The Democratic nominee for Tennessee governor is now publicly calling for an independent candidate to drop out of the race.
Memphis lawyer and City Councilmember Jerri Green went public with her call Wednesday after privately asking the progressive-leaning candidate, Lauren Pinkston, to end her campaign.
The move comes as recent polling shows a tighter race between Green and Republican frontrunner Marsha Blackburn for Tennessee’s highest office. If that polling holds true, a few percentage points lost to an independent could make or break Green’s bid to be the first Democrat elected to a statewide office in more than 20 years.
Blackburn’s office has dismissed the recent poll, paid for by a Green supporter, as biased. A poll from the conservative-leaning Beacon Center gives Blackburn a 21-point lead over Green. Both polls show Pinkston with a single-digit slice of the vote.
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Pinkston became the center of some online controversy Tuesday when she posted a video discussing the importance of mental health in the context of Andrew Jackson’s life.
“The list is a mile long of things that Andrew Jackson went through that were very traumatic, and the list is even longer of the things that he tried to do to cope with those things in a very unhealthy way,” Pinkston said.
Standing outside Jackson’s former home in Jonesborough, Tennessee, Pinkston recounted how the president lost his parents when he was young.
“Mental health has always been around. We just haven’t known how to talk about it,” Pinkston said. “If we don’t figure that part out, we’re going to continue to have leaders who do very harmful things because they haven’t learned to talk about their feelings. Harmful things like removing all of the Native Americans from Tennessee land.”
The video has drawn sharp criticism from Democratic voters online who see the focus on Jackson’s mental health as an excuse for his role in the Trail of Tears. Green’s campaign pointed to the video as reason for Pinkston to drop her bid for governor.
“Attempting to retroactively diagnose historical figures to excuse atrocities is deeply thoughtless at worst and juvenile at best,” Green campaign manager Alex Hensley said in a statement. “This is a serious race that will have life-altering consequences for the people of this state, and this level of carelessness should be disqualifying.”
Pinkston told WPLN News that had not been her intent, and that the video does not paint Jackson in a positive light. But the public scrutiny points to something she said is a problem for the Democratic Party this election cycle.
“Voters have felt that they can’t perform to the level of scrutiny of all of the social issues, the representation,” Pinkston said. She said that the Democrats on her staff have told her, “‘I’m so exhausted by us.’ Because there’s no one who can perform to the level of scrutiny that the Democratic Party is placing on humanity.”
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