No Democrat thinks that it’s possible to turn Tennessee blue anytime soon. A combination of demographics and the deterioration of the party across the South in the past few decades has given Republicans total control of the state, barring Memphis and Nashville. Success for Democrats in the state shouldn’t be measured by winning statewide elections—a near-impossibility at the moment—but in eroding the GOP’s massive edge, ending the Republican supermajority in the state legislature, and rebuilding the party’s infrastructure from the ground up.
“Tennessee has officially become the most Republican state in the old South,” said Dave Cooley, who served as the deputy governor for Phil Bredesen, the last Democrat to win statewide office. “It’s really the textbook case of the rural-urban shift in politics in the country right now.”
The challenge
It wasn’t so long ago that Tennessee was run by Democrats. When Bredesen, a moderate Democrat, became governor in 2003, the party had majorities in the statehouse and Senate. But this was a hangover of sorts from a previous era of politics when the Democrats ran the South; though Clinton was the last Democrat to carry the state at the presidential level, Democrats were able to win state and local elections for years after that. This power eroded gradually, then collapsed: Bredesen won reelection in 2006, but John Wilder, a Democrat who had held the Senate speakership since 1971, lost his post. In 2010, the state House went from being closely divided to being dominated by Republicans, and the Senate followed suit: After the 2012 elections, the upper chamber only had seven Democrats versus 26 Republicans. Today, there are six Democrats in the Senate; Republicans have a 73-26 edge in the House. Both U.S. senators from the state are Republicans, and so are seven of its nine U.S. representatives.
This GOP stranglehold is partly a result of the redistricting process, which in Tennessee is controlled by the state legislature and governor rather than a nonpartisan committee. After the 2010 Census, Republicans (then fully in control of the government) drew state legislative district lines in ways that disadvantaged Democrats. But it’s also true that Democrats just aren’t all that popular statewide. According to a gerrymandering tool from FiveThirtyEight, if you drew congressional district lines to favor Democrats, there would still be five safe Republican seats, two toss-up seats, and two that lean Democratic. In 2020, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by 700,000 votes and more than 20 points; Biden only won three of the state’s 95 counties. One useful measure of how the state has changed: When Bredesen ran for U.S. Senate in 2018, he lost by 11 points. There simply aren’t enough Democratic votes in the state.
Tennessee’s demographics paint a pessimistic picture. Seventy-eight percent of residents are white, according to the Census, and 60% are “white alone” (meaning not Hispanic or Latino). That makes the state much whiter than parts of the country that Democrats have either flipped or come close to flipping, like Georgia, North Carolina or Texas. Tennessee residents are less likely to have a college degree than the country as a whole, and the state is relatively rural. Given Democrats’ difficulties winning over rural white voters who don’t have college degrees, all of this is bad news.
More bad news: The state Democratic Party is currently negotiating with the FEC over a “significant financial penalty” after the party’s previous leadership failed to keep proper employment records and lowballed its collections and disbursements by more than $150,000 in 2015.
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Tennesse election results
What state party leaders say
Hendrell Remus, the new state party chair, represents a break from the past both for his age (he’s just 34) and because he’s the first Black person to lead the Tennessee Democrats. He’s quick to admit the party has had a lot of difficulty connecting with voters.
“We’ve got to make sure that our priorities are laser-focused on issues that will impact ordinary people,” he told Blue Tent. “For a long time, we have been on the defensive about who we are, what we stand for, instead of defining who the Republicans in Tennessee are.” That message is TBD (Remus said they were working on it with focus groups) but he thinks it should focus on economic issues like the minimum wage, which is just $7.25 in the state, the federally mandated floor. Democrats also need “to increase the voter participation numbers,” Remus added. “We rank near the very bottom in the number of people even involved in the process.”
If picking a message and getting people involved in politics sound like first steps for a state party, that’s because the party essentially needs to rebuild itself after the last several cycles of defeats.
“We as a party kind of lost the connection with the rural voters,” said Cooley, who now runs a strategy firm. “If you get outside a couple of the major urban areas in Tennessee, the Democratic brand is at the very least tarnished, and at worst, a dead brand. And I think it is a case of almost having to start over with city councils and school boards and build a bench.”
Remus would like to see the national party invest in the state—one thing more money could help with would be to improve the quality of the party’s data on voters. But given the unpopularity of Democrats in Tennessee, there’s little that national figures can do to raise the profile of candidates here. Any successes in Tennessee will have to bubble up from the grassroots.
What activists say
Last year, Marquita Bradshaw, a Black progressive activist who had raised less than $25,000, defeated the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee-backed favorite, James Mackler, in the primary. She lost the general election—any Democrat would have—but getting the nomination speaks to how weak the Democratic establishment here has become.
“It wasn’t so much about the person, it was more so about the policies,” said Bradshaw, who supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. “When I participated in this campaign, the issues about environmental justice, about women’s rights—all those things came to the forefront.”
Bradshaw is to the left of some of the state’s other prominent Democrats, but she agrees that the party needs to focus on rural voters, a common refrain among state Democrats. “We have places where people want to grow the Democratic Party, but they don’t have the resources because they’re just starting out in counties that don’t have a Democratic presence,” Bradshaw said. “I’ve been to all 95 counties. And I’ve been to places where there were only two visible supporters of Democrats, and they talked about how hard it was to be a Democrat and how much they got harassed for being a Democrat.”
She says that she heard from some primary voters that they were pressured into taking a Republican ballot instead of a Democratic one by poll workers. The notion that Democrats are being intimidated by their communities has convinced her that protecting the right to vote, and making it easier to vote, should be a top priority for the party. Passing a voting rights act at the federal level, like the bill currently being debated in the Senate, is a prerequisite for any level of success here.
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Tennessee demographics
The path forward
There may be some disagreements on policy between different factions of Democrats in Tennessee, but mostly everyone just wants a competently run party to be competitive in local elections. If that sounds like a low bar, it’s one that the state party hasn’t always been able to meet in the past.
Remus said that he believes “we have a really good shot at being extremely competitive in the governor’s race next year.” A victory over incumbent Bill Lee would be shocking. A more realistic expectation would be to break the supermajority that Republicans currently hold in the legislature. That wouldn’t give them any more ability to pass legislation, but it would be a moral victory and a sign that the party has hit bottom and is rebounding.
Another way Democrats could succeed in the state is by finding a way to appeal to rural voters, something that the party has been struggling with nationwide—if local candidates can find ways to win, or even get close to winning, in rural parts of Tennessee, it might provide a blueprint for other campaigns. Actually winning power is probably a secondary objective at this point, something Democrats can turn to when they have successfully built up the party.
“It’s a long haul back, and I don’t know that we’re gonna see any major movement overnight,” Cooley said. “If you look at what the Republicans did in Tennessee in the ’70s, ’80s, and culminating in the ’94 election, where they won the governor’s race and two U.S. Senate races… they did it a building block at a time, and I think the Democrats have to fundamentally get back to that approach.”
