Well, all of Mark Padgett's efforts to endear himself to local Republicans seem to be paying off. He is the unofficial mayoral choice of the Knoxville Tea Party. According to a press release from Benjamin McCroskey, the secretary of the local organization, Padgett was the clear winner of a straw poll among attendees at an Oct. 25 Tea Party meeting. Of those who voted, 50 percent said they lived in city-limits Knoxville and supported Padgett in the nonpartisan race, and another 20 percent said they did not live in the city but would prefer Padgett. The other 30 percent expressed no preference. Front-runner Madeline Rogero, whom Padgett has been busy bashing in true Tea Party fashion as a tax-and-spender, received no votes.
This seems like the logical endpoint for a campaign that started with Padgett playing up his roots in local Democratic politics and has seen him turning ever farther to the right in an attempt to pick up disaffected Republican voters -- the best hope of a guy who scratched out under 23 percent of the vote in the primary. He's been endorsed by former mayoral candidate Ivan Harmon and Sheriff J.J. Jones, both Republicans from the good-ol'-boy wing of the Knox County party, and his mass mailings have increasingly looked like generic right-wing product, playing up Rogero's record of voting for tax increases when she was on County Commission. (That she was voting along with Republican majorities for things like keeping schools maintained and giving raises to sheriff's deputies goes, of course, unmentioned.) Curiously, Padgett himself has never said he won't raise taxes -- like Rogero, he says he would consider it only as a last resort. But politics being what they are, he's taking advantage of the fact that Rogero has actually held office before and therefore, like everyone from Bill Haslam to Rick Perry, has supported tax increases in tough budget years. Anyway, his not-so-subtle attacks seem to be resonating. He can now call himself the only Tea Party candidate in the race. If he wants to.
(Meanwhile, in today's Shopper-News, our friend Betty Bean talks to some other Republicans who are backing Rogero.)
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