Tennessee Republicans redrew their congressional map, carved Memphis into three separate Republican-leaning districts, forced the state's only Democratic congressman into retirement, and then sat back feeling pretty pleased with themselves. Now Justin Pearson, the expelled-and-reinstated state lawmaker who became a national progressive icon after Republicans literally threw him out of the legislature, has won the Democratic primary in that newly gutted district. This November is going to be something.
Who Is Justin Pearson and Why Do Republicans Keep Making Him Famous
If you need a refresher: Pearson is one of the "Tennessee Three," the trio of state lawmakers who staged a gun-control demonstration on the state House floor in April 2023, days after the Covenant School shooting in Nashville killed three children and three adults. Tennessee Republicans responded to this act of grief and protest by expelling Pearson and fellow state Rep. Justin Jones from the legislature entirely. A third member of the group, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, survived expulsion by a single vote, according to local media reporting.
The expulsions backfired spectacularly. Both men were reinstated by their local governments within days, returned to the capitol to a hero's welcome, and became nationally recognized faces of the gun reform movement. Pearson in particular, known for the kind of preacher-inflected floor speeches that make C-SPAN briefly watchable, picked up endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Summer Lee. The Squad showed up to Memphis to campaign for him last month. Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, MoveOn, and Indivisible all backed him too.
On Thursday, according to Fox News, Pearson won the Democratic primary in Tennessee's 9th Congressional District, defeating state Sen. London Lamar, community activist Marion LaTroy Alexandria-Williams, and attorney Jim Torino. He did it with a campaign war chest of millions of dollars that significantly outpaced every other Democrat in the race.
The Map That Killed Tennessee's Last Blue Seat
Here is the part of this story that deserves to be said slowly and clearly. Before Tennessee Republicans redrew their congressional map, Memphis was largely kept intact within the 9th District. That made it reliably Democratic. Rep. Steve Cohen had held the seat since 2007, making him, as Fox News reports, the lone Democrat in Tennessee's nine-member House delegation alongside eight Republicans since 2023.
The new map splits Memphis across three separate, Republican-leaning congressional districts. Cohen, apparently not interested in spending the rest of his career running uphill in a rigged race, announced his retirement. The result is a congressional delegation that, under the new map, favors Republicans in all nine Tennessee districts. Every single one.
This is what targeted partisan gerrymandering looks like in practice. It is not subtle. Tennessee Republicans did not try to hide it. They found the one place in their state where Democrats reliably won and they cut it into pieces. Federal courts have allowed this kind of mapping in partisan gerrymandering cases, which is its own entire scandal, but that is a story for another day.
Pearson Is Running Anyway
To his credit, Pearson is not pretending the map is fair. He is running in the redrawn district, in an uphill race, with Squad backing and millions in the bank, against whoever Republicans put up in November. That takes a particular kind of stubbornness that is either genuinely admirable or strategically shrewd, possibly both.
The primary field he beat was not trivial. London Lamar is a sitting state senator. Pearson beat her, along with two other candidates, in a race that attracted national progressive attention precisely because the stakes are clear. Losing this seat to a redrawn map without even fielding a serious fight would have been a capitulation. Whether fighting it accomplishes anything is the question nobody has a great answer to yet.
The Broader Midterm Picture
Tennessee's 9th is one piece of a much larger redistricting story playing out ahead of the 2026 midterms. Republicans who control state legislatures have spent the last several years methodically redrawing maps to entrench their advantages, and the downstream effects are becoming visible in races like this one. A district that elected the same Democrat for nearly two decades no longer exists as it was drawn.
For national Democrats, Pearson's primary win creates an interesting test case. Pour resources into a long-shot race in a newly hostile district and signal that Republicans cannot just erase seats without a fight? Or focus money and attention on more winnable targets elsewhere? Progressive groups have already voted with their wallets by backing Pearson heavily. Whether the DCCC follows suit will tell you a lot about how the party is reading this map.
The Dingo Take
Republicans expelled Justin Pearson from the Tennessee legislature for protesting after children were shot dead in a Nashville school. He came back. Then they redrew the map specifically to eliminate the congressional district where Democrats had won for two decades. He is running there anyway. At some point you have to appreciate the man's tolerance for punishment, because the institution handing it out clearly does not.
The gerrymandering here is not a side detail. It is the whole story. Tennessee Republicans were not satisfied holding eight of nine congressional seats. They engineered a map to go nine for nine, forced a veteran Democrat into retirement to make it happen, and are now watching a progressive firebrand with national name recognition and millions in the bank line up against their chosen candidate in a district designed specifically to beat him. That is the situation they built for themselves.
Pearson may well lose in November. The map is bad. The district is new. The math is hard. But the guy was expelled from a legislature, reinstated inside a week, became a national figure, won a competitive primary against a sitting state senator, and is now running for Congress in a race everyone said was unwinnable before a single vote was cast. Write him off at your own risk.
Comments