🎤 THE $500 MICROPHONE
Last Thursday night — leading into Memorial Day, when every sane Tennessean was thinking about lake plans and brisket — about one hundred Republicans packed the Lewisburg Recreation Center to watch four candidates for Tennessee’s brand-new Ninth Congressional District share their visions through a single microphone. The Marshall County Young Republicans had been quoted $500 for a second one and decided, in the words of chapter chair William Quan, that another mic “would be a poor use of our funds.” Solid reasoning.
“We got one microphone,” moderator and state party chairman Scott Golden told the room, “so we’ll just go down this way.” And the candidates passed it down the row like a Thanksgiving gravy boat. Four candidates, one mic, one hundred-plus of the faithful, and somebody’s kitchen timer chirping from the moderator’s table, trying desperately to keep things moving.
Credit where it’s due: these candidates had filed barely a week earlier, some were just ten days into running, and the Young Republicans managed to pull off a four-way forum on a shoestring — then filmed and posted it, so voters across 300 miles of the new district who’ll never set foot in Lewisburg can watch.
Tip of the hat, Marshall County Young Republicans. The kids are alright.
Half of Williamson County is suddenly in this district, the courts could still scramble the map before August, and somehow a congressional primary is now sprinting across Middle Tennessee on a twelve-week clock. As Chairman Golden put it, nobody had “a ninth congressional district debate the Thursday before Memorial Day” on their bingo card. “Work twice as hard and vote in half the time.”
So who showed up? Going down the row:
BRENT TAYLOR
The Memphis state senator is the front-runner and the only one who can point to a real legislative record. By his account, he sponsored the Senate’s 287(g) immigration bills, traded a swing vote for county road money, and carried what he billed as the only AI bill to clear the legislature last session — the one that makes data centers, not your power bill, pay for their own electricity. Impressive.
He’s got the hardware, too: Blackburn, Hagerty, and — dropped almost casually during the lightning round on hobbies — a fresh Burchett endorsement, selfie included. By the end of the night, “endorsed my candidacy” had become the evening’s background music.
A Memphis funeral director running in a district that’s now mostly rural Middle Tennessee spent most of his time reciting the names of people who don’t live in it. Then he signed off with a Davy Crockett flourish: “I’m going to Congress, and I’m going to give the Democrats hell.”
JEREMY THOMPSON
Jeremy Thompson of Fayetteville brought the strongest national-security résumé in the field — twenty-two years as a Green Beret, “in the backyards of our nation’s enemies.” He lost his father in a trucking accident at five, grew up working-class in Lincoln County, and built a life around public service: volunteer firefighter, EMT, reserve deputy. He still runs emergency calls in his county while running for Congress.
And unlike some of the louder performances onstage, Thompson carried all of it without much bravado. Where the others vowed to fight, Thompson talked about assembling a team “that knows as much, or perhaps more than I do.” His point that agricultural security is national security was one of the few genuinely district-aware things anyone said all night.
The profile was classic outsider campaign stuff: no office, no money, no endorsements, a campaign two days old, and a tendency to answer every question like he’s still in a tactical debrief. He even announced he’d “cheat the clock” on the volunteer timekeeper. Old habits die hard.
CHARLOTTE BERGMANN
The Memphis conservative has run for this seat five times, so she knows the Memphis end cold. A former schoolteacher turned IT specialist turned conservative podcaster, she’s carried the Republican banner in one of the bluest cities in the South for more than a decade — a lonely, uphill thing to do as a Black conservative. Asked which historical figure she’d share a meal with, she picked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for judging people by the content of their character. Nobody in that room doubted she meant it.
She’s also lost all five of those races, never breaking 27 percent, and she told a room whose endorsements all went elsewhere that “the media has not come after me and said I was the front-runner for nothing.” Fair enough. But after five losses, you don’t get to declare yourself inevitable.
TODD WARNER
The state rep from Chapel Hill earns the long look — partly because he had the most crowd-ready answer of the night, and partly because he followed it by stepping on a rake.
Warner lives in the rural middle of this district, and while everyone else was bombing Iran and running against Hakeem Jeffries, he was the one man on stage talking about what actually keeps Marshall County up at night. “We are in a water crisis right here,” he told the room, warning that the district “cannot afford to let an AI center come in here and take a valuable resource” like water — then walked through the Duck River shortage, the never-built Columbia Dam, and the thousands of acres TVA has been sitting on since the ‘70s. On the subject that actually touches these voters, he sounded like the smartest guy in the room — which made it all the more noticeable what he avoided talking about. Conveniently absent was the quarry-pond fight that’s consumed parts of his own community for the better part of a year. Apparently, some local issues poll better than others.
Then there’s everything else. He opened by hoisting a flag to announce it “represents the greatest president this country’s ever seen” — backwards, until the room corrected him.
Warner spent his close swinging at Taylor and the establishment behind him. He waved off the whole endorsement race — “the only endorsement I need is the people” — which is an easier thing to say when the senator beside you has just collected all of them. And going after Taylor for leaning on the word “I,” he argued that nobody passes a bill alone: it takes “50 or 51” House members, seventeen senators, and a governor’s signature. True enough. But the line that came out of it was, “I will get nothing done.” He meant the senator can’t go it alone. Set against Taylor’s rundown of bills he’d actually passed, it didn’t come out that way.
And he closed by volunteering, all on his own, that the FBI once raided his house — spinning it as a badge of honor: “The FBI raided my home, just like they did our great president. I was never charged with nothing.” The “never charged” part is true. But that raid was part of a campaign-finance and dark-money probe in which, per NewsChannel 5, the anonymous mailers attacking his 2020 opponent shared a postal permit with his own campaign. The other men in that orbit — Glen Casada and Cade Cothren — were convicted last year and pardoned by Trump in March; Robin Smith pleaded guilty. So Warner’s closing argument for Congress became: remember the time the feds raided me in a corruption probe that sent everybody else to prison.
Then, for good measure, he suggested America should “take enough oil to pay for” the Iran fight — the night’s equivalent of “please clap.” And they did.
SO WHO WINS?
On paper, Taylor — the endorsements are real and the Burchett pickup matters. Money also matters. But it’s a single-round, plurality-wins sprint on a twelve-week clock: two Memphis candidates splitting the Memphis vote, two Middle Tennessee candidates splitting the rural counties, and nobody yet dominant in the ground game between. Thompson has a lane if the outsider-veteran pitch catches fire. Bergmann has one if name ID still counts in a district that’s only twelve percent of her old turf. Anybody at that table could pull it off — which might be the fun of it.
And for Williamson County: half of the county is in the new Ninth now, voting in this thing on August 6. Yet across an entire evening, Williamson came up exactly once, in passing. That’s worth pondering.
The forum’s up on the Young Republicans’ page. Watch it and decide for yourself. Whoever ends up in Congress, somebody give the Marshall County Young Republicans five hundred bucks. They’ve earned at least that much.
May the best candidate win.
Happened so quickly that many of us missed it but Tim Burchett now runs this state