Nashville’s 5th U.S. Congressional District is now splattered across Middle Tennessee, a jigsawed polygon conjured by creative Tennessee Republicans in a redistricting plan aimed at picking up a seat in this year’s midterms. The 5th won’t have an incumbent in the November general election — Jim Cooper, who held the seat for 20 years, bowed out almost immediately following redistricting — pitting gadflies against party insiders in a litmus test for Republican politics in Tennessee. Democrat Heidi Campbell, who is uncontested in her party’s primary, has a narrow lane to victory that requires her to capture purple middle ground vacated by Republicans racing to the right. But the district, which stretches from Mt. Juliet to Bellevue to Hohenwald, is more pink than violet.
Back in the winter, the 5th attracted national media attention as a prime example of partisan gerrymandering. The GOP used its supermajority in the state House and Senate to crack Nashville three ways, drawing sections of Davidson County into the 5th, 6th and 7th Congressional districts. The three meet up near the Krispy Kreme on Thompson Lane. (The 6th and 7th remain conservative strongholds, with incumbent Reps. John Rose and Mark Green, respectively, unopposed in their Republican primaries.)
Cooper, who presented alternative maps to state legislators in late 2021, used the subsequent media cycle to sling blame toward unspecified Nashville power brokers who could have “easily changed the minds of enough legislators to change the map.” Extremely well-connected politically, Cooper is the older brother of Nashville Mayor John Cooper. Their father, Prentice Cooper, was Tennessee’s segregationist governor during World War II. “I could not stop the General Assembly from dismembering Nashville,” Jim Cooper wrote in a retirement press release. “No one tried harder to keep this city whole.”
The longtime U.S. rep lamented the death of Nashville’s political representation via extended metaphor in The Tennessean on the same day that New York Times columnist (and former longtime Scene contributor) Margaret Renkl elegized Nashville and eulogized Cooper. Even before Lt. Gov. Randy McNally’s Ad Hoc Committee on Redistricting inked its final boundaries, the writing was on the wall: Why would the modern GOP, eager for House seats, turn down a legally viable chance for an electoral advantage?
The seat has become a free-for-all. Morgan Ortagus, fresh off a stint in the Trump administration, came out of nowhere with the former president’s endorsement only to get kicked off the ballot by the Tennessee GOP in April. State Republicans also kicked off far-right media personality Robby Starbuck (né Newsom), who moved to Franklin in 2019. He raised a boatload of money this spring and has since launched a primary write-in campaign, one more wildcard for Republicans to deal with in August.
On the Republican side, nine candidates remain. Three have the résumés and fundraising numbers to be considered frontrunners. Beth Harwell, former speaker of the state House, is a Belle Meade Republican attempting a key test of political dexterity for any legacy politician running in a Trump-era GOP primary: adopt enough fascist elements to protect the right flank without betraying suburban conservatives who may have other options. In June, Harwell said she didn’t want Trump’s endorsement. After being kicked out of the race in April, Ortagus came on as an adviser for retired National Guardsman Kurt Winstead, who bills himself as the trustworthy political outsider. He’s turned big fundraising into a flood of radio and TV ads, never missing a chance to remind voters that he was a (governor-appointed) brigadier general — he prefers to draw less attention to his wife’s role as a career lobbyist. Billionaire John Ingram, a Republican megadonor, maxed out to both top candidates while his family lined up behind Harwell.
On paper, Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles is a step below Harwell on name recognition and a comma behind Winstead’s fundraising. But Maury County is big, and he may have an edge on the ground game. The remaining six candidates have, by comparison, anemic campaigns with Little League budgets. Many, specifically Stewart Parks and Tim Lee, have taken to Tennessean debate stages to amplify less-hinged GOP talking points, like support for last year’s failed attempt to overthrow the government and accusations that Democrats are engaged in acts of coordinated violence.
Oftentimes the top of the ticket drives turnout. Without a contested gubernatorial primary, smaller, energized constituencies can get relatively more power. This could split the race into several sizable chunks and hand the nomination to a cult favorite with 25 to 30 percent of the vote.
Democrat Heidi Campbell has no competition. The former mayor of Oak Hill (who also self-identifies as a Williamson County soccer mom) is watching the Republican fracas move further from the middle ground that she sees as the prevailing politics of the district: more Brentwood fiscal conservatism, less “Hang Mike Pence.”
“The Republican Party is beholden to a monolithic agenda,” Campbell tells the Scene a week before voting starts. “It doesn’t matter the nuances of the candidate — they have no ability to control the national conversation. Most people live in that central space. Not the crazy wings of the spectrum.”
With a big fundraising disclosure out this month, Campbell hopes her campaign can attract national party leaders scouring the country trying to hold onto a razor-thin margin in the House. She’s betting on the same moderate appeal that helped her win a state Senate seat from Republican Steve Dickerson in 2020.
State and federal primaries and Davidson County general elections are on the Aug. 4 ballot
