Democratic candidates in much of the Volunteer State, especially in its rural areas, face a steep hill to climb. Perhaps that is most true in East Tennessee, a region that has voted reliably red for decades.
Hamilton County, the urban anchor of Southeast Tennessee with Chattanooga as its seat, hasn’t voted for a Democratic county mayor since the early 1990s, and a majority of its voters haven’t cast a ballot for a Democratic president since Harry Truman in 1948.
The ideological leanings of both major parties have changed drastically throughout American history, but voters in Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District, centered around Knox County, have elected a Republican to Congress in every election cycle since 1867.
But if the local municipal elections in August are any indication, East Tennessee may be starting to swing left.
Democrats in the Hamilton County elections narrowed the Republican majorities on the county commission and school board, flipping three seats among both governing bodies — with double-digit swings in a district President Donald Trump carried in the 2024 presidential election.
There were similar results in Knox County. Democrats flipped a school board seat, winning majority control of the board. On the county commission, the party gained a district Trump carried by 10 percentage points in 2024.
In both Hamilton and Knox, the Democratic county mayoral candidates — Mark Herndon and Beau Hawk, respectively, who both fell short of victory — dwindled double-digit point losses for the party in both the 2024 presidential election and the 2022 county mayor contests down to four points in both counties.
These gains for the Democratic Party are part of a national and regional trend since Trump returned to office in 2025.
In a December special election for Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, for instance, state Rep. Aftyn Behn, a Nashville Democrat, lost the race by just nine percentage points in a district Trump carried by 22 in 2024.
In Georgia, Democrats flipped two seats on the state Public Service Commission in November, marking the first time since 2006 that the party has won statewide constitutional offices. A month later in December, Georgia Democrats narrowly flipped a state House seat that Republicans had controlled since 2019.
Quotation
I think what we’re seeing is certainly an emerging, what I would call, a small-d democratic coalition, a coalition of those supporting American democracy.
– Jeremy Strickler, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
In a special election months later for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, previously held by former Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene before she resigned after a widely publicized conflict with the president, Republican Rep. Clay Fuller won by just 12 points in a district Trump carried by 37 in 2024.
For Jeremy Strickler, an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, this could be the beginning of an electoral shift, from Washington, D.C. down to the local level in Tennessee, in reaction to the Trump administration polling in the negative on major issues.
“I think what we’re seeing is certainly an emerging, what I would call, a small-d democratic coalition, a coalition of those supporting American democracy,” Strickler said. “That carried over electorally to a lot of these special elections, and particularly in the South, you just see a lot of what feels like the ground is shifting under our feet in a way.”
A matter of turnout
Before Josh Wichman ran for District 8 on the Hamilton County Commission this past election, a Democrat hadn’t contested the seat since 2014. In turn, the district, centered around East Ridge, had been mired by low turnout — just 9.21% of voters in East Ridge showed up to the polls for the local elections in August 2024, compared to over 13% countywide that same cycle.
Fueling Wichman’s win in August — a 10-point swing for Democrats in a district Trump carried by eight in 2024 — turnout in East Ridge shot up to 28.61%, nearly matching the countywide rate of 30.12%.
“I had that same perception that it was more conservative than it actually is,” Wichman said of his district. “I feel like it’s been neglected by Democrats.”
The surge in turnout was seen throughout Hamilton County. The August election saw the most voters go to polls, over 30% of all registered voters, among all local August elections of the past decade, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported. That was up from the 21.3% turnout in 2022, the previous local election for county mayor and the county commission.
Quotation
The thing I battled the most in the campaign, even talking to very dedicated Democrats, was, ‘This is a red territory. Good luck. I’ll vote for you, but I don’t think you have a chance.’
– Knox County Commissioner Brandon Huckaby, a Democrat
Knox County experienced a comparable increase in turnout. Among the county’s nearly 270,000 registered voters, 33.43% cast ballots in August, up from 18.07% in the last local countywide races in 2022.
