Better Win a District: Tennessee's Ninth

For our third and final Better Win a District, I want to take you back to the Mid-South. This time, we are looking at a district defined by one of my favorite cities in America and one of the most overlooked: Memphis, Tennessee, part of which is in Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District. 

I have a lot of love for Memphis. My family drove through it often on trips to visit relatives in Tennessee. I would occasionally opt for the ninety-minute drive from my hometown to Memphis over the forty-five-minute one to Little Rock when I wanted to spend a Saturday exploring a much bigger city. A number of my dear friends call the city home today.

You might be thinking, “Wait, surely Memphis is a Democratic city? Aren’t they represented by a Democrat?”

And the answer is yes, Steve Cohen has represented Memphis since 2007. But Republican gerrymandering efforts saw Tennessee’s Ninth lose large chunks of Memphis proper. Memphis was sliced up and given to three different districts. Tennessee’s Ninth now stretches from south Memphis along the state’s southern border until it grabs pieces of middle Tennessee between Franklin and Murfreesboro. Cohen opted for retirement. Tennessee’s Blackest city, the heart of its Mississippi Delta region, looked set to be stripped of its voice in the House. 

Or at least that’s what Republicans hoped would happen. Instead, they have a much bigger fight on their hands than they anticipated, driven by both a generally anti-Trump environment and the caliber of Cohen’s replacement nominee. Justin Pearson rose to national prominence in 2023 after he and two other members of the Tennessee House of Representatives were expelled by its Republican supermajority for staging a gun control protest on the House floor. Pearson was already running to challenge Cohen in the primary, but the new maps and Cohen’s exit have only galvanized him further—transforming his bid into a symbolic fight against the anti-democratic nature of the modern GOP. 

It is difficult to look at the gerrymandering of Tennessee's Ninth and not see the shape of 21st-century Jim Crow politics. Pearson's rhetorical eloquence and activist's brio makes him all the more suited to carry the fight here. He has castigated the Tennessee Republican Party and excoriated the state’s gerrymandering efforts as “a political lynching.” A longer look at Pearson’s comments on the redistricting vote gives you a sense of his gifts as a speaker:

“The authoritarianism that has taken over Tennessee and other state houses across our country not only is a threat to democracy, it drains resources that are better used to improve the quality of life for marginalized communities and increase civic education and engagement. Instead, Tennessee has become the model for abuse of power in the name of racism and political ideology. But we are not powerless.

“We will organize, mobilize and activate people power across Tennessee, the South and the country to include more voices rather than shut people out as Republicans do. We will out-organize despair and out-mobilize racist maps to overcome political malpractice.”

Pearson's sentiments are shared by many Memphis voters. And his style has captured a lot of independents. As one supporter told the Memphis Flyer, “He doesn’t just have guts, and he doesn’t just call out what’s happening, but he’s got hope in his eyes. I can see it in his smile. I can see it in his face.”

The anger in Memphis at the attempts from Republicans to disenfranchise its population is widespread. J. Lawrence Turner, the pastor at Memphis’s Disciples of Christ-affiliated Mississippi Boulevard Church, told local news back in May that “We are witnessing a coordinated effort to weaken Black political power.” Memphis outlet MLK50 interviewed city residents this spring to capture on-the-ground reactions. One man, Fred Dorse, summed up the pain of seeing one of America’s historic Black districts carved up in a power grab: “It hurts my heart, at almost 81 years old, to see us lose this again. The same fight we had then, back in the late 60’s and 70’s, now we’re fighting it in 2026, and we have to preserve it.”

Memphis has also come under the boot of the Trump administration’s draconian approach to immigration and law enforcement, although it has received far less attention from the press than either Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. Memphis remains policed by a joint task force of ATF, FBI, and DHS agents, sent by President Trump in September of 2026, aided by a deployment of Tennessee state patrol and a sizable contingent of Tennessee national guard members sent by Republican Governor Bill Lee. Memphis’s crime rates are indeed down since, but they had already been falling. Locals have chafed at the deployment, with some businesses refusing to serve National Guard members. One immigration raid this September by the task force saw over 100 arrests, a massive figure, an event that highlights what Memphians see as a lack of transparency and oversight. 

There has been a reduction in personnel deployed in Memphis over the last few months, but this has also come as tensions reached new heights following the fatal shooting of Tyrin Johnson by Tennessee National Guard troops in August. Despite claims by authorities that the guardsmen were threatened with a weapon, a subsequent autopsy showed that the twenty-year-old Johnson was shot in the back. 

On October 20, the Memphis City Council passed a resolution calling for DHS and the National Guard to leave the city. In it, the council notes that six people have died since the Memphis Safe Task Force began.

This is the backdrop against which Pearson is leading a David-like challenge to Republican rule. Pearson is uniting outrage over the treatment of Memphis with frustration over affordability and opposition to data centers. Earlier this month, Pearson and six other plaintiffs filed suit in the U.S. District Court of West Tennessee, citing First Amendment violations by the Memphis City Council during an ongoing battle over approving the construction of new data centers. 

Polling suggests it could be a single-digit fight. And national Democrats certainly think there’s an opportunity for a push win. The DCCC added Pearson to their Red to Blue program alongside candidates like Chris Jones in Arkansas, whose race I covered here earlier this month.

It will be a monumental task for Pearson to get over the line and win this district. But the public dissatisfaction with Trump’s economic policies and the specific anger in many Tennessee communities at the attempt to silence their voices could prove fatal for a Republican Party that has fallen quite far from the hubristic heights on which it stood just after Callais.

Featured image is Kamala Harris and Justin Pearson at the White House, April 24, 2023, official White House photo by Adam Schultz.