Ford wins in county, loses state
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With 94 percent of precincts reporting, Corker had 882,086 votes, or 50.8 percent, and Ford had 833,120 votes, or 48 percent.
However, Ford did carry Warren County, claiming 54 percent of the vote here. Ford beat Corker locally by a 6,254 to 4,938 margin.
Ford, a charismatic five-term congressman from Memphis, was treated like a celebrity on the campaign trail and carried a marker in his pocket to sign autographs.
Corker, 54, defused his lesser celebrity by acknowledging that Ford was better-looking and a better speaker ? implying that Ford was style without substance.
The former Chattanooga mayor sold himself to voters as a practical and accomplished businessman, a devoted father and husband who started his own construction business in Tennessee.
Corker cast his opponent as a Washington insider, a liberal career politician who was trying to convince voters that he was actually a conservative.
Randy Reeves, a 31-year-old salesman from Knoxville, said he voted for Corker because “he isn’t a career politician.”
“He did have other aspirations, and he was successful at those,” Reeves said.
Ford, 36, sought to shape the election as a referendum on President Bush and Republican policies of the past six years. He took conservative positions on gay marriage and tax cuts, but he has strongly criticized how the president has handled the war in Iraq.
But the war in Iraq, which has claimed the lives of 59 Tennessee service members, has stronger support in Tennessee than nationally.
Tennesseans are now divided on the war, compared to a majority opposing it nationally, according to a survey of voters for The Associated Press.
While news stories focused on whether a Southern state could send a black man to the Senate, both candidates insisted that the campaign should have nothing to do with racial politics.
But the issue surfaced when a Republican television ad attacking Ford was criticized for making an implicit appeal to deep-seated racial fears about black men and white women.
Possibly more damaging to Ford were subsequent ads that accused him of supporting gay marriage and giving the “abortion pill” to schoolchildren. The Ford campaign was put on the defensive by those claims, which the candidate called lies.
Corker will fill the seat being vacated by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and will continue a string of Republican successes in the state. Tennessee has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in 16 years.
“Corker might be a little more in touch with the people than Ford might be,” said Christine Williams, 60, a Knoxville nurse who voted for the Republican.
Tennessee has a smaller black population (about 17 percent) than other Southern states, putting a greater emphasis on Ford’s need to appeal to white voters.
After the Civil War, the Mississippi state legislature sent the first black senators to Washington in the 1870s ? Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce.