CIVPAC was planning on making no endorsement in Tennessee’s 2026 election for the United States Senate. President Trump helped change our mind.
This is another race in which the two major-party candidates present very different problems, while the independent alternatives have not yet demonstrated enough to earn our support.
Republican incumbent Bill Hagerty has an impressive conventional résumé. A businessman and former U.S. ambassador to Japan, he serves on the Senate Foreign Relations, Appropriations, Banking and Rules Committees. On many questions of taxation, regulation and economic policy, he is substantially closer to CIVPAC than his Democratic opponent.
But agreement on conventional economic policy is not enough.
Hagerty’s record presents serious questions on two matters that CIVPAC considers particularly important: preservation of democratic institutions and American support for Ukraine. These concerns are reflected more broadly in CIVPAC’s candidate-evaluation principles.
Before the January 6, 2021 certification of the presidential election, Hagerty joined a group of senators and senators-elect announcing that they intended to reject electors from disputed states unless Congress established an emergency commission to conduct a ten-day audit. Their statement specifically contemplated that states could reconvene their legislatures and change their certified electoral votes depending on the commission’s findings.
After the attack on the Capitol, Hagerty did not follow through with that threatened objection. He voted against rejecting the electoral votes from both Arizona and Pennsylvania. That distinction deserves acknowledgment. But his willingness beforehand to participate in an effort to delay certification of a legitimately conducted presidential election remains part of his institutional record.
His position on Ukraine is substantially different from CIVPAC’s stated policy. Hagerty has described himself as one of the senators who opposed “every cent” of U.S. aid to Ukraine and said that the United States “should never have been in Ukraine,” clarifying when challenged that he was referring to American funding rather than the presence of U.S. forces.
Hagerty has also given us little evidence that he would provide an independent legislative check on a president of his own party. He supported controversial Trump nominees including Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Senate records show that Hagerty voted for both nominations. When the Senate considered legislation terminating President Trump’s use of emergency authority to impose tariffs on Canada, Hagerty voted to preserve that authority.
We do not expect Republican senators routinely to oppose a Republican president. We do expect senators of either party to remember that Congress is a separate branch of government and to exercise its constitutional authority when circumstances require it. In the cases mentioned above a number of Republican senators did exercise that atuhority.
Hagerty has not given us sufficient confidence that he will do so.
Democrat Marquita Bradshaw presents substantial questions of her own.
Bradshaw’s current campaign emphasizes working families, education, affordable housing, voting rights, broadband and environmental protection, while speaking positively about small businesses and economic opportunity. Her 2026 campaign language is less programmatically specific than that of her earlier Senate campaign. Her 2020 campaign explicitly supported policies including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, while contemporary reporting also identified support for a $15 federal minimum wage and other progressive economic policies. That change in presentation does not by itself establish that she has abandoned positions she previously supported.
Important questions also remain about Bradshaw’s approach to Ukraine, NATO and America’s broader international responsibilities. Her current public campaign material provides considerably less detail on those subjects than on domestic policy.
There is a powerful argument for electing legislators willing to check executive power, particularly when the president’s own party has frequently failed to do so. CIVPAC has discussed that institutional consideration more fully in Why CIVPAC Sometimes Favors Divided Government.
We also looked for an independent alternative.
Among the independents, Catherine “Barcy” Whitson has developed a more substantial domestic platform than was available earlier in the campaign. She addresses economic development and small business, health care, education, immigration and refugees, technology, environmental stewardship and other domestic issues.
Her published platform remains much less developed, however, on foreign policy, national security, fiscal policy and the concrete separation-of-powers questions a senator would confront. Her emphasis on constitutional government and political independence therefore supplies information about her governing philosophy, but less information about how she would apply it to specific Senate decisions.
The result of this evaluation of all of these candidates is unsatisfactory and might push in the direction of no endorsement at all.
Hagerty is closer to CIVPAC on conventional economic policy, but his opposition to Ukraine aid, his role in the pre-January 6 effort to challenge the 2020 election, and his record of deference to President Trump make an endorsement impossible at this point.
Bradshaw would provide a much stronger partisan check on the administration, but her economic program remains too far from the market-oriented centrism reflected in CIVPAC’s public-policy philosophy, while important questions about her foreign policy remain unanswered.
And none of the independent candidates has yet demonstrated the combination of preparation, policy depth and viability necessary to overcome those shortcomings.
The Final Straw
President Trump has recently urged voters to treat the 2026 midterm elections as a referendum on his presidency. At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on September 9, he told voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”
We are inclined to take him at his word.
That statement makes the relationship between congressional elections and presidential power an explicit issue in the campaign. The Senate’s composition affects such matters as legislation, executive and judicial confirmations, committee control and congressional oversight. Hagerty’s record on nominations, tariffs, war powers and foreign policy therefore provides concrete evidence voters can consider when assessing the institutional implications of the Tennessee U.S. Senate election.
In a race where we have struggled to find an affirmative reason to support any candidate, Trump’s framing makes the institutional question harder to ignore. Senator Hagerty has repeatedly supported the President when Congress had opportunities to exercise independent judgment on nominations, tariffs, war powers and foreign policy.
President Trump has therefore helped clarify what had been a difficult decision: in evaluating this Senate race, the willingness of Congress to serve as an independent constitutional check must carry substantial weight.
We therefore endorse Marquita Bradshaw for the U.S. Senate from Tennessee.