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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) Democrat Craig Fitzhugh is joining the race for Tennessee governor.

The banker and attorney from Ripleytells The Tennesseanthat he will draw on his 23 years of experience as a state lawmaker, most recently as House minority leader and previously as chairman of the powerful House Finance Committee.

"There's some things that I think we can do better," Fitzhugh said. "That's why I'm in it."

Fitzhugh joins former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean in the race for the Democratic nomination. While Dean has already raised $1.2 million and has his own personal wealth to draw on, Fitzhugh has a closer relationship with labor and teachers unions.

Craig Fitzhugh (File/AP via the Tennessean)

Craig Fitzhugh (File/AP via the Tennessean)

Photo by File/AP via the Tennessean

Fitzhugh is also the only gubernatorial candidate from either party from West Tennessee.

"The problems and the situations that people in North Nashville and south Memphis find themselves in are not much different than those in Ripley, or Columbia or Etowah or other communities," Fitzhugh said. "There are things that we can do to give people an opportunity to better their lives."

Fitzhugh, 67, is CEO and chairman of the Bank of Ripley. He was a captain in the U.S. Air Force from 1976 to 1980 and served in the reserves until 1988. He and his wife, Pam, have two children and four grandchildren.

Fitzhugh's campaign treasurer is John Morgan, the former state comptroller and chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents.

Former Gov. Phil Bredesen was the last Democrat to win a statewide Tennessee race in 2002.

"I think there's a dissatisfaction among Democrats because Democrats aren't as bold as they used to be," Fitzhugh said. "Sometimes they don't want to admit they are Democrats, and I think sometimes we've had the issues wrong."

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam can't run again next year because of term limits. Declared GOP candidates so far include state Sen. Mae Beavers of Mt. Juliet, U.S. Rep. Diane Black of Gallatin, businessman Randy Boyd of Knoxville, state House Speaker Beth Harwell of Nashville and businessman Bill Lee of Franklin.

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Democrat Craig Fitzhugh joins race for Tennessee governor - Chattanooga Times Free Press

WASHINGTON Do you believe in mermaids, unicorns and fairies?

If so, you may have taken interest in a new mythical creature that appeared during the 2016 election: the Trump Democrat.

It has become an article of faith that an unusually large number of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012 switched sides and voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. It follows that Democrats, to win in the future, need to get these lost partisans to come home.

But new data, and an analysis by AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer that he shared with me, puts all this into question. The number of Obama-to-Trump voters turns out to be smaller than thought. And those Obama voters who did switch to Trump were largely Republican voters to start with. The aberration wasnt their votes for Trump but their votes for Obama.

It follows for Democrats that most of these Obama-Trump voters arent going to be persuaded to vote Democratic in the future; the party would do better to go after disaffected Democrats who didnt vote in 2016 or who voted for third parties.

In the aftermath of Trumps surprise win, the commentary quickly focused on the Obama-Trump voter. Nate Cohn of the New York Times said, Democrats have to grapple with the importance of the Obama-Trump voter. NBCs Chuck Todd said one of the big surprises of this election was the emergence of the Obama-Trump voter. Priorities USA, the super-PAC that backed Clinton, concluded that Democrats must win back Obama-Trump voters.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) asserted that Trump is expanding the Republican tent. We used to call them Reagan Democrats. Now theyre Trump Democrats. Donald Trump Jr. embraced the Trump Democrats claim at a rally. And many Democrats have bought into this thinking. Not long ago, according to McClatchy News, the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group concluded that Obama-Trump voters effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost.

There was some justification for thinking this. Data from the American National Election Study (ANES) survey found that about 13.4 percent of Trump voters had backed Obama in 2012. A University of Virginia poll found that 20 percent of Trump voters had supported Obama at least once.

But such polls have a flaw: People tend to forget how they voted in previous elections, with more recalling they voted for the winner than actually did. A poll released in June by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a nonpartisan collaboration of analysts and scholars, avoided this problem because it re-interviewed the same respondents queried in 2012; they were asked who they voted for in real time.

