Politics Mother Jones
GOP Gerrymandering Worked in Tennessee—But Just Barely
In some ways, the outcome of Tennessee’s ninth district congressional election was determined in May, when Republican Gov. Bill Lee and the Tennessee legislature redrew the state’s legislative maps—ca
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In some ways, the outcome of Tennessee’s ninth district congressional election was determined in May, when Republican Gov. Bill Lee and the Tennessee legislature redrew the state’s legislative maps—carving Tennessee’s sole district in which white voters were not a majority into three new ones designed to lean Republican, following an April Supreme Court ruling that gutted the federal Voting Rights Act.
While Republican gerrymandering efforts failed in Florida and North Carolina, they seem to have narrowly succeeded in Tennessee’s ninth district, which includes part of Memphis, and where Republican Brent Taylor declared victory late on the night of November 3, defeating Democrat Justin Pearson by about 2,500 votes with 99 percent of votes counted.
Pearson, a Black progressive elected in 2023 to represent Memphis in the Tennessee House of Representatives, first rose to national prominence as one of the “Tennessee Three,” when he was removed from office after co-leading a personal protest for gun reform on the statehouse floor. He later won back his seat in a special election.
The Democratic incumbent for Tennessee’s ninth district, Rep. Steve Cohen, said he would retire during the primary rather than try to win back his seat in a gerrymandered district where the Republican Party now held a 21-point advantage. But Pearson—facing worse chances than he had before the gerrymandering, in a district that now includes the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan—kept running.
He centered his campaign messaging on opposition to data center buildout, a message of economic populism that he hoped could resonate with Republicans and Democrats in a district where Elon Musk’s xAI is aggressively expanding its footprint.
“This MAGA-envisioned state and MAGA-envisioned country are not good for any of us, including MAGA people. Especially MAGA people,” he told the New Yorker in October. “Life should not be this hard in the richest country in the history of the world. My thing is that, if you are not a billionaire, you are one of us.”
State Sen. Brent Taylor, Pearson’s Republican rival, has pitched himself as a hard-line conservative Christian. Taylor was endorsed by President Donald Trump, but his campaign was thrown into chaos days before the election when he was found to have sent a series of unsolicited nude photos. He dismissed those allegations and called the acts “youthful indiscretions,” although the Nashville Scene found that Taylor sent some of the photos as recently as 2021, when Taylor was 53.
In his four years in the Tennessee State Senate, as ProPublica and the Memphis-based outlet MLK50 recently reported, he has consistently worked to undermine minority voters’ interests: “With the backing of a Republican supermajority, Taylor, who is white, pushed through half a dozen laws that superseded the power and priorities of local politicians,” as Wendi C. Thomas wrote.
In other gerrymandered Tennessee districts, Democrats managed to flip seats. In the state’s fourth district, south of Nashville, Victoria Broderick pulled off an upset victory against eight-term GOP incumbent Scott DesJarlais. And even in the ninth district, Brent Taylor’s victory was remarkably narrow, including in counties Trump won in a landslide two years ago.
“Every single county in our district swung between 10 and 30 points toward Democrats, inspired by our vision to get big money corruption out of politics, stop billionaires from building toxic data centers in our backyards, and take on politics as usual in both parties,” Justin Pearson stated in a November 4th concession speech.
Pearson’s political career isn’t over. He will continue to serve as a state representative for Memphis. And “Tennessee politics will never be the same,” he said, after his campaign turned a projected 24-point Republican lead into a margin of fewer than 3,000 votes.
‘I’m really excited about the fact that we’re going into these counties, we’re making inroads, we’re building relationships and connections that are going to outlast a single campaignm” Pearson told the Tennessee Lookout late Tuesday night. “We’ve got a lot more work to do, and I’m just 31, so I’m ready to do it.”