The phone call last October was ostensibly a courteous gesture from a onetime intern to his former boss ahead of a campaign announcement. It quickly turned sour.
You’re going to run behind me just like everyone else, Representative Steve Cohen, 76, the former boss and a veteran of 10 successful congressional runs in Memphis, told State Representative Justin J. Pearson, 31, who made the call.
Mr. Pearson ended the call with his own rebuttal: I’m going to beat you.
The two Democrats, who separately described the conversation, have not directly spoken since, and that flash of acrimony — months ahead of the August primary contest — is a sign of how personal the generational battle to remake the Democratic Party this year could become.
In a party that until recently was largely run by octogenarians, the push for generational change spans the country. Party stalwarts — from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the former majority leader, Steny Hoyer, to Senator Richard J. Durbin and reliable rank-and-file liberals like Jan Schakowsky — will retire at the end of the year.
Many who stayed face primary challengers. Last month, Representative Valerie Foushee, 69, narrowly fended off a competitor from the left in North Carolina, while Representative Bennie Thompson, 78, trounced his Mississippi opponent. In Colorado, Representative Diana DeGette, 68, barely qualified for the ballot in the state’s nominating process and still faces another, much younger, challenger from the left.
In Georgia, Representative David Scott, 80, dogged by questions about his health, has been out-raised in a crowded field. And Representative Al Green, 78, of Texas is in a runoff against Representative Christian Menefee, 37, after Republican redistricting effectively put them in the same seat. In a Senate Democratic primary, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, 79, is facing Representative Seth Moulton, 47.
Mr. Cohen has repeatedly held off challengers with ease in a Tennessee district that overwhelmingly backs Democrats. But Mr. Pearson’s activism has energized some voters, and his brief expulsion from the state House three years ago over a gun control protest has given him national prominence and a considerable war chest.
“The elected official that I seek to be is the one that I wanted to grow up having,” Mr. Pearson said, sipping a coffee before speaking at a “No Kings” rally on Saturday. With Mr. Trump in office, he said, “we need active leadership, not passive leadership.”
Both progressive candidates are largely aligned on the issues. Instead, the campaign centers on a deeply personal debate over effectiveness, race and respect in a majority-Black city that has struggled with poverty and crime.
Mr. Cohen, the state’s lone Jewish Democrat in Congress, is white; Mr. Pearson, the son of a preacher, is Black. In Memphis, both are recognized as they stop for a handshake, hug or photograph.
First elected to political office at 27, Mr. Cohen is a strong, and at times bluntly eccentric, politician in Memphis. There is widespread acknowledgment that Mr. Cohen has delivered for the district since he first won the seat in 2006, steering millions of dollars to a city often starved by Republican leaders in the state.
“Can y’all give it up for Congressman Cohen?” said Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat who has so far declined to endorse, at a Monday groundbreaking event for the expansion of a landing along the Mississippi River that Mr. Cohen helped fund. “He’s working hard every single day for our great city.”
With some leaders, the Cohen record speaks for itself.
“I know that there is appetite for new generational leadership — and I get that,” said State Senator London Lamar, an early public endorsement for Mr. Cohen, “but right now, we are in a very crucial time in history.”
Mr. Cohen also points to his seniority on the House Judiciary Committee, where he promises to scrutinize President Trump if Democrats capture the House.
“Taking out all the experienced people who are still effective — it’s not a good idea,” he said in an interview.
And Mr. Cohen and his allies have fanned questions about Mr. Pearson’s thin legislative record.
“He’s smart, he can make a great speech, he can fire people up — perfect for a cheerleader, but he doesn’t know how to legislate,” Mr. Cohen said. He warned against “unbridled ambition.”
Mr. Cohen has swatted away past challengers who have said that the district should be represented by a Black member of Congress. That question was central in 2010, when a former Memphis mayor, Willie W. Herenton, ran against him with the slogan “Just One” to sum up his contention that Tennessee should have at least one Black representative. Mr. Cohen won the primary with 79 percent of the vote.
Mr. Pearson could be Mr. Cohen’s most serious challenger since then. The young lawmaker has sought to frame the race as more about energy than age or race.
“It is the ability to do the hard, laborious job of serving your constituents tirelessly,” Mr. Pearson said.
With a preacher’s cadence and an ease with crowds, Mr. Pearson first gained attention in Memphis leading a successful campaign to stop the construction of a pipeline in a Black neighborhood. In 2023, he had just won a state House special election when he joined two other lawmakers in bringing the legislature to a halt with calls for gun control after a deadly school shooting in Nashville.
He and State Representative Justin Jones, who is also Black, were expelled, while State Representative Gloria Johnson, who is white, was not.
Both lawmakers were quickly returned to their seats, and the incident catapulted them to fame. As Mr. Pearson walked into a Memphis library this weekend, a security guard told him, “With an Afro and a suit, I knew it had to be you.”
At the 2024 Democratic convention, it was Mr. Pearson, standing next to Mr. Cohen, who delivered the speech announcing Tennessee’s delegates for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Since then, he has been at the front lines resisting both a federal law enforcement task force sent to Memphis by the president and an artificial intelligence complex built by Elon Musk near a Black neighborhood.
Last week, just before Mr. Pearson took the stage at a rally protesting a visit by Mr. Trump to Memphis, Barbara Beaver, 66, acknowledged the “good work” that Mr. Cohen has done.
“But,” she added, “I also have to acknowledge that there’s another voice out there that is doing equally good work.”
All this has wrecked the previously cordial relationship between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pearson. When Mr. Pearson didn’t invite him to his recent wedding, it was an unmistakable sign that the younger lawmaker was distancing himself, Mr. Cohen mused.
Mr. Pearson described Mr. Cohen’s response to his challenge as unnecessarily abrasive. (In one interview, Mr. Cohen compared it to the attack on Pearl Harbor.)
“We weren’t friends — he’s not a mentor,” Mr. Pearson said.
Mr. Pearson’s real challenge will be convincing voters that he is more than a fixture on protest lines. Most of the bills he has sponsored in the legislature this year have stalled in committee.
To be sure, there are few opportunities for Democrats under the legislature’s Republican supermajority, but some Tennessee conservatives have been opposed to Mr. Pearson’s approach since his first day in office, when he was sworn in wearing a dashiki. Some Democrats have also been rankled by Mr. Pearson’s more confrontational tactics and notoriety.
Some political watchers said that the primary challenge could be viewed as an affront to more senior Black Democrats, who have waited for Mr. Cohen’s retirement. Mr. Cohen pointed to the State Senate minority leader, Raumesh Akbari, and Ms. Lamar, as well as other officials from surrounding Shelby County as possible successors.
“At every level, someone’s going to say you jumped the line,” said Ms. Akbari, who has not yet publicly endorsed. “We have to speak less in terms of that, and more so respecting someone’s personal decision and really looking at what a person brings to the table.”
Mr. Pearson dismissed the suggestion that he was inexperienced.
“Some people try to use the word experience where they really mean something else — that I don’t deserve to serve in Congress or I don’t deserve to be a state representative,” Mr. Pearson said. But, he added, “my constituents, time and time again, have put me in office and I think they’re going to do it again.”
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
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