Democracy Fund found a fairly ordinary crossover vote in 2016: 9.2 percent of Obama voters supported Trump and 5.4 percent of Mitt Romney voters supported Clinton. That was a typical and unsurprising degree of partisan loyalty. The 2016 election did not create more instability, in the aggregate, than others, it reported.

And those Obama voters who did cross to Trump look a lot like Republicans. The AFL-CIOs Podhorzer analyzed raw data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, out in the spring, and found that Obama-Trump voters voted for Republican congressional candidates by a 31-point margin, Republican Senate candidates by a 15-point margin and Republican gubernatorial candidates by a 27-point margin. Their views on immigration and Obamacare also put them solidly in the GOP camp.

Democratic analysts who are looking to solve the partys problem by appealing to this small group of Obama-Trump voters are pointing themselves to a group that by and large is a Republican group now, Podhorzer told me. The bulk of Obama-Trump voters are not fed-up Democratic voters; they are Republican voters who chose Obama in 2012. As such, few are available in 2018 or 2020. Democrats should instead appeal broadly to working-class voters, he said.

In 2008, a larger-than-usual number of Republican voters went with Obama during an extraordinary time, when the economy was in free fall and an incumbent Republican president was deeply unpopular. ANES polling found that 17 percent of Obama voters in 2008 had been for George W. Bush in 2004, compared to the 13 percent of Trump voters, the same survey found, who supported Obama at least once. These people arent Obama-Trump voters as much as they were Bush-Obama voters.

This is important, because it means Democrats dont have to contort themselves to appeal to the mythical Trump Democrats by toughening their position on immigration, or weakening their support for universal health care, or embracing small government and low taxes. What Democrats have to do is be Democrats.

Milbank is a Washington Post columnist.

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Commentary: There's no such thing as a Trump Democrat - MyStatesman.com

KLIEVER, Mo. Harold Hohenfeldt lives on a slice of land overlooking a rolling field in the middle of Missouri. He has a National Rifle Association sticker on his front door and watches his fair share of Fox News.

On Tuesday, Hohenfeldt, 85, intends to head to the polls and cast his ballot for Sara Walsh, the Republican running against Democrat Michela Skelton in a special election for Missouris 50th House District.

The other one, from what I understand, is pretty liberal, he said of Skelton. And Im not a liberal.

Conventional wisdom says there are enough voters who think like Hohenfeldt here to send Walsh to Jefferson City. But this is 2017, and this year has been anything but conventional.

Skelton, 31, has outraised her opponent and has used a network of mid-Missouri Bernie Sanders supporters and other win-thirsty Democrats to beat up and down the district. She is homing in on bread-and-butter issues like jobs and education. At the same time, the GOP has tried to brand her as too liberal for the district.

Those labels are nonsense, Skelton told the Post-Dispatch. Theyre ways to divide people that otherwise have so much in common.

Robert Knodell, the executive director of the Missouri House Republican Campaign Committee, called the district a hybrid, taking in suburban parts of Columbia as well as rural parts of four counties Boone, Cole, Cooper and Moniteau.

He said the GOP is cautiously optimistic about a win here, but added turnout is key. He said Walsh, who has worked in the upper echelons of the Missouri GOP, holds views that align with the majority of the district and would wield more influence than Skelton in the GOP-dominated Legislature. Walsh did not respond to two interview requests.

I think she (Walsh) is a better fit than her opponent, Knodell said.

On her campaign website, Walsh hits familiar Republican notes, emphasizing her anti-abortion and pro-Second Amendment positions. She also says she will work to ensure the University of Missouri receives its fair share of state funding.

The 50th House District was drawn after the 2010 U.S. Census to give Republicans a 55-to-45 percent edge over Democrats.

Whether Democrats can compete is a mystery. Republican Caleb Jones did not face Democratic competition here in four elections to the Missouri House. In January, he took a job in Gov. Eric Greitens administration, setting up the special election to fill out the remaining year of his term.

