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Senate Seat At Risk: Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander Says He Won’t Run For Reelection

   DailyWire.com

On Monday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and a seventh-generation Tennessean, announced he would retire from the senate and not seek reelection in 2020. Alexander’s statement is likely to trigger a fierce competition in the GOP primary, as Tennessee is a solidly Republican state.

Alexander’s statement read:

I will not be a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate in 2020. The people of Tennessee have been very generous, electing me to serve more combined years as Governor and Senator than anyone else from our state. I am deeply grateful, but now it is time for someone else to have that privilege. I have gotten up every day thinking that I could help make our state and country a little better, and gone to bed most nights thinking that I have. I will continue to serve with that same spirit during the remaining two years of my term.”

Alexander is the only person to be elected in Tennessee as both a governor and a senator; his 2008 general election vote total of 1,579,477 is the largest ever received by a statewide candidate.

As his website notes:

He authored opioids legislation signed into law in October which President Trump called “the single largest bill to combat a drug crisis in the history of our country.” In 2016, he wrote the “21st Century Cures Act,” which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called “the most important law of this Congress.” In 2015, Alexander authored the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” fixing “No Child Left Behind.” … the Wall Street Journal said it was the “largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter century.”

In 1978, when he was running for governor, Alexander walked from Mountain City the far northeast of the state to Memphis, a distance of 1,022 miles wearing a red and black flannel shirt; that shirt became identified with him.

Alexander has served as president of the University of Tennessee and U.S. Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush. According to fivethirtyeight.com, Alexander has voted in line with President Trump’s position 93.7% of the time. Alexander differed from Trump, voting for a nonbinding motion calling for congressional approval of national security tariffs. Alexander also voted to impose sanctions on Russia in June 2017, which Trump opposed at the time, and opposed repealing parts of Obamacare, which Trump favored. That vote came in July 2017.

Speculation as to who will succeed Alexander immediately erupted. As political analyst and University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, pointed out, a plethora of candidates for Alexander’s seat is expected to emerge. Sabato tweeted, “Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) retiring, seat up 2020. Hope springs eternal for Dems, but the early rating for Crystal Ball is Safe R. I asked good source: Which Rs are running now? Answer: ‘Everyone I know.’”

One rumor suggested former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, who starred at the University of Tennessee, with one Tennessee representative apparently throwing out Manning’s name.

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