It wasn’t quite a concession speech.
At New Direction Christian Church on Tuesday night, Nov. 3, state Rep. Justin J. Pearson stood before a crowd that had spent more than a year working to send him to Congress. The votes were still being counted, and the race for Tennessee’s newly redrawn 9th Congressional District had not yet been called. But Pearson was already looking beyond Election Day.
“Together we have changed history,” Pearson declared. “Tennessee and Tennessee politics will never be the same again.”
Final unofficial returns from the Tennessee Secretary of State showed Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor with 111,968 votes, or 49.63%, compared with 109,429 votes, or 48.5%, for Pearson — a difference of just 2,539 votes, or 1.13 percentage points. All 15 counties had reported, although provisional ballots remained outstanding. Pearson declined to concede pending an official determination of the results.
Even as Pearson was speaking, Taylor claimed victory in a race far more competitive than the district’s Republican-friendly boundaries had suggested.
“All I can say is, damn, the Democrats did not want to give up that seat,” Taylor said during his victory speech.
Molder and Kuhn fall short also
Democratic candidates in the other two districts that include Memphis fell short as well. In the 5th District, Republican Charlie Hatcher defeated Democrat Chaz Molder, the mayor of Columbia, 110,408 votes (51.7%) to 99,841 (46.7%), a margin of 10,567 votes. In the 8th District, incumbent Republican David Kustoff defeated Democrat Heidi Kuhn, a former Shelby County Criminal Court clerk,, 114,045 votes (51.6%) to 102,406 (46.4%), a margin of 11,639 votes.
Molder credited Memphis with helping revive his campaign after the Republican-controlled Legislature redrew the 5th District to include portions of the city. He campaigned extensively in Memphis, including visits to churches, community centers and college campuses.
“After redistricting, when it would have been easy to walk away, Memphis brought our campaign back to life,” Molder told supporters in his election-night concession speech.
Molder carried the Shelby County portion of the district by a lopsided margin, 42,950 votes to 4,696, despite losing districtwide. Kuhn also carried the Shelby County portion of the 8th District, defeating Kustoff there 73,320 to 58,949.
“The fight to protect the right to vote is not over,” Molder said. “The Memphis that I’ve come to know and love does not back down after it gets one hit. In fact, Memphis gets back up again. It always has and it always will.”
A half-century of representation ends
Before redistricting, the Memphis-centered 9th District was nearly 61% Black. Under the new map, Memphis was divided among three congressional districts, each with a Black population of less than 30%, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
Despite those changes, Democratic candidates captured between 46% and 49% of the vote in all three districts. The returns show support extending beyond the Memphis portions of those districts, although they do not establish the racial or partisan makeup of individual candidates’ coalitions.
When the new Congress convenes in January 2027, the GOP victories will end 52 years of Democratic congressional representation rooted in Memphis, a political tradition dating to Harold Ford Sr.’s historic 1974 election.
The city has elected a Democrat to Congress continuously since Ford Sr. defeated Republican incumbent Dan Kuykendall in 9174. Ford served until 1997, followed by his son, Harold Ford Jr., and then Steve Cohen, who took office in 2007.
But the close contests also underscored how fiercely Democrats competed on a political map drawn to favor Republicans. And Pearson, whose campaign traveled across 15 counties, made clear that he had no intention of disappearing from the political landscape.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Pearson told reporters afterward. “I’m gonna continue to fight for people across these 15 counties in addition to the people who are in my state House district.”
A campaign against the map — and the status quo
The 9th District that Pearson sought to represent bears little resemblance to the Memphis-centered district represented for nearly two decades by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, who announced he would not seek reelection after the new congressional map was approved in Nashville.
Earlier this year, the 9th was almost exclusively Memphis. Now, it stretches from southern Shelby County through rural West Tennessee and into Middle Tennessee, including portions of affluent Williamson County. Had it been in place, President Donald Trump would have carried it by about 21 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election.
“In a district that they drew to gerrymander us into oblivion,” Pearson told supporters, “they can’t even call it, it’s so close.”
“That is what people power can do.”
Election returns showed Pearson receiving 56,303 votes to Taylor’s 9,152 in the Shelby County portion of the district, a lead of 47,151 votes. Outside Shelby County, Taylor led 102,816 to 53,126. Nearly half of Pearson’s total votes came from outside Shelby County, illustrating the geographic reach of his campaign even as Taylor carried the rest of the district by a wider margin.
Pearson credited the unexpectedly close race to his campaign’s efforts to connect with voters in rural, suburban and urban communities. In his post-speech media scrum, he argued that sustained organizing could overcome even significant partisan disadvantages.
“Gerrymandering can be beat when people vote,” he said. “And so we are seeing what significant turnout and investment can do.”
Even as he said in a statement Wednesday afternoon that he would accept the election’s outcome, Pearson refused to characterize the campaign as a defeat for the movement behind it. “I accept the results of this election for Congress. But, I will not concede to rigged maps, attacks on democracy in Tennessee, or to billionaire control of our political system,” he said.
Statewide contests deliver mixed signals
Republicans also retained control of Tennessee’s two major statewide offices on the ballot, although the governor’s race proved unexpectedly close.
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn defeated Memphis City Council member Jerri Green to become Tennessee’s first female governor, succeeding term-limited Republican Gov. Bill Lee.
Final unofficial statewide returns showed Blackburn receiving approximately 45.5% of the vote, compared with about 43% for Green. Independent candidate David Hatley received about 9.3%, preventing either major-party candidate from winning an outright majority.
Green, who had campaigned on expanding health care access, reducing costs for working families and challenging Republican policies on immigration and reproductive rights, conceded the race Tuesday night.
The narrow outcome represented a markedly different political picture from recent Tennessee gubernatorial elections, in which Republicans have generally enjoyed comfortable statewide victories.
In the U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent Bill Hagerty defeated Memphis Democrat Marquita Bradshaw in a rematch of their 2020 contest.
Unofficial election-night returns showed Hagerty receiving approximately 55% of the vote to Bradshaw’s 43%. Bradshaw, an environmental justice advocate, had again sought to mobilize voters around economic inequality, environmental protection and health care access.
For Memphis Democrats, the results presented a complicated picture: continued Republican control of statewide offices and congressional representation, but several contests that were substantially closer than the state’s recent electoral history might have suggested.
Beyond Election Day
Taylor also won reelection to his Tennessee Senate seat Tuesday, defeating Democrat David Weatherspoon, 38,004 votes to 35,234. If Taylor takes office in Congress, his departure from the Legislature would trigger a special election to fill the state Senate vacancy.
For Pearson, however, the immediate future appears less complicated. He will remain a member of the Tennessee House, where he has become one of the Legislature’s most recognizable Democratic voices.
And despite the outcome, Pearson argued that his campaign had created relationships and political infrastructure that could endure beyond a single election.
“I’m really excited about the fact that we’re going into these counties, we’re making inroads, we’re building relationships and connections that are gonna outlast a single campaign,” Pearson told reporters.
“We got a lot more work to do, and I’m just 31, so I’m ready to do it.”
