Credit to Reddit user -Badger3- for posting this on Wednesday, right before early voting in the primary ended on Thursday. WKRN then ran a story about the mailers and haven’t been able to get to the bottom of who sent it. Tennessee GOP chair Scott Golden was running as far away from it as he could, telling the station “We’ve had a few calls to the office regarding the mailer… It wasn’t coming from the Tennessee Republican Party, even though it certainly referenced us… It was done with an Austin [Texas] postmark,” adding “We’re not going to be sitting around trying to figure out who’s voted and who’s not voted. We never color outside those lines during the election process, so I mean, clearly, in this case, somebody has; and if you’ve broken the law, I think you should be held accountable.” Stop laughing that a state GOP chair would say that last bit. He thinks he’s serious.

Anyway there’s been some murmuring about this special in Tennessee’s 7th, even though now-former Congressman/most likely still currently into boning women his daughter’s age dude Mark Green won it by 21 percent last year, murmurs that it may not exactly be safe. That Jeff Yass shitbag went and pumped $10 million into some PAC with bailiwick the seat just two days after Green had announced his resignation but weeks before he’d actually effected it in July, setting off this primary.

There’s no question that the Dem is going to overperform, they do in every special, and the question of whether they will overperform enough also seems moot given that the MAGA powers that be clearly don’t want to take any chances. They’re definitely facing some problems. First off there are 19 – not a typo – candidates in the primary field, six of them sitting state legislators. A single candidate in theory could win with as little as 5.3 percent of the vote. Tennessee doesn’t have runoffs, which are usually a pain in the ass for primary candidates in other states, but here it would absolutely be a help to consolidate support. They may be stuck with a less-than-optimal scumbag.

Second is the date: The vagaries of Tennessee election laws meant that the earliest the general could be conducted is on December 2nd and not next month when there’s national media attention on gubernatorial/state legislative races in New Jersey, Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi, plus the California redistricting referendum. That’s going to hurt turnout and it’s probably why you’re seeing that threatening mail above being sent by who the fuck knows what shady MAGA group, to hype voters up for the stupid primary so they then stay tuned in and show up for the general election.