This isn’t how the people of Memphis thought their congressional primary would go on Thursday.
Four months ago, the reliably Democratic city was going to preserve the state’s one Democratic House seat; the only question was whether the district’s majority of Black voters would back the incumbent Representative Steve Cohen, a 77-year-old white Democrat, or endorse Justin Pearson, a 31-year-old Black state representative.
Then the Supreme Court struck a blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and state Republicans redrew Tennessee’s congressional map. Now the burning question going into Thursday’s primary is bleaker for Democrats: Do they even have a chance?
Under the new map, Memphis’s Ninth Congressional District has splintered into three seats. Mr. Cohen has retired. Mr. Pearson, his home drawn out of the Ninth, has stayed in, but he faces a new challenger. And Republicans have raced to take advantage of a generational opportunity to cement an entirely conservative state House delegation.
“It has caused such a topsy-turvy atmosphere here,” said Otis Sanford, a longtime commentator and chronicler of Memphis.
Democrats, including those running to represent Memphis, insist that their voters are enraged and energized, even as they also say Black voters have been disenfranchised.
Some Republicans said that was a contradiction.
“There may be Democratic backlash in the new Ninth, but at the end of the day, it was drawn to advantage Republicans,” said State Senator Brent Taylor, a Memphis Republican who jumped into the race for the Ninth, with the endorsement of President Trump.
“The Democrats have said that they were disenfranchised when the districts were drawn, they were losing their voice,” he added. “They can’t lose their voice and then also have a backlash.”
Because the three districts that now include Memphis stretch for dozens of miles eastward, Republican and Democratic candidates face the challenge of educating and winning over voters spread much farther across the state.
But math is math, and all nine of Tennessee’s districts now solidly favor Republicans, with the Democratic strongholds of Nashville and Memphis splintered and lumped in with reliably conservative rural hamlets.
Mr. Taylor’s opponents, State Representative Todd Warner, who wore a Trump flag like a cape during the legislature’s special redistricting session, and Charlotte Bergmann, a Black Republican who has repeatedly challenged Mr. Cohen, did not return requests for an interview.
On the Democratic side, Mr. Pearson still wants to give the Ninth a shot, but on Thursday, he must first beat State Senator London Lamar, a Black Democrat who had previously backed Mr. Cohen. Mr. Pearson has maintained a strong national profile since his brief expulsion from the legislature in 2023 for challenging the state’s lack of gun laws. Ms. Lamar has quietly climbed the ranks in the General Assembly’s Democratic minority.
Ms. Lamar has echoed Mr. Cohen’s critique that Mr. Pearson relies more on flashy debating skills than effective legislating.
“I want strategic, I want effective, I want results” in a representative, Ms. Lamar said in an interview late last month in Memphis, in which she interrupted herself repeatedly to chase after voters and ask for support.
But with a campaign apparatus put in place for his primary challenge to Mr. Cohen and endorsements from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. Pearson said that he was best positioned to energize Democrats.
“The moment is meeting us, and I don’t have a spirit to quit just because they make things harder,” Mr. Pearson said before a campaign event at a church in Lewisburg, Tenn., just over 200 miles east of Memphis.
The event ended with campaign aides scrambling with church baskets to collect donations and donor information. (“Y’all passed the plate yourselves,” Mr. Pearson said. “I’m actually overwhelmed.”)
Some Democrats and political watchers believe their chances of holding on to a single seat in Tennessee actually rest with the Fifth Congressional District, once a Nashville-area seat that now extends from just outside the city to a piece of Memphis.
The incumbent, Representative Andy Ogles, has been criticized for inflammatory anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant comments and campaign finances improprieties. The congressman, who has Mr. Trump’s endorsement, has his own primary challenger on Thursday, Charlie Hatcher, a former state commissioner of agriculture.
Mr. Hatcher has urged voters to “hire a farmer,” nodding to the dairy farm his family has run for more than a century. On Tuesday, he secured the endorsement of Gov. Bill Lee, the outgoing Republican governor and a longtime friend.
The winner of the Republican primary is expected to face Chaz Molder, the mayor of Columbia, Tenn., the leading Democratic candidate.
“I’ve got a big target on my back,” Mr. Ogles said at an event in Tennessee last month, where he vowed that “I will never back down.”
On Friday, he pointed out he was the lone candidate who could cast a vote for himself. Mr. Hatcher and Mr. Molder were both drawn out of the district.
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