Bredesen’s primary night victory speech on Aug. 2 stands in sharp contrast to the one Abrams delivered in May:

We’ve just turned into a country where everybody stands on opposite sides of the room and shouts at each other. I’d like to be part of the fix for that, to start bringing us back together to find some solutions and to do some things together.

Tennessee is 73.9 percent white.

In his latest digital ad, “What Republicans Are Saying About Phil Bredesen,” the campaign cites favorable comments from prominent Republicans, including Sen. Bob Corker and Representative Chuck Fleischmann.

In an earlier television ad, Bredesen — a Harvard graduate with a degree in physics and a business executive who founded HealthAmerica Corporation — made his opposition to polarization explicit: “I’m not running against Donald Trump.” There are “a lot of things I personally don’t like about Donald Trump,” Bredesen says,

but he is the president of the United States and if he has an idea or is pushing something that is going to be good for Tennessee, I’m going to be for it no matter where it came from. And likewise, if I think it’s not going to be good for Tennessee I’m going to be against it.

On Tuesday, Democratic primary voters demonstrated a strong preference for centrist candidates; in May and June, they chose progressives. Looking toward the general election in November, there is evidence in support of both the Abrams and the Bredesen strategies.

The Third Way — a leading Democratic think tank that pushes for centrist, pro-business policies — conducted a poll June 14-15 designed to test the strength of two competing messages.

The first message expressed support for positions best described as non-adversarial and focused on expanding economic opportunity:

It’s getting harder and harder for people to earn the life they want. That’s because the economy has changed dramatically, but government is stuck in the past. To solve this, we need an opportunity agenda for the Digital Age so that everyone everywhere has the opportunity to earn a better life.

The second message takes a decidedly adversarial stance toward the rich and illustrates an approach based on economic populism:

The American people must make a fundamental decision. Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? This is the most important question of our time, and how we answer it will determine the future of our country.

For all intents and purposes, the result was a draw. The first message — similar to Bredesen’s approach — got slightly more support from respondents (75 agree, 17 disagree), compared with 69-19 for the second message. But a higher percentage, 36 percent, “strongly” agreed with the more assertive populist message — similar to the Abrams approach — than the 32 percent for the message focused on opportunity.

A paper called “Who Punishes Extremist Nominees? Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in US Elections,” by Andrew B. Hall and Daniel M. Thompson, political scientists at Stanford, arguably helps make the case for the moderate Bredesen-type, non-polarizing strategy.