Political gatherings are often places of unlikely coexistence.

The 37th annual Lincoln Day Gala of the Shelby County Republican Party included an auction as the group of 600 party faithful at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn ate dinner.

Except dinner at a political gathering always involves elected officials and those who want to be elected officials circulating around the room, shaking hands and waving.

What was missing were any overwhelming indications of the race for the Republican presidential nomination that comes to Shelby County and Tennessee starting Wednesday, Feb. 15. That’s when the early voting period opens for the March 6 Tennessee presidential primary.

There weren’t any Mitt Romney supporters jockeying for position with Ron Paul advocates or Rick Santorum boosters.

There was, however, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a keynote speaker with some past interest in being the GOP presidential nominee.

Alexander told the local Republicans to be motivated by three words when they vote: “The Obama Economy.”

“He’s made it worse and we need a change,” Alexander said to applause. “They’ve been in charge. They’ve made it worse. We can do better.”

With President Barack Obama unopposed on the Democratic side, Alexander acknowledged the state’s open primary system will likely mean a sizeable Democratic and independent crossover vote in the GOP primary.

He defended the system. Tennessee voters do not register by party. A voter who casts a ballot in a Republican primary in one election can vote in a Democratic primary in the next election or vice versa.

“Sometimes we say we don’t want the Democrats and the independents messing around in our primaries,” Alexander said. “If they weren’t, we’d still have primaries where we have 150,000 voting statewide. And I can tell you from experience, it’s no fun winning the Republican primary statewide when only 150,000 Tennesseans voted in the Republican primary. And you turn it around and look at 800,000 Tennesseans voted in the Democratic primary.”

Alexander credits the Shelby County GOP with changing that starting in the 1960s when the “New Guard” movement took over the party as a shift of African-American voters away from the Republican Party and to the Democratic Party began.

It took time. The “no fun” reference by Alexander was his 1974 campaign for governor in the year of Watergate in which he lost to Democratic nominee Ray Blanton. Alexander returned as the GOP nominee in 1978 and beat Democratic nominee Jake Butcher of Knoxville.

Alexander has long argued within the party that Republicans can’t win elections with just Republicans and that the same is true in Tennessee for Democrats. The key for both parties is drawing enough independents and those of the other party looking for a change.

“Our door has always been open,” he said at Friday’s Lincoln Day Dinner. “And we became the majority party … because our door was open and we always attracted new people in.”

Those new people have been changed by the process as well as changing the party.

Alexander was introduced by U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher, one of several Republican congressional contenders who took the state from a majority Democratic nine-member delegation to Congress to a majority-Republican delegation.

“Before I was elected to office, I threw you guys under the bus a lot,” Fincher said of Alexander and other incumbents in introducing him.

Fincher says the transition to service in the House has been hard and humbling work and that work is about to change as Fincher’s new district now includes a sizeable part of not only the Shelby County Republican base but Memphis as well.

The new territory could come with new challengers within his own party as Fincher prepares for his first re-election campaign.