Marsha Blackburn is about to leave a US Senate seat wide open.

Democrats and their media pals are praying she hands it to another forgettable career politician.

And one former WWE champion just climbed to the front of the line.

The Big Red Machine Moves to the Front of the Line

Glenn Jacobs spent the better part of two decades playing Kane, the fire-scarred, sometimes-masked half-brother of The Undertaker. Now Republican insiders say the wrestler-turned-mayor sits at the head of the line for Marsha Blackburn’s seat in the US Senate.

The Washington Sun reported that Jacobs has become the favorite to fill the seat once Blackburn, the governor-elect, moves into the governor’s office in mid-January.

“Based on [what happened], it’s even more likely for Glenn,” one Republican operative told the paper.

Two other people familiar with the process said Jacobs holds the “advantage” over the rest of the field. That field includes US Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN), Deputy Governor Stuart McWhorter, and US Representative Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN).

Burchett makes no secret of wanting the job. He turned into a fixture at Blackburn’s campaign stops.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s name floated around too. But insiders mostly waved it off, and Hegseth would need a waiver from a rule that requires candidates to have voted in four previous Republican primaries in the state.

Jacobs, meanwhile, never strayed far from the governor-elect. He served as treasurer for her governor campaign, and the two share a consultant in Ward Baker.

“Every time I saw Marsha, Glenn wasn’t very far behind,” said Kim Perry, president of the political consulting firm Perry Strategies.

Perry added that the wrestling crowd around Memphis already knows the man. “Here in Shelby County and the Memphis metro area, where we live, we love our wrestling here, so people know him,” she said.

Blackburn holds the pick. Whoever she names would face voters in a special election in 2028.

The Lone No Vote That Washington’s Giggling Crowd Skipped Right Over

Most of the national coverage treats Jacobs like a novelty act. Chokeslams, pyrotechnics, a cheesy horror movie or two, and a punchline about a body slam on the Senate floor.

But the coverage keeps skipping the most interesting thing about him.

On July 1, 2020, the Knox County Board of Health voted 7-1 to order face coverings in nearly every indoor public building in the county. Jacobs, the county mayor and a voting member of that board, cast the only no.

Under the order, anyone caught bare-faced risked a $50 fine and up to 30 days in jail, according to a local newspaper.

Sit with that for a second. A guy who wore a mask in front of millions of people for a paycheck drew the line when the government tried to strap one on everybody else.

Jacobs never pretended the virus was fake. He told people he wanted individuals and business owners making the call, and he complained that the board handed down a command instead of a request.

Knoxville’s Democrat mayor, Indya Kincannon, cheered the other way. “I fully support a face mask mandate and am very grateful that the Health Board adopted such a measure for the entire county at their meeting tonight,” she wrote on Facebook.

Left-leaning commentators in the state piled on. One Tennessee Lookout column slapped him with the nickname “COVID Cowboy” and called him a lousy mayor.

And the cowboy kept riding anyway. Reason later credited him with beating back tax increases along with mask and vaccine mandates during his eight years running the county, a run that ended when term limits closed out his tenure at the end of August 2026.

Ron Paul’s Fingerprints Are All Over This Resume

None of this came out of nowhere. Jacobs came up through the Ron Paul movement, the same grassroots rebellion that produced Rand Paul and Thomas Massie.

At Ron Paul’s 90th birthday celebration in August 2025, Jacobs sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie and explained what pulled him in.

“It was tying the fiscal conservatism together with the noninterventionist foreign policy,” Jacobs said. “That’s where the mass appeal came from.”

He went further on who actually runs Washington. “It’s the administrative state and the bureaucrats who are actually populating the rules. They’re the ones running most of the government,” he told the magazine.

He has also long blamed the Federal Reserve and central banking for fueling bad policy, a view the polite crowd once laughed off as fringe. Then came the money-printing of the Biden years and the inflation that followed it, and the laughing got a lot quieter.

Ron Paul stood among the handful of House Republicans who voted against the Patriot Act in October 2001, back when opposing warrantless government snooping could get a man called unpatriotic. His Audit the Fed bill later cleared the House 327-98 in July 2012 before the Senate buried it.

Rand Paul endorsed Jacobs in his first mayoral race. So did The Undertaker, which tells you the family feud got patched up somewhere along the way.

The Midterms Already Graded the Lesson Jacobs Learned Decades Ago

Republicans just watched Congress slip away, and the establishment wants to blame everything except the obvious.

Nearly two-thirds of the electorate, 63 percent, told NBC News exit pollsters that taking military action against Iran was the wrong decision. Democrats walked off with 83 percent of that bloc. That war came straight out of the neoconservative wing’s playbook, and voters sent the invoice to every Republican on the ballot.

The Ron Paul crowd warned about exactly this kind of entanglement for two decades. Jacobs just repeated the warning on camera at a birthday party.

Now, nobody should pretend a single Senate appointment fixes a party. It doesn’t, and the choice belongs to Blackburn alone.

But the incoming Democrat majorities did plenty of cheering for lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates the last time a virus came around. Their socialist wing just grabbed big-city mayor’s offices and House seats on promises of government-run everything.

So the real question isn’t whether a former wrestler can handle the Senate. It’s whether the people mocking him ever noticed which side of the mask fight he took when it actually cost him something.

In July 2020, eight people sat on the Knox County Board of Health. Seven voted to put a mask on everyone in the county. The one who said no had worn a mask for a living.

Sources:

“Introducing ‘Likely’ Republican Replacement for Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn: WWE Wrestler Kane,” Mediaite

“Former Pro Wrestler Could Be Tennessee’s Next Senator,” The Washington Sun

“Blackburn won’t address U.S. Senate appointment,” Tennessee Lookout / States Newsroom

“Masks Mandated,” Compass Knox

“Buchanan: Masks a Safety Measure, Not a Political One,” WUOT

“WWE Superstar Mayor Kane Votes Against Mandatory Coronavirus Masks,” Bleeding Cool

“Commentary: COVID Cowboy is Lousy Mayor,” Tennessee Lookout

“Glenn Jacobs on Donald Trump, the Administrative State, and Ron Paul’s Legacy,” Reason

“Citizen Kane Rising,” The American Conservative

2026 midterm exit poll, NBC News