But Thursday’s primary election to retire senior Lamar Alexander turned into a bitter, competitive rivalry between Hagerty and Dr. Manny Sethi over who Tennessee’s Trump could be.
Hagerty and Sethi campaigned like Trump loyalists, even though they found things in each other’s backgrounds to try to advise otherwise. Hagerty founded a private equity firm and served as the state’s economic commissioner under former Republican Gov. Bill Haslam. Sethi, the son of first-generation immigrants from India, is an orthopedic trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who founded the non-profit organization Healthy Tennessee.
Trump himself intervened in the primary, reminding voters of his appeal in a tweet last week and agreeing to a tele-town hall with Hagerty on the eve of the primary.
Hagerty thanks Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Tennessee sen. Marsha Blackburn for her support after his primary victory.
“Now, more than ever, we need strong conservative senators who do not cowtow to the angry liberal mice who are tearing the dust of America we love apart. President Trump will not stand for it, and neither will I, “he said in a statement Thursday night.
The divisive race was extended to the Republican Senate Conference. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky stepped up for Sethi. And the Protect Freedom PAC, a group focused on Paul, spent more than $ 1.2 million on ads that supported him. At one point, Paul said directly to the camera, “Tennessee is a state too conservative to send Democrats in Republican clothing to represent Tennessee.”
Blackburn and sen. Arkansas’ Tom Cotton took Hagerty’s side in championship stories, saying he would stand with Trump. “Bill is pro-life, he’s pro-gun, he’s pro-family, he’s pro-small business and he’s pro-conservative values,” Blackburn said in a recent video posted on Twitter.
The race has been tough the last few weeks. Of the 15 Republican candidates, Hagerty spent by far the most on advertising, buying more than $ 5 million in airtime, according to Kantar’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. Since the beginning of June, he has spent most of that campaign cash. Sethi spent more than $ 2.6 million and Dr. George Flinn, another GOP candidate, spent more than $ 1.5 million. Tom Ingram, a longtime Tennessee Republican strategist, told CNN on Wednesday, “The best I can tell you is that it’s too close to call.”
Hagerty will now be the favorite to win the seat in November; Tennessee is a deep-red state that led Trump by 26 points in 2016. In the Democratic primary, Marquita Bradshaw, a black community organizer and single mom whose campaign raised less than $ 10,000, won in a landslide, beat lawyer and former Army helicopter pilot James Mackler, who raised more than $ 2 million and was supported by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Commission.
While the nominee GOP of the First Chamber hopes to succeed Alexander, a legislator for working horses who left a leadership position to focus on education and health care policy, the race turned into a series of personal attacks.
Hagerty and Sethi brought many of two recent separate interviews with CNN sharply critical of each other.
Hagerty called Sethi a “false conservative” whom Trump would only support if it was “handy.” Sethi tagged Hagerty as a “Mitt Romney Republican”, and tried to use Hagerty’s decades-long friendship and campaign for the former GOP presidential candidate against him. Hagerty defends himself against alliances with the Utah senator and Trump critic, and criticized Romney for marching with Black Lives Matter protesters.
“You have senators like Mitt Romney who have honestly lost their way,” Hagerty said.
Hagerty also sued Sethi for making a $ 50 donation to a family friend through the ActBlue campaign’s online donation portal, for receiving a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, and for applying for a nonpartisan White House grant during the Obama administration to portray his opponent as a Democrat who supports gun control and former President Barack Obama. Sethi responded that the prosecutors were desperate attacks by an “insider in Washington.”
“They’re in deep trouble, and they know it,” Sethi said.
He had tried to marry Hagerty’s conservative bona fides, suggesting that Hagerty was a fan of the Black Lives Matter movement to a brokerage firm whose board he served on expressed support for it. Hagerty later resigned from the board, telling CNN that Black Lives Matter is “a Marxist organization” that is “against the nuclear family” and “anti-Semitic.”
But despite the sparring between them, there may not have been much politics different between the two leading candidates.
“Both candidates are not very well known, and they have been fighting over who ‘is too liberal’ for Tennessee,” Professor Vanderbilt University political science John Geer, the dean of the College of Arts and Science, told CNN prior to the primary. “The truth is, both are conservative and there is not much difference between them other than Sethi being more of an outsider.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
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