“Not Red, Not Blue” Is a Pinterest Board, Not a Campaign

Tennessee is facing hospital closures, book bans, and abortion bans. We don’t need a mood-board candidacy built on neutrality and nostalgia. We need someone willing to fight.

I’ve gone back and forth about writing this. Truly. I don’t enjoy criticizing someone who shares my home state, my background, or my alma mater. No one takes pleasure in poking holes in the launch of someone’s dream. But I also don’t think it’s responsible (not in a state like Tennessee, not in a year like this, not with this much on the line) to stay silent while a statewide campaign introduces itself with curated neutrality, aesthetic faith language, and a refusal to take a side in a place where other people simply do not have that luxury.

Here’s the launch video her team wants you to see. Soft, curated, aesthetic, and very on-brand.

Because Tennessee politics is not abstract. It is not theoretical. It is not a canvas for moral vibes and Pinterest-board slogans. It is a machine that determines whether hospitals stay open, whether women get emergency care, whether queer kids stay safe, whether teachers keep their jobs, whether families keep their land, and whether democracy survives one more legislative session.

And in this moment, Tennessee has only two political lanes. There is the lane rolling back rights, and the lane fighting (imperfectly, inconsistently, but honestly) to protect them. There is no mystical third lane. Not structurally. Not historically. Not mathematically.

The numbers make that painfully, painfully clear.

In 2022, nearly 1.74 million Tennesseans voted for governor. The Republican cleared over a million votes. The Democrat received a little over half a million. Every independent in the race combined didn’t even break forty thousand.

In 2018, nothing changed. More than 2.2 million votes were cast statewide. Independents barely cracked the low forty-thousands.

Anyone launching an independent statewide run in Tennessee isn’t defying the odds… they’re ignoring reality. And when someone waves away numbers this overwhelming while claiming they’re offering a “new way forward,” it usually says less about strategy and more about the candidate’s personal calling, branding, or need to narrate their own hero’s journey.

In deep-red states, independent bids do not form new coalitions. They fracture the only coalition capable of slowing extremism. They give soft Republicans a guilt-free escape hatch. A way to “not vote Republican” without having to support the only candidate who can actually beat one. And every time someone takes that out, the people paying the price aren’t the voters chasing moral purity. They’re the ones who cannot escape the consequences.Women in ERs. LGBTQ kids. Rural families. Teachers. Nurses. Hospital patients. Minimum-wage workers.

This is the context in which Lauren Pinkston launched her campaign yesterday.

Two speeches. Two crowds. Two beautifully staged moments.

And almost no policy at all.

This is how the Selmer speech opened. Not with policy, but with a full prayer.

What was heard were stories of childhood and casseroles, flowing prayers, small-town healing, moral testimonies, and lines like “God told me I hadn’t learned how to love the people who raised me.” She talked about how Southern hospitality “healed” her, how her affection for Tennesseans “demands her service,” and how she is entering the race because she believes in the transformative power of listening.

What she did not talk about were the laws being passed in God’s name. She did not talk about power. Or the legislature. Or the very real machines that are harming people right now. If anything, the warm nostalgia and prayerful tone acted like a soft-focus filter. Emotional fog that obscured the absence of any plan to confront the people actually making life harder here.

There is a certain type of candidate that appears in moments of crisis. The soft-focus healer, the moral storyteller, the person who promises unity without ever telling you what they’ll unify us toward. They show up when stakes are highest but choose a politics designed to protect their own comfort. They talk about healing because they do not want to talk about power. They talk about love because they do not want to talk about responsibility. They talk about God because they do not want to confront the harm being inflicted under that banner.

Pinkston’s slogan lays that aesthetic out plain:

“Not Red, Not Blue, Just You”

A picture-perfect launch: all vibe, no vision. The Pinterest-board aesthetic hits harder here than any policy never mentioned on stage.

It’s adorable. It also tells you exactly what she’s selling.

Because when a candidate says she is “not red, not blue,” what she’s really saying (in a state like ours) is that she refuses to pick a side even when picking a side determines whether people live or die, stay or leave, vote or lose that right.

That isn’t humility. It isn’t compassion. It is privilege.

Privilege available only to people whose rights are not currently under assault. Privilege available only to people who can afford to treat politics like a personal growth exercise.

Pinkston makes her worldview explicit. In her own launch speech, she said:

“I would sleep better at night not voting than putting a checkmark beside someone’s name that to me appears to be the lesser of two evils.”

Here’s the moment she says she’d ‘sleep better’ not voting than choosing the lesser of two evils… in a state where the stakes are life and death.

It is a breathtaking thing to hear a woman running for governor (in a state where women are being denied care during miscarriages) say she would “sleep better” staying home. To hear it in a state where lawmakers criminalize trans kids, strip funding from public schools for vouchers, and push rural hospitals to the brink… and to hear her present that as a moral stance.

Neutrality might help her sleep.
But the rest of Tennessee sure as hell is lying awake at night.

And her record doesn’t match the persona. She says:

“If you look at my voter history, you’ll see me voting in Republican primaries and Democrat primaries.”

The framing suggests balance. Moderation. Careful independence.

But her actual record tells a different story:

One Democratic primary vote… in 2020.
Every other primary vote in Republican contests.
And in 2016, she proudly told The Tennessean:

“I voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson.”

We need to stop pretending that people who refuse to pick a side are brave or independent. Most of the time, they are aligned, but unwilling to admit it. They want the emotional safety of moral purity without the responsibility of facing the consequences that fall on everyone else.

Her platform reflects that same evasiveness. Two launch speeches. Thousands of words. Not a single concrete position on abortion, Medicaid expansion, vouchers, rural hospitals, LGBTQ rights, guns, wages, unions. Hell, not even on property taxes. Not one. Instead, her website offers soft-focus sentiments like:

“We prioritize human life.”
“We prioritize farmers.”
“We prioritize working-class Tennesseans.”
“We prioritize schools as safe and well-funded institutions of discovery.”

That’s not a platform. It’s a mood board. And it’s one that melts in your hands the second you ask how any of it would stand up against the legislature we actually have.

Even where her writing reveals sharper beliefs, she refuses to say them out loud.

On abortion, she writes:

“As a person of faith, I believe in the sanctity of life, even life in a womb.”
“As an adoptive mom, I completely understand your not wanting your tax dollars spent on government-funded abortions.”

Not once does she affirm abortion as a legal right.
Not once does she call for restoring access in Tennessee.
Not once does she confront the ban.

On immigration, she writes that ICE deportations are “state-sanctioned trafficking” and warns, “without the rule of law, the law becomes subject to the ruler.”

But when the microphones turned on, that clarity disappears. When your boldest opnions live only in a newsletter and don’t even make it into your stump speech, you’re not leading voters. You’re managing your image.

Add to this her Forward Party fundraising (urging donors to “break up the two-party system” and “fund a third way for American democracy”) and the picture clears. She’s not a neutral Tennessean following a moral calling, but a career independent operative committed to rejecting coalition politics even in a state where coalition is the only way to protect vulnerable people.

And that’s the heart of it.

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There is nothing noble about refusing to take a side when the stakes are human lives. Neutrality is not kindness. It is not ethics. It is not love. It is the quiet permission slip extremists rely on. And Tennessee has given up too much, lost too much, and buried too much to tolerate another candidate who would rather sleep well than fight hard.

There’s a difference between loving your neighbors and fighting for them.

Lauren Pinkston seems to know how to do the first.
Tennessee needs someone who can do the second.

We Don’t Have the Luxury of Pretending Anymore

For transparency, here are both full launch speeches. You shouldn’t have to take my word for anything… you can watch every minute for yourself.