Partisan evolution in Tennessee politics

How did Tennessee turn from a Democratic stronghold to reliably red?

The results of yesterday’s primary elections and a look back at the 2000 election that painted Tennessee red.

Plus the local news for August 7, 2026 and remembering Martha Ingram.

Below is a partial transcript of the episode.

It’s August 7th, 2026.

We’ll have results from yesterday’s primary elections coming up in the newscast part of this episode, but we’re also coming up on an interesting anniversary in Tennessee’s election history.

Tomorrow marks the day when, in 2000, the national press gathered on Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza as Al Gore announced Joe Liebermann as his running mate in the presidential election. Gore was a second-generation Senator from Tennessee. At that point, he was coming off of eight years as Bill Clinton’s vice president. He had his eyes set on the White House, and I think most of the nation expected this state to be firmly in his pocket.

If that had been the case, we probably would be remembering him as President Gore. The results were so close that it went to painstaking punch card ballot recounts in Florida that taught us all the definition of a hanging chad and, ultimately, a Supreme Court decision. A single state going a different way would have made the results more definitive on election night.

But Gore lost Tennessee. And while that wasn’t entirely surprising, it did make it really clear that this state’s political tide had well and truly turned.

I’m Nina Cardona, and this is your daily digest of what’s happening around Middle Tennessee (with context and backstory) from Nashville Public Radio — WPLN News.

Maybe you’re young enough that you didn’t know what I meant when I said “hanging chad” just now. Some states at the time used a kind of ballot where you used a tool to physically punch a hole next to the name of the candidate you were voting for. The paper that was removed was called a chad. And a hanging chad was one that wasn’t punched all the way out, so that little chunk of paper was still hanging on by a thread.  

Now, if you needed that little explanation, or if you have only lived in Tennessee for the last decade or so, maybe you also don’t realize how different the political landscape had been in Tennessee before that time, either.  

This state was actually a Democratic Party stronghold for decades. You know how the sense is that a lot of elections were basically decided in yesterday’s Republican primary? It used to be the other way around in Tennessee. In 1970, when Winfield Dunn became the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, it was a shock to many Tennesseans. And he once told me in an interview that one of the most important messages he had to convey on the campaign trail was to tell people that they needed to actually show up for the general election. Folks were so used to everything being decided in the Democratic primary that they considered it was the only election day that mattered. 

From Dunn’s time as governor on, Tennessee went through an era of the governor’s office being on a continual pendulum shift. We’d elect a Democrat, then a Republican, back to Democrat, another Republican.

Democrats maintained their hold on the legislature for a long time. But bit by bit, over many election cycles, the GOP gained a few seats at a time. The balance slowly shifted. 

Of course, that movement was made easier by the fact that, for a while, Tennessee’s politics were mostly just moderate. The Democrats were pretty moderate, the Republicans were somewhat moderate. Their differences weren’t all that stark. It seemed like a compelling personality could take a candidate farther than party affiliation – or, honestly, just simple name recognition.  

I remember one WPLN journalist around that time theorized that if you ran a fake campaign for a fictional candidate, it could win as long as you put out more signs than any of the real candidates. Of course, that idea couldn’t be tested out for real, but this was a person who had been out at the polls talking to a lot of voters — and closely covering the campaigns themselves. There weren’t many other factors that really differentiated the people on the ballot.  

And the Republicans were working hard to put out a lot of signs in certain races. 

By 2000, the state senate had 18 Democrat and 15  Republican members. That’s a difference of just three people. A well-crafted GOP bill could, and sometimes did, pull just enough Democrats over to have a chance at passage. 

The split was bigger in the house, because it has more members, but the proportions were similar: a 57 seat majority for the Democrats, with a 42-member GOP minority nipping at their heels. 

The governor at the time was Republican Don Sundquist, but he’d had a rocky time in office.  

Now, you’d think those factors – voters picking a Democratic majority in the legislature and being a little fed up with the Republican governor, would spell success for a native son running for president on the Democratic party ticket. 

But looking at Sundquist’s problems gives us some sense of how things were starting to crystalize for the Tennessee GOP.  

For one thing, the biggest scandal of his tenure involved allegations that his deputy governor was corrupt. Peaches Simpkins resigned in 2000 under a cloud of controversy. But, on a national level, the bigger political scandal of the moment was Bill Clinton cheating on his wife with a young White House staffer. So while the Simpkins story was filling out local newscasts with allegations, the overall vibe was to associate the Democrats with shady activity. And Gore was directly involved by way of being Clinton’s VP. 

The other big point of contention during the Sundquist administration had erupted one year prior. That’s when he proposed Tennessee join just about every other state in the nation and institute a state income tax. In some ways, that was the moment that truly allowed deep red conservatives to start pushing moderates aside within the state’s Republican party.  

The battle over the income tax went on for several years, marked by periodic protests where anti-tax drivers cruised past the state capitol building while laying on their car horns. That galvanized a lot of middle-of-the-road voters to not just lean towards the GOP but start thinking they may actually be more Republican than independent. Right-wing talk radio went from a sort of fringe entertainment to a major player in crafting the local narrative. And that political fight pushed a handful of people into the spotlight as the state’s conservative champions, including a state legislator from Williamson County called Marsha Blackburn. 

In the early stages of the anti-tax movement, there was a real question of whether it was just a handful of loud voices getting all the attention. Gore’s loss of this state helped show the answer. Voters were increasingly in line with those big voices.  

Over the next eight years, Republicans solidified control of the state legislature. The next governor, Phil Bredesen, was a Democrat. But since he left that office, it has stayed in Republican hands. And for a while now, the GOP has had a supermajority with broad control of state government. 

Tides change. Pendulums swing. There’s always a possibility that things will take another turn in Tennessee politics. And while we do have results now from a primary election, there are still moves to be made on either side before the general in November.

Credits: 
This is a production of Nashville Public Radio.
Host/producer: Nina Cardona
Editor: LaTonya Turner
Additional support: Mack Linebaugh, Tony Gonzalez, Megan Jones and the staff of WPLN and WNXP