Lee prevailed in a field of six candidates, The Associated Press reported, after a primary campaign that collectively cost Republicans about $46 million and previewed an autumn of political turbulence.
Tennessee Republicans chose Bill Lee, a wealthy businessman who has never served in elected office, as their nominee for governor on Thursday, spurning a conservative candidate who eagerly sought — but only glancingly received — the support of President Donald Trump’s White House.
Lee prevailed in a field of six candidates, The Associated Press reported, after a primary campaign that collectively cost Republicans about $46 million and previewed an autumn of political turbulence. He will face Karl Dean, a former Nashville mayor who easily won the Democratic primary, in the race to succeed Gov. Bill Haslam, a term-limited Republican.
“Looking back, I never could have imagined that the road would lead here,” Lee, appearing visibly surprised after a victory that followed a late surge in the polls, said Thursday night.
Although Tennessee is a conservative state that Republican presidential nominees have carried since 2000, Democrats believe they have recruited their strongest candidates in more than a decade. Both parties are preparing to spend millions of dollars on the campaigns for governor and an open Senate seat.
In the race for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Bob Corker, Marsha Blackburn, a Republican House member from Middle Tennessee, easily won her party’s nomination and will challenge Phil Bredesen, a moderate Democratic former governor.
Neither faced competitive primaries, and The Associated Press projected both as winners less than 15 minutes after the polls closed across the state.
Left off the November ballot: Rep. Diane Black, who had aggressively tied herself to the Trump administration but won only a modest show of support during her campaign for governor.
Blackburn has no such worries: Trump has already campaigned alongside her, hoping to install a new ally in a bitterly divided Senate chamber as Corker, one of Trump’s most persistent Republican critics on Capitol Hill, retires after two terms.
Although the Senate race is poised to be exceptionally hard fought and will draw most of the political attention in Tennessee in the coming months, Thursday’s most heated competition was concentrated in Republicans’ primary for governor. The staggeringly expensive contest renewed tensions about the direction of the party in a state that has long embraced moderate conservatives in the mold of Howard Baker, the longtime senator, and more recently Corker and Haslam.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.