A few cocktails later, give or take, we had a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and a majority Republican House delegation. “A Disillusioned State Gives Up on Democrats,” headlined a story in the New York Times the following week recapping the blue Tennessee carnage. After all, how much redder can the reddest of red states get? If we were already peak Republican, you wouldn’t see that big concentration of red there in Tennessee. For that matter, even while Tennessee Democrats held high hopes for Johnson, polls consistently showed her out of striking distance of Blackburn.
