP is here; international companies with a lot of trade, a whole logistics infrastructure that's here.

It could be good, it could be bad, but I imagine they are very much gearing up to try to, you know, the big businesses here to make sure that whatever changes are more in favor of the employers in this community.

That is all the time we have this week though.

Thanks for joining us.

Next week, we do have a show talking about workforce and developments efforts to improve and expand the workforce in Memphis.

We recently had on Doug McGowen from MLGW.

It was an interesting conversation about things going on there.

Marie Feagins from Memphis Shelby County Schools.

And it's about a month ago now but we had Paul Young on.

You can get all those at WKNO.org.

You can go to The Daily Memphian, or you can go to YouTube.

And again, you can download the whole show as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much.

We'll see you next week.

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