Steven Glaser, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for state house, is circulating an email blasting the TNDP for their lack of support. You can read it here.

The TNDP's somewhat wishy-washy response, also at the above link, is perhaps a little too polite. They didn't mention that the candidate had a string of bankruptcies and IRS tax liens totaling more than $100K going back to 1988.

While that doesn't instill a great deal of confidence in a candidate's sense of fiscal responsibility, in GOP bizarro world such shortcomings are far worse than being indicted for assaulting your wife (like newly reelected Republican State Rep. David Hawk) or having sex with patients and pressuring them to get an abortion (like newly reelected Republican Congressman Scott DesJarlais, whose Democratic opponent had similar IRS problems).

But regardless of whether Glaser's characterizations of the TNDP are accurate (they probably are, but possibly for the reasons cited above), it appears that some of the TNDP's underlying problems are related more to recruiting good candidates who can stand up to voter scrutiny outside their local comfort zone (a standard that only seems to apply to Democrats in Tennessee politics). On the other hand, it's not clear why anyone would want to subject themselves to the TNGOP slime machine, so hats off to those who did and prevailed.