Lee and the Republican supermajority in Nashville enacted a broad conservative agenda, including a trigger law that will ban abortion in the state following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Lee also signed off on a congressional map that nudged Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) into retirement, by splitting up his traditionally liberal 5th Congressional District.
“I could not stop the General Assembly from dismembering Nashville,” Cooper said in January, when the map was finalized.
The new 5th Congressional District stretches from Nashville to take in deep-red counties south of the city; in 2020, President Donald Trump carried the new seat by double digits. Nine Republicans are competing for what’s now a safe red seat in Congress, while Democratic state Sen. Heidi Campbell is unchallenged for her party’s nomination.
Trump has stayed out of the GOP primary since Morgan Ortagus, a veteran of his administration’s State Department, was removed from the ballot over residency issues. Beth Harwell, a former state House speaker, has outraised the field and adopted the Trump brand, emphasizing that the former president put her on the Tennessee Valley Authority.
“I respect a lot of what Donald Trump did, but his endorsement is not what I want,” Harwell said at a June 27 debate in one of the conservative counties newly added to the district. “I want the endorsement of the people of the 5th Congressional District.”
Support for Trump was a major theme of that debate, as it had been throughout the race. Onstage with Harwell, Maury County Mayor Andy Nogles called the Biden administration “a criminal enterprise,” adding that the president and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas should be “impeached and then tried for treason.”
Stewart Parks, a real estate agent who joined the crowds in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, and was later arrested in connection with his appearance there, went further than Ogles, embracing false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. “I’m the only candidate in this race that has not called him president,” Parks said of Biden. “He is not the legal president of United States of America.”
While Harwell has raised more from individual donors than her rivals, most of the on-air spending has focused on Nogles. Conservative super PACs have spent nearly $1.3 million on pro-Nogles advertising, and anti-Nogles PACs have tried to match it. One of them, Conservative Americans PAC, has spent more than $700,000 on TV ads that call Nogles a “phony” over his support for a gas tax increase.
The winner of the primary will begin as a favorite in the November general election.
In Shelby County, Thursday’s vote will determine who becomes district attorney. Amy Weirich, a Republican appointed in 2011 and then elected to an 8-year term, faces Democrat Steven Mulroy, who has criticized her handling of a voter fraud case and said he wouldn’t prioritize abortion cases if he got the job.
While President Biden carried the county by 30 points in…
Read More: Voting underway in Tenn., posing tests over abortion, support for Trump
