Could Phil Bredesen Be This Cycle's Heidi Heitkamp?

Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-TN)

If you read this blog often, you'll know that we largely are at the end of Senate recruitment season.  Most winning campaigns, unless there's a surprise retirement, have been established at this point in the cycle.  There are exceptions, of course.  Two winning candidates who won pickups past this date in their cycles include Heidi Heitkamp (who declared in the November preceding her win) and Cory Gardner (who announced in the March prior to his election), but by-and-large if you're going to be a senator in January 2019, unless there's a death or a scandal we don't see coming, you're probably already a candidate.

But Sen. Bob Corker's late retirement from the Senate has thrown that rule for a loop, and if there's a surprise looming, it could be in the Volunteer State.  While the man who probably could have shut down the whole race and kept this in Republican hands (incumbent Gov. Bill Haslam) declined the race, it has looked so far to be a largely Republican affair.  This was, after all, a state that Trump won by over 25 points and has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1990.  Republicans didn't get Haslam, but they probably don't need him, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn has already emerged as the likely frontrunner, able to steer clear of Steve Bannon without issue (she's a very conservative, Michele Bachmann-style congresswoman), and even if she gets into a bloody primary with Rep. Stephen Fincher, it normally wouldn't be enough to take this seat.  That is, at least, until Gov. Phil Bredesen decided he might want to get into the race.

Bredesen, for those unfamiliar, was a very popular governor of Tennessee from 2003-2011, and before that a well-liked Mayor of Nashville for eight years.  He left office due to term limits, but remains popular and surely was the first person most Democrats thought of when Corker retired, except for three major reasons.  First, he's largely retired, and hasn't done much publicly in the six years he's been out-of-office.  Second, he'd be coming back to the electoral landscape in a far less friendly environment, and may not want to mount a vigorous campaign where he'd be a decided underdog.  And third, and most importantly, Bredesen is 73-years-old, and would be 74 when he would take office in January of 2019.  While that doesn't technically make him the oldest freshman senator in history, it'd put him mighty close to that list (when Ted Strickland was running last year at age 75, it was said he would have been the oldest freshman elected to a full-term in the Senate, so if he isn't at the top of the list he'd be close).  Bredesen initially came out against a run, and most people took him at that since it was so unlikely he'd run in the first place, but since then he's had a change-of-heart (I'm guessing Chuck Schumer calling and begging daily may have helped), and is now said to be considering the race, a very good sign for a Democratic Party that couldn't approach having a candidate this good.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)

Pundits online were quick to point out that Bredesen is entering politics again in a different environment, and against Blackburn he wouldn't get to run a particularly genial campaign (she's a notoriously tough campaigner).  They stated that last year Democrats went to former golden boys like Evan Bayh, Russ Feingold, and Ted Strickland, and struck out with each one, and they're right.  Bredesen is hardly the candidate he would have been in an open seat in, say, 2008, and at 73-years-old is not the face of the future of the party.  His name is really only coming up because the Democrats have no one else of his caliber in the state.  But I think it's unwise to simply dismiss a candidate who has won statewide twice, and it's worth remembering Heidi Heitkamp in particular when it comes to candidates who might serve as a blueprint for how to win this race.

Heitkamp, like Bredesen, was running for an open seat in a state that Republicans were dominating nationally.  In 2012, Mitt Romney was winning North Dakota 20-points, and the Republican nominee was a sitting member of Congress.  Heitkamp had largely left politics after a tough battle in 2000 where her diagnosis of breast cancer may well have cost her the governorship, and wasn't really on anyone's radar until the DSCC convinced her to enter the race.  Most reactions to Heitkamp's campaign were the same: "good candidate, best the Democrats can do, still no shot at a win." and indeed polls showed her down by double digits at the start of the campaign.

But Heitkamp was a superb retail politician, a skill Bredesen has exhibited in the past, and ran a deeply local and very effective campaign.  Knowing her voters wouldn't respond well to vicious attack ads, she made homespun commercials that highlighted her long history with the state, and managed to distance herself from her party label enough to not be dragged down by Barack Obama statewide.  She was helped by Rick Berg running a poor campaign, but she clearly wouldn't have won that without a home run, and she hit one.  She barely won, but "a win is a win is a win" when it comes to politics, and she's now headed into her reelection bid as a marginal, but real, frontrunner for another term.

No one is saying this would be easy, but home runs do happen in politics on occasion, as Heitkamp illustrated just a few years ago, and Bredesen's running in a very similar sort of environment.  He's 73, and admittedly I wish the Democrats wouldn't keep going to their old rosters for new candidates (we need to start building the bench, and this strategy isn't going to be viable much longer, as Bredesen would be a stretch to even run for a second term, much less have a long career in Congress), but the 2018 Senate battle is so close to actually becoming competitive that it's impossible to argue against Bredesen getting this opportunity.  Democrats need three seats, and now have very good candidates in Arizona & Nevada, with all of their incumbents raising money like machines & doing pretty well (to very well) in the polls despite nine coming from Trump-won states.  But the DSCC still needs one more seat to pull off this miracle.  Could Phil Bredesen be the Heidi Heitkamp of 2012 (and in the process win the Senate for the Democrats)?  I wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand.