In the last week, Congressman John Rose has become much more aggressive in his campaign for Governor against Senator Marsha Blackburn. Blackburn’s campaign team has touted her frontrunner status from the beginning, and most political analysts have been waiting for Rose to begin taking serious steps to close the gap. It appears Rose is now beginning to do that in a couple of ways.

First, Rose launched a $600,000 TV/online ad buy in early October in a bid to begin boosting his name recognition.  Blackburn has a huge name ID advantage over Rose thanks to a long career in the state Senate and US House before winning two statewide US Senate races. Americans for Prosperity and others also featured her in their ad campaigns earlier this year promoting passage of Governor Lee’s voucher program. Rose’s team knows they can’t close the polling gap until they close the spread in name ID.

Rose followed the TV buy with more targeted criticisms of Blackburn on policy issues. When the Senate passed a supposedly “clean” continuing resolution to reopen the government, the bill included a provision allowing eight Senators, including Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, to sue for up to $500,000 in damages per occurrence arising from Department of Justice officials obtaining their private phone records without their knowledge. The damages would be paid by the federal government, which has no money except for tax dollars supplied by taxpayers.

Senator Hagerty immediately announced that he would not be suing to obtain money from the taxpayers. Blackburn indicated that she would seek that money before then reversing course and joining Hagerty in announcing she would also support removing the seemingly self-serving provision that Senators had included in their bill to reopen the federal government.

Rose leapt at the opportunity to both criticize the Senate and Blackburn for including a new provision in a bill that had been moved to a vote as a “clean” continuing resolution 15 times previously. In addition to stepping up his media appearances on the issue, Rose also immediately filed a bill to remove the offensive provision from the legislation.

Rose took another step towards increasing his visibility with Republican voters across the state when a new mail piece begin hitting mailboxes this week. The postcard emphasizes that Rose is a “proven conservative leader, not a career politician” and features a photograph of Rose with President Donald Trump. In addition to biographical and background information about Rose, he notes that “President Trump has stood with John Rose in every one of his runs for Congress.”

Despite the not-so-subtle references to Blackburn with a few mentions that Rose is “not a career politician”, the mail piece is a positive introduction of Rose to voters who know nothing about him. It is a pretty standard political strategy to highlight a candidate’s positives before moving to attack ads intended to define the opponent in a harsh and negative light. So, this mail piece is almost certainly a gentle prelude to what is likely to be a very tough campaign between Blackburn and Rose moving towards the August primary in 2026.

A third Republican candidate for Governor, State Representative Monty Fritts, has been campaigning across the state in recent months. The next financial disclosure for candidates to reveal their fundraising totals will come in January 2026. At that point, it will be possible to determine whether Fritts has the financial resources necessary to mount a serious campaign.

Rose reported raising $6.1 million in his financial report filed with the state election finance registry in July of this year. Blackburn, like Fritts, entered the race after the July fundraising reports were due. Thus, the first reports from both Blackburn and Fritts will come in January, along with an updated report from Rose.

Steve Gill is editor and publisher of TriStar Daily.