By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher
Earlier this week, a friend — who happens to also be a local official — told me a baffling story.
As most small town drama does, it starts in the comments section of a community forum on Facebook. My friend — we’ll call him Sean — noticed a new citizen he didn’t know personally — we’ll call him George — asking questions and making non-factual assertions under a post about a local issue.
Because Sean happened to both know the answers and felt he could deliver the information with the necessary nuance and institutional history, he reached out. What followed bordered on satire.
Over the course of the next hour, each time Sean tried to help, George only wanted the answer to a single question: Are you a Republican or a Democrat?
Sean attempted to pivot, time and again, to the facts. Each time, George responded: Are you a Republican or a Democrat?
“I don’t see my role as partisan,” Sean replied. “I try to do what’s best for Moore County as a whole.”
Diplomacy and reason bounced right off George. He’d have none of it.
“Why won’t you tell me?” he demanded. “What are you afraid of?”
How We Got Here
It would be easy to write George off as an outlier. Except that George didn’t invent this framework on his own — he was handed it. Last August, the Tennessee Republican Party’s state leadership made an extraordinary decision: over the objections of local election officials, it invoked state law to call Moore County’s first-ever Republican primary for county offices, stepping in because the local party had long since disbanded. According to Moore County Elections Administrator Jim Sanders, nothing like it had happened here before in recorded elections history.
The move was not subtle in its intent. Moore County has voted Republican consistently since 2000. The primary wasn’t called because locals demanded it. It was called because the state party wanted a mechanism to make sure too many Republican candidates didn’t appear on the August ballot and split the GOP vote. It’s a reasonable strategy with some unintended trickle down effects. Local election officials were so troubled by the decision that they told The Times they were “praying that calmer heads prevail at the state level.” When the state apparatus reaches into a community that had been governing itself just fine and inserts a partisan sorting mechanism, it shouldn’t surprise anyone when the Georges of the world show up in the comments demanding to know which team you’re on.
Small town politics aren’t partisan
Moore County doesn’t run on party platforms. It runs on who shows up to fix the road, who answers the phone when the water main breaks, who sits on the planning commission and actually read the zoning ordinance. The people doing that work mostly don’t care what you call them politically. They care whether the culvert drains, whether the budget balances, whether the permit gets processed correctly.
George’s question — repeated, insistent, unanswerable to his satisfaction — is the wrong question. It assumes that a party label is the most useful thing to know about a person trying to serve folks in a small Tennessee county. It isn’t. Not even close.
The right questions are the ones Sean was already trying to answer. What does the ordinance actually say? What’s the history of the issue? What happens to the neighbors if this goes through? Those questions have answers. They don’t care who you voted for.
There will always be a George in the comments. But there will also always be a Sean — someone with institutional knowledge and a genuine willingness to share it, showing up anyway, trying again. That’s the version of local civic life worth protecting.
Until we stop leading with the wrong question, we’re going to keep missing the people who actually know the answers, have the heart, and actually show up to do the work. Small town politics aren’t partisan — never have been and really never should be. •
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