Knox County Commissioner Brandon Huckaby, the Democrat who flipped a seat previously held by a Republican, attributed some of the low turnout of the past to Democratic-leaning voters assuming elections are already lost before they are decided.
“The thing I battled the most in the campaign, even talking to very dedicated Democrats, was, ‘This is a red territory. Good luck. I’ll vote for you, but I don’t think you have a chance,’” Huckaby said.
“They lost the election before Election Day because they have what I call blue-dot syndrome,” he continued. “They think they’re the only Democrat on their street.”
But with a close loss for Democrats in the district in 2022 — just 87 votes — Huckaby said his strategy was to drive Democratic turnout. “We knocked the heck out of some doors,” he said. “We knocked probably 6,000 likely Democratic doors to drive that turnout.”
Even with this relatively high turnout, most local county seats in Hamilton and Knox are still held by the GOP. As Hawk, the Democratic candidate for mayor of Knox County, pointed out, more Republicans showed up to vote as well.
“We had a dramatic, relatively speaking, surge in Democratic voter participation in this county election,” Hawk said in an interview. “But it was also a higher turnout for Republicans as well, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I think everybody should be engaged in the process.”
Still, for Tennessee Democrats throughout the rest of the state, the key to building upon the momentum from August may not be assuming an inherent conservatism among the electorate and seeking to persuade those Republicans to vote Democratic; it may be convincing people to vote at all.
“Tennessee is not a red state,” Wichman said. “It’s a non-voting state.”
‘An anti-MAGA wave’
In the August election, Democrat Brandy Jenkins, new member of the Knox County Board of Education, did not face an established Republican incumbent, but an upstart candidate more in line with the party’s MAGA arm.
In the GOP’s May primary for the seat, Kristi Kristy, a Republican who had held the seat since 2018, was defeated from her right flank by Bill Sofield, who was endorsed by Moms for Liberty, an organization designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a far-right extremist group. With local chapters throughout the country, Moms for Liberty is known to advocate against LGBTQ+ inclusion in public education and for book bans at schools and public libraries.
Before being reinstated in Knox County after a backlash, one of those books was “Roots,” an account of the horrors of chattel slavery published in 1976 and authored by Alex Haley, a Black American who lived in Tennessee during several periods of his life.
Haley is such a prominent figure in the state that Gov. Bill Lee designated “Roots” as an official state book two years ago. In Knoxville, there is a 13-foot statue of Haley. “It’s a very important book in our city,” Jenkins said.
Knox County votes to challenge Tennessee’s book ban law after “Roots” removal
“Roots” was banned by the Knox County school board in May under a state law enacted in 2022 that requires public libraries to filter content deemed inappropriate for children; in the book, there is a depiction of rape of an enslaved woman that Republicans on the school board had initially found in violation of the state law for detailing “sadomasochistic abuse.”
Following nationwide pushback, Superintendent Jon Rysewyk reversed the board’s decision. In June, previous Republican member Kristy voted with Democrats on the school board to urge the state to reconsider its criteria for book bans. With Sofield running on the GOP ticket in Kristy’s place, Jenkins flipped the seat.
“Why are we discussing this?” Jenkins said how she would respond when questioned by those seeking to ban books. “Let’s talk about what’s really happening in our schools.”
This grounded approach seemed to work, not just for Jenkins, but Huckaby on the county commission as well. His opponent was Sheri Super, vice chair and former chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter. In the GOP primary, she beat former incumbent Gina Oster, who is closer to the center.
For Huckaby, he doesn’t see the election as a transformational shift away from Republicans, but a backlash against the party’s far-right arm.
“I don’t see an anti-Republican wave in Knox County. What I see is an anti-MAGA wave,” Huckaby said. “It was me, a commonsense candidate against a far-right candidate. It was easy to get those commonsense voters.”
In the election for mayor of Knox County, Hawk saw his relative success as a sign that voters are growing tired of what he described as “pointless national culture war stuff.” The messaging against Hawk on the Republican side, mirroring the party’s national electoral strategy, was largely accusations that the Democratic candidate is a socialist.
