Tennessee's 1st congressional district | |
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Representative | |
Distribution |
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Population (2023) | 788,014 [2] |
Median household income | $55,431 [3] |
Ethnicity |
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Cook PVI | R+30 [4] |
Tennessee's 1st congressional district is the congressional district of northeast Tennessee, including all of Carter, Cocke, Greene, Hamblen, Hancock, Hawkins, Johnson, Sullivan, Unicoi, Washington, and Sevier counties and parts of Jefferson County. It is largely coextensive with the Tennessee portion of the Tri-Cities region of northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia. With a Cook Partisan Voting Index rating of R+30, it is the most Republican district in Tennessee. [4]
Cities and towns represented within the district include Blountville, Bristol, Church Hill, Elizabethton, Erwin, Gatlinburg, Greeneville, Johnson City, Jonesborough, Kingsport, Morristown, Mountain City Newport, Pigeon Forge, Roan Mountain Rogersville, Sneedville, Sevierville and Tusculum. The 1st district's seat in the U.S. House of Representatives has been held by Republicans since 1881.
The district was created in 1805 when the at-large seat was divided among multiple districts.
The district's current representative is Republican Diana Harshbarger, who was first elected in 2020 following the retirement of Republican Phil Roe. [5]
These results vary from older lines to current
Year | Office | Result |
---|---|---|
1998 | Governor | Sundquist 77% - Hooker 23% |
2000 | President | George W. Bush 61% – Al Gore 38% |
Senate | Frist 75% - Clark 25 | |
2002 | Senate | Alexander 66% - Clement 34% |
Governor | Hilleary 57% - Bredesen 43% | |
2004 | President | George W. Bush 68% – John Kerry 31% |
2006 | Governor | Bredesen 59% - Bryson 41% |
Senate | Corker 62% - Ford Jr. 38% | |
2008 | President | John McCain 70% – Barack Obama 28.6% |
Senate | Alexander 76% - Tuke 24% | |
2010 | Governor | Haslam 78% - McWherter 22% |
2012 | President | Mitt Romney 72.7% – Barack Obama 25.7% |
Senate | Corker 77% - Clayton 23% | |
2014 | Governor | Bill Haslam 78% - Brown 22% |
Senate | Alexander 71% - Ball 29% | |
2016 | President | Donald Trump 76.7% – Hillary Clinton 19.7% |
2018 | Governor | Lee 78% - Dean 22% |
Senate | Blackburn 72% - Bredesen 28% | |
2020 | President | Donald Trump 76.2% – Joe Biden 22.1% |
Senate | Hagerty 80% - Bradshaw 20% | |
2022 | Governor | Lee 78.6% – Martin 20% |
The 1st has generally been a very secure voting district for the Republican Party since the American Civil War, and is one of only two ancestrally Republican districts in the state (the other being the neighboring 2nd district).
Republicans (or their antecedents) have held the seat continuously since 1881 and for all but four years since 1859, while Democrats (or their antecedents) have held the congressional seat for all but eight years from when Andrew Jackson was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1796 (as the state's single at large representative) up to the term of Albert Galiton Watkins ending in 1859.
Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth President of the United States, represented the district from 1843 to 1853.
Like the rest of East Tennessee, slavery was not as common in this area as the rest of the state due to its mountain terrain, which was dominated by small farms instead of plantations. [6] The district was also the home of the first exclusively abolitionist periodicals in the nation, The Manumission Intelligencer and The Emancipator, founded in Jonesborough by Elihu Embree in 1819. [7]
The 1st was one of four districts in Tennessee whose congressmen did not resign when Tennessee seceded from the Union in 1861. Thomas Amos Rogers Nelson was reelected as a Unionist to the Thirty-seventh Congress, but he was arrested by Confederate troops while en route to Washington, D.C. and taken to Richmond. Nelson was paroled and returned home to Jonesborough, where he kept a low profile for the length of his term. [8]
Due to these factors, this area — excepting "Little Confederacy" Sullivan County with its deep ties to neighbouring Virginia — supported the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War, and identified with the Republican Party after Tennessee was readmitted to the Union in 1866, electing candidates representing the Union Party — a merger of Republicans and pro-Union Democrats — both before and after the war. This allegiance has continued through good times and bad ever since, with Republicans dominating every level of government. While a few Democratic pockets exist in the district's urban areas, they are not enough to sway the district. Since 1898, Democrats have only crossed the 40 percent barrier twice, in 1962 and 1976.
The district's Republican bent is no less pronounced at the presidential level. It was one of the few areas of Tennessee where Barry Goldwater did well in 1964. Johnson, Carter, Unicoi, Washington, Cocke, Sevier and Hancock Counties are among the few counties in the country to have never supported a Democrat for president since the Civil War. Franklin D. Roosevelt turned in respectable showings in the district during his four runs for president, as did Jimmy Carter in 1976. However, Carter is the last Democrat to carry any county in the district, and apart from Sullivan County, which except in the Catholicism-dominated 1928 election was consistently Democratic up to 1948, and Hamblen County in that 1976 election, no county in the present district has backed a Democrat for President since 1940.
