Haslam sweeps in with historic win margin

 NASHVILLE - Republican Bill Haslam's 65 to 33 percent victory over Democrat Mike McWherter - a margin of 32 percentage points - is by far the biggest victory margin in a Tennessee election for governor without an incumbent running for re-election since 1970 when Republicans began seriously contesting gubernatorial races in the Volunteer State.

You might call that 40-year span the modern era in Tennessee politics, although you could argue that it actually began four years earlier, in 1966, when Republican Howard Baker won his first U.S. Senate race.

In any event, there have now been 11 elections for governor beginning with 1970s watershed election of Republican Winfield Dunn over Democrat John Jay Hooker (Dunn was the first Republican governor of Tennessee in 50 years.)

Of those 11 elections, the closest was the 2002 battle in which Democrat Phil Bredesen defeated Republican Van Hilleary by only 3 percentage points. (Four years later, Bredesen won re-election over Republican challenger Jim Bryson by 38.86 percentage points.)

Prior to Tuesday, the biggest margin in an open-seat race (like the one Tuesday without the incumbent running), were the 11.6-percentage-point margins of victory in both 1974 and 1978. Ironically, Republican Lamar Alexander was on the losing end of that margin in 1974 when he lost to Democrat Ray Blanton 43.8 to 55.4 percent, then on the winning side four years later when he beat Democrat Jake Butcher 55.6 to 44 percent.

Haslam's 32 percent margin was nearly three times bigger than those.

Haslam fell short of the biggest victory in any of those 11 races, including the lopsided results when governors won re-election.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Republican Don Sundquist's 68.6281 percent to 29.4754 percent victory over Democrat John Jay Hooker (again) was by 39.1527 percentage points. And Bredesen's 68.5987 percent to 29.7402 percent victory over Bryson in 2006 was a 38.8585 percentage point margin.

However, Bredesen racked up 1,246,776 votes in that 2006 far outdistanced the 669,973 votes Sundquist won for re-election in 1998.

As of 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, the complete gubernatorial returns as reported on the Secretary of State's website showed Haslam with 1,041,409 votes to McWherter's 529,834. The 14 other candidates on the ballot for governor shared 30,096 votes.

Feel free to peer-review these numbers. It's 1 a.m. and my calculator is tired.

One final thing: Bill Haslam becomes the first governor from Knoxville since William Gannaway "Parson" Brownlow, a Knoxville newspaper publisher who served in the post Civil War years of 1865 to 1869. Interestingly, Brownlow was an ardent supporter of the Union -- and of slavery.