Brent Taylor defeats Justin Pearson in Tennessee's 9th district

Brent Taylor defeats Justin Pearson in Tennessee’s 9th district

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Tennessee’s Gerrymander Barely Held—and the 2,500-Vote Margin Says Everything

Republican State Senator Brent Taylor declared victory in Tennessee’s ninth congressional district late on November 3, defeating Democrat Justin Pearson by about 2,500 votes with 99 percent of ballots counted—a margin so narrow it suggests the GOP’s gerrymander worked, but only just.

Mother Jones reported that the outcome was effectively determined in May, when Republican Governor Bill Lee and the Tennessee legislature redrew the state’s congressional maps following the Supreme Court’s April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the federal Voting Rights Act. The legislature carved the state’s only district in which white voters were not a majority—the Memphis-based ninth district—into three new ones designed to lean Republican, and by October 17, Memphis voters were already studying the new boundaries.

The close finish in a seat that Republicans had redesigned to give themselves a 21-point advantage offers a rare window into what happens when mapmakers overreach, arriving at a moment when similar gerrymandering efforts failed in Florida and North Carolina but succeeded in other parts of Tennessee.

The redistricting split the state’s only Democratic and Black majority-minority district into three gerrymandered congressional districts, effectively eliminating the sole seat where minority voters had previously been able to elect their preferred representative.

A District Dissolved

Steve Cohen, the Democratic incumbent who had represented the Memphis area in Congress, opted to retire during the primary rather than seek reelection in a gerrymandered district where the Republican Party now wielded a 21-point advantage. That decision left Pearson, a 31-year-old Black progressive elected to the Tennessee House in 2023, to challenge Taylor in a district that now included the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

Pearson, Taylor clash in Tennessee's 9th Congressional District race

Pearson initially gained national attention as a member of the “Tennessee Three,” after being expelled from office for jointly spearheading a personal gun-reform demonstration on the statehouse floor. He later won back his seat in a special election and has since represented Memphis in the state House, building a reputation as a vocal critic of corporate influence in state politics.

Facing worse chances than he had before the gerrymandering, Pearson nonetheless kept running, refusing to cede the district despite the 21-point Republican advantage. He centered his campaign on opposition to data center buildout, betting that economic concerns about xAI’s aggressive expansion could resonate across party lines in a district that now stretched beyond Memphis’s urban core.

Economic Populism Against the Map

“This MAGA-envisioned state and MAGA-envisioned country are not good for any of us, including 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.”

Taylor, a hard-line conservative Christian endorsed by President Donald Trump, pitched himself as a defender of traditional values. But his campaign was thrown into chaos days before the election when the Nashville Scene found that he had sent a series of unsolicited nude photos. He dismissed those allegations and called the acts “youthful indiscretions,” although the outlet found that Taylor sent some of the photos as recently as 2021, when he was 53.

In his four years in the Tennessee State Senate, ProPublica and the Memphis-based outlet MLK50 recently reported, Taylor consistently worked to undermine minority voters’ interests. With the backing of a Republican supermajority, the white state senator pushed through half a dozen laws that superseded the power and priorities of local politicians.

Every County Swung

Despite the 21-point Republican advantage engineered into the map, Taylor’s victory came by fewer than 3,000 votes. Every single county in the district swung between 10 and 30 points toward Democrats, including 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,” Pearson stated in his November 4 concession speech.

The gerrymander did not hold everywhere in the state. In Tennessee’s fourth district, south of Nashville, Democrat Victoria Broderick pulled off an upset victory against eight-term GOP incumbent Scott DesJarlais, demonstrating that the new maps were not uniformly effective at protecting Republican seats.

Relationships That Outlast a Campaign

Pearson’s political career isn’t over. He will continue to serve as a state representative for Memphis, and he told supporters that the connections forged during the campaign will endure beyond the election.

“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 campaign,” 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.”

After converting a projected 24-point Republican lead into a margin of fewer than 3,000 votes, Pearson announced that Tennessee politics would never be the same.

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