Skelton has netted just over $98,000 in the race while Walsh has raised $60,000, according to Missouri Ethics Commission reports filed in the week before the election. Skelton said the numbers even out when considering the aid Walsh has received from state GOP committees.

The fact that theyre pouring in money and desperately trying to smear our candidate shows theyre worried, said Stephen Webber, the chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party.

And Democrats are itching for a win after losing every statewide race in 2016 and seeing their ranks diminished in the Legislature.

On Tuesday, they will get a shot in both the 50th House District and the 28th Senate District, a sprawling district in southwest Missouri vacated by now-Lt. Gov. Mike Parson. There, Republican state Rep. Sandy Crawford faces Democrat and former educator Al Skalicky.

Skelton is an attorney by trade and former apolitical state Senate staffer. If her name sounds familiar, that is because she is a distant cousin of former Democratic U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton. The elder Skelton, who died in 2013, held a rural Missouri seat for decades as the Democrats transformed into a more urban party.

Michela Skelton, raised in a conservative military family in Alabama, said she speaks the language of rural voters.

But in campaign advertisements, Republicans cast Skelton as Too Liberal. Too Extreme. The House Republican Campaign Committee mined her campaign donation filings, saying University of Missouri professors aligned with controversial former professor Melissa Click chipped in to Skeltons campaign.

Dave Robertson, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said a safe bet would be on the Republican in Tuesdays contest.

Right now, the money would be on the Republican in that race, he said, based on the fact that Missouri looks like a red state now.

Then again: Maybe (Skeltons) got a base more capable of mobilization than we think.

Be informed. Get our free political newsletter featuring local and national updates and analysis.

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In mid-Missouri, Democrats hope to flip a state house seat in Tuesday election - STLtoday.com

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Democrat Craig Fitzhugh joins race for Tennessee governor The News Tribune Fitzhugh joins former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean in the race for the Democratic nomination. While Dean has already raised $1.2 million and has his own personal wealth to draw on, Fitzhugh has a closer relationship with labor and teachers unions. Craig Fitzhugh to run for governor of Tennessee, setting up contested Democratic primaryWBIR-TV all 5 news articles »

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Democrat Craig Fitzhugh joins race for Tennessee governor - The News Tribune

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer blasted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Saturday for failing to sign off on an event the U.S. was slated to host on supporting global democracy, saying the action sends a "dangerous signal" to the nation's adversaries.

"By stalling and scaling back this event -- in addition to removing just' and democratic' from the State Department's mission -- Secretary Tillerson is sending a dangerous signal to the world about the priorities of the United States," the top Democrat from Maryland said in a statement. "Congress must send a strong signal to this Administration that we stand united in the promotion of democracy here at home and around the world."

The event is called the Community of Democracies ministerial conference that the U.S. had been slated to host this year. The organization was established in 2000 by then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as an intergovernmental coalition to work with civil society groups to promote and protect democratic freedoms and human rights.

Washington Post opinion writer Josh Rogin reported that the State Department was expected to host the event in September, but no one at State Department can say definitely if it will actually take place.

"Administration officials and organizers told me the planning is stalled because Tillerson's office hasn't responded to his own building's months-old proposals about the event," Rogin wrote on Thursday. "As planning time runs short, many see the State Department under Tillerson as shirking the U.S. commitment as current president of the coalition."

Every two years, the coalition hosts a foreign ministerial meeting and this year it is the U.S.'s turn to host.

"I am deeply concerned by Secretary Tillerson's unwillingness to sign off on the Community of Democracies event that the United States is expected to hold this year," Hoyer added in his Saturday statement.

"At a time when foreign adversaries are working to undermine democracies, we ought to be joining with our allies to examine how we can safeguard democratic institutions and confront those who threaten them," he said.

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Top Democrat Steny Hoyer blasts Rex Tillerson for stalling global democracy event - Washington Examiner