One major point of criticism from Republicans was Hawk’s appearance at a 2020 march in Venezuela in support of then-president Nicolás Maduro, a self-identified socialist whom the Trump administration kidnapped and jailed earlier this year.
“I was young and dumb,” Hawk, who is now 35, told the Knoxville News Sentinel in June. Hawk told the Tennessee Lookout that the socialist label and messaging is absurd.
“I’m not even sure how you could enact any kind of socialist agenda when you’re just dealing with potholes and libraries and things like that,” Hawk said. “Do you want to actually have a functioning government or not is the question. If that’s socialist, I guess yeah, I’m a socialist.”
Hawk eventually lost, but only narrowly by four points. Prior Republican County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, the term-limited former WWE wrestler better known by his stage name Kane, won in 2022 by 10 points and in 2018 by 28.
In Hamilton County, Mayor Weston Wamp faced Herndon, who said he felt compelled to get involved in local politics last year after Republicans on the school board voted to end supplementary mental health services for students.
The local GOP had criticized what it called the provider’s introduction to students of “matters of identity, sexuality and gender” in a statement to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Herndon’s son Silas, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, died by suicide a few weeks prior to the school board ending the services.
After much local pushback, including from Herndon, the school board eventually reinstated the vendor, along with other options for parents.
Nearly a year later, months after he started his campaign, Herndon found himself in the midst of a local controversy just before the election when it was revealed that he had sent threatening text messages to Republican school board members just after their decision to end the services. (Herndon has since apologized for sending the texts.)
The county GOP and many local Republican officials used the texts to discredit Herndon. Even still, like Knox’s county mayor race, Wamp won by just four points, down from his 16-point victory in 2022.
Wamp, his office and the Hamilton County Republican Party did not respond to questions or requests for interviews. Neither did the Knox County GOP or the recently inaugurated County Mayor Betsy Henderson.
Strickler, the UTC political science professor, said that much of what has fueled the GOP’s success over the past decade is Trump convincing these more fringe elements within the party, normally electorally dormant, to turn out and vote.
“The main kind of political effect of Trumpism electorally since he entered the arena in 2016 was bringing out people who had traditionally been disaffected voters,” Strickler said. “Well, they could much easily just go back to not caring about politics.”
In turn, he said, when Trump isn’t on the ballot, like with these local elections, Republicans don’t do as well, leaving an opportunity for Democrats to campaign on anti-MAGA.
“The number of his support has really seemed to be shrinking and independents are very much turned against Trump,” Strickler said. “I think that’s what we’re seeing, but whether or not it’s durable is the open question.”
The future of Tennessee Democrats
Even with the party’s August gains, Tennessee Democrats face a high hurdle in forming a meaningful coalition. Not only do Republicans control most local seats in Hamilton and Knox counties, the statehouse has been governed by a GOP supermajority since 2013.
For Democrats like Wichman in Hamilton County, turning the tide for the party starts with delivering results locally. As seen elsewhere across the country, that means, he said, focusing on making life more affordable.
“We have a really good opportunity right now to show residents of Hamilton County what Democrats are interested in and what we can do, but we have to be able to show action,” Wichman said. “We have to be able to show them that we can get things done.”
In Knox County, Huckaby said Democrats must start tying the struggling economy to the Republican Party more broadly, not just its MAGA wing.
“The Republicans have been in control. Affordability isn’t getting better. Infrastructure is getting worse,” he said. “Then you can tie it to a party instead of a faction.”
Hawk, who recently announced his run for Knoxville mayor in the election next year, said there needs to be more politicians willing to enact meaningful change — in both parties.
“So many of the issues that we are dealing with from the local level to the national level, they are solvable. It’s just a matter of political will. Do we want to actually put government to work for everyday people or not?” Hawk said. “I think there’s a lot of people in both parties that would prefer to just keep it as is.”
For Herndon, creating true change falls on the public.
“We’ve got to raise the bar. The bar has been lowered so much that people have forgotten that we have to hold our elected officials accountable to something, to someone,” Herndon said. “That someone, when everything else fails, is us.”
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: [email protected].
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