Recovering journalist and Nashville-area public policy expert Clint Brewer thinks Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti would be a strong candidate if he were to run for governor in 2026.
“If this were a state where the attorney general was elected, we’d be talking about Skrmetti for governor right now,” Brewer said on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“If we were in a state where he had to run statewide, we’d be talking about what higher offices he would be going to seek next,” Brewer added.
Skrmetti was selected by the Tennessee Supreme Court to serve as the state’s attorney general and reporter in August 2022.
Before serving as attorney general, Skrmetti was the chief deputy attorney general in the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office from 2018 to late 2021. Afterward, he served as chief counsel to Governor Bill Lee.
Skrmetti has said his office has worked on more than 10,000 cases in just over two years.
Within the past couple of days, Skrmetti oversaw significant wins for the state as the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request to review a lower court’s decision upholding Tennessee’s Adult Entertainment Act and the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling that the state law mandating only the Tennessee Attorney General can handle post-conviction death row cases is constitutional.
Brewer also championed Skrmetti’s successful fight against the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) over its name, image, and likeness (NIL) recruitment ban.
“That applies to Vanderbilt, MTSU, University of Memphis, Austin Peay, anybody with a Division I athletic program,” Brewer said.
Noting how Skrmetti is “very popular,” Brewer said his lack of ambition to seek higher office is “unusual” in today’s political world.
“Skrmetti is an interesting commodity, politically. He has done things that are, for the majority of voters in the state, wildly popular policy positions. He’s brought home wins and really chained policy here in a demonstrable way, but doesn’t seem to have any ambition. That’s unusual in this day and age,” Brewer said.
“It’s laudable,” Brewer added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Jonathan Skrmetti” by Tennessee Attorney General.
