Senator Blackburn Runs for Governor as a 'Fraud Fighter,' Promising a Day-One Audit; Her Opponent Notes She Issued 1,000 Press Releases Since 2022 and Never Once Mentioned the State's $250 Million Fraud Scandal

NASHVILLE — Senator Blackburn, the heavy favorite to become her state's next governor, has built her campaign on a promise to fight fraud, a commitment her opponent this week measured against the senator's own archive and found to be approximately 0 for 1,000.

The senator's campaign ad, released earlier this month, pledges a state audit on her first day in office to root out waste, fraud and abuse, language that arrived after a quarter-billion-dollar fraud scandal in a state program became the defining issue of the race and helped drive the incumbent governor, a member of her own party, out of it. Her opponent, the speaker of the state House, searched the senator's press releases since 2022, counted more than a thousand, and found none that mentioned the scandal by name.

The opponent also noted that Senator Blackburn, a two-decade veteran of the upper chamber with committee seats to spare, never held a hearing on the matter and did not attend one held a few months ago, and summarized the record in a question her campaign has now printed on signs: 'Where were you?'

The senator's allies said she has a long record on oversight and that the audit pledge is forward-looking, which her critics agreed it was, in the sense that it looks forward from a point at which the fraud had already happened. The opposing party, which spends its own election years explaining why its own senators did not notice its own scandals, said this one was different because the senator is theirs.

"I have always fought fraud," the senator said, in a press release.

The Press's audit desk notes that 'a fresh start on accountability' and 'a twenty-year bystander discovers the issue in an ad' are the same candidate viewed from opposite sides of the ballot, and which side a voter sees depends on the letter beside her name. At press time the thousand releases had been indexed, the keyword search returned nothing, and the day-one audit remained scheduled for day one.