The district typically gives its congressmen very long tenures in Washington; indeed, it elected some of the few truly senior Southern Republican congressmen before the 1950s. Only nine people have represented it since 1921. Two of them, B. Carroll Reece and Jimmy Quillen, are the longest-serving members of the House in Tennessee history. Reece held the seat for all but six years from 1921 and 1961, while Quillen held it from 1963 to 1997.
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Republican | Phil Roe (Incumbent) | 182,252 | 76 | ||
Democratic | Alan Woodruff | 47,663 | 19.9 | ||
Green | Robert N. Smith | 2,872 | 1.2 | ||
Independent | Karen Brackett | 4,837 | 2 | ||
Independent | Michael Salyer | 2,048 | 0.9 | ||
Total votes | 239,672 | 100 | |||
Republican hold |
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Republican | Phil Roe (incumbent) | 115,533 | 82.8 | |
Independent | Robert D. Franklin | 9,906 | 7.1 | |
Green | Robert N. Smith | 9,869 | 7.1 | |
Independent | Michael D. Salyer | 4,148 | 3.0 | |
Independent | Scott Kudialis (write-in) | 14 | 0.0 | |
Total votes | 139,470 | 100.0 | ||
Republican hold |
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Republican | Phil Roe (incumbent) | 198,293 | 78.4 | |
Democratic | Alan Bohms | 39,024 | 15.4 | |
Independent | Robert Franklin | 15,702 | 6.2 | |
Independent | Paul Krane (write-in) | 6 | 0.0 | |
Total votes | 253,025 | 100.0 | ||
Republican hold |
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Republican | Phil Roe (incumbent) | 172,835 | 77.1 | |
Democratic | Marty Olsen | 47,138 | 21.0 | |
Independent | Michael Salyer | 4,309 | 1.9 | |
Total votes | 224,282 | 100.0 | ||
Republican hold |
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Republican | Diana Harshbarger | 228,181 | 74.7 | |
Democratic | Blair Walsingham | 68,617 | 22.5 | |
Independent | Steve Holder | 8,621 | 2.8 | |
Write-in | 4 | 0.0 | ||
Total votes | 305,423 | 100.0 | ||
Republican hold |
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Republican | Diana Harshbarger (incumbent) | 147,253 | 78.3 | |
Democratic | Cameron Parsons | 37,032 | 19.7 | |
Independent | Richard Baker | 2,466 | 1.3 | |
Independent | Matt Makrom | 1,245 | 0.7 | |
Total votes | 187,996 | 100.0 | ||
Republican hold |
Washington County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2020 census, the population was 133,001. Its county seat is Jonesborough. The county's largest city and a regional educational, medical and commercial center is Johnson City. Washington County is Tennessee's oldest county, having been established in 1777 when the state was still part of North Carolina. Washington County is part of the Johnson City, TN Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is a component of the Johnson City–Kingsport–Bristol, TN-VA Combined Statistical Area, commonly known as the "Tri-Cities" region.
The State of Franklin was an unrecognized proposed state located in present-day East Tennessee, in the United States. Franklin was created in 1784 from part of the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains that had been offered by North Carolina as a cession to Congress to help pay off debts related to the American War for Independence. It was founded with the intent of becoming the 14th state of the new United States.
John Sevier was an American soldier, frontiersman, and politician, and one of the founding fathers of the State of Tennessee. A member of the Democratic-Republican Party, he played a leading role in Tennessee's pre-statehood period, both militarily and politically, and he was elected the state's first governor in 1796. He served as a colonel of the Washington District Regiment in the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780, and he commanded the frontier militia in dozens of battles against the Cherokee in the 1780s and 1790s.
Alfred Alexander Taylor was an American politician and lecturer from eastern Tennessee. He served as the 34th governor of Tennessee from 1921 to 1923, one of three Republicans to hold the position from the end of Reconstruction to the latter half of the 20th century. He also served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1889 to 1895.
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James Henry Quillen was an American politician who served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Tennessee from 1963 to 1997. Quillen represented the 1st congressional district, which covers the northeast corner of the state, including the Tri-Cities region.
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Nathaniel Green Taylor was an American lawyer, farmer, and politician from Tennessee. He was U.S. Representative from Tennessee from 1854 to 1855, and again from 1866 to 1867, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1867 to 1869.
Thomas Amos Rogers Nelson was an American attorney, politician, and judge, active primarily in East Tennessee during the mid-19th century. He represented Tennessee's 1st Congressional District in the 36th U.S. Congress (1859–1861), where he gained a reputation as a staunch pro-Union southerner. He was elected to a second term in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War, but was arrested by Confederate authorities before he could take his seat.
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