Tennessee Election Results

In Tennessee’s 83rd House District near Memphis, Republican candidate Mark White won the January 12 special election by 1,784 votes.

The Tennessee Secretary of State doesn't keep track of voter registrations, so we'll probably never know the percentage of voter turnout. But White took 67% of the votes cast, and that's a pretty convincing victory.

On the downside, we weren't able to contact any of the candidates ahead of time. That was primarily for two reasons:

According to the RIDE2REPEAL.COM playbook, it's always far more effective to lobby legislators while they are still candidates. Once they've won the election, they don't need our help -- and we have nothing to offer them. But there were hotter races going on in other parts of the country, all with bikers talking to the candidates. So we had to let the Tennessee race go ... this time.

But even if we had contacted the Tennessee candidates, we'd still be unable to offer them anything. One look at the H-83 map will show that we don't have a single Legislative Alert subscriber who lives within riding distance of the Memphis district. And there's no sign of any bikers nearby who could have organized a campaign volunteer effort. Without local contact or support, there just wasn't any way to affect the outcome of this race.

We could only sit on the sidelines, watching our rights pass by.

From a negotiating standpoint, the winner of the Tennessee race is now the incumbent legislator. And that means bikers must assume the position of humble-and-lovable inferior when lobbying. But that doesn't mean the new State Representative won't be biker-friendly. It just means that bikers must come in low, hat in hand, and grateful for even the smallest of tid-bits.

In other words, status quo.

Hopefully that will change as more Tennessee bikers subscribe to our Legislative Alerts. Then they'll quickly learn what our Tennessee subscribers already know: There's more than one way to skin a cat ... and that it's a lot easier when done from the standing position.