Take a short drive down Franklin Pike during election season and you can usually feel which way the Republican winds are blowing — or at least where the money is flowing. A few days before early voting began, big Courtney Johnston yard signs far outnumbered the single plywood billboard for Andy Ogles outside the stately homes lining Nashville’s surrender to Brentwood.
Johnston raised more than $700,000 since April in her bid to unseat Ogles, an unpopular incumbent whose campaign relies on personal loans and support from Koch-funded conservative activist group Americans for Prosperity, Ogles’ former employer. A Johnston win in the Aug. 1 Republican primary, just like Ogles’ primary victory two years ago, would feel like a coup inside a party fractured by the dominance of Donald Trump.
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Ogles, then serving as Maury County mayor, jumped into the GOP primary for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District when state lawmakers cracked Nashville into three congressional seats in January 2022. In name, the district had long belonged to Davidson County and was held for decades by centrist Democrat Jim Cooper. It now contains the county’s wealthy enclaves of Oak Hill, Green Hills, Forest Hills and Belle Meade, as well as diverse and quickly growing neighborhoods in southeast Davidson County. The district also wanders through Wilson, Williamson, Maury, Marshall and Lewis counties. (In 2022, Cooper announced he would not seek reelection in a district he deemed unwinnable for Democrats.) Ogles, who burnished his credentials as a conservative activist, won the 2022 primary with 35 percent of the party vote; former state House Speaker Beth Harwell and attorney Kurt Winstead, both seen as more traditional Republican alternatives, split another 46 percent of the vote.
Since then, scandals and drama have dogged Ogles in Tennessee and Washington. In one of his first moves as a congressman, he joined a GOP rebel faction trying to depose Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, a quest that plunged the House majority into chaos the following October. Reporting from NewsChannel 5’s Phil Williams has discredited Ogles’ professional and educational background, earning him comparisons to ousted New York Rep. George Santos. Messy finances, blurry lines between his congressional communications and his reelection campaign, and high-dollar expense reports billed to taxpayers have further hurt his conservative credibility.
Despite frequent appearances in the conservative mediasphere, Ogles never quite earned a spot alongside Reps. Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jim Jordan as a national star. He showed off his favorite talking points at a First Tuesday luncheon on July 2, a monthly conservative huddle emceed by former Metro Councilmember Robert Swope: inflation, the threat of artificial intelligence and a looming global takeover by China. As far as legislation, he touts his failed “No Juicing Joe Act,” which would notify Congress of medications taken by President Biden.
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Johnston, a fast-talking Metro councilmember who put aside her real estate career in 2019 to become a full-time politician, has become institutional Republicans’ answer to Ogles’ national embarrassment. A 2017 home break-in prompted her to run for Metro Council, where — representing parts of Oak Hill and Berry Hill in District 26 — she has been one of a few conservative voices since 2019. Support from Kim Kaegi, a prolific fundraiser and Johnston’s founding campaign treasurer, brings a Rolodex of Tennessee GOP royalty and mainline access to the party’s biggest donors.
Courtney Johnston
“Republican leaders, the community, the party, we knew we had to coalesce around one strong person with character and integrity who was going to do the job instead of chase headlines because of some immature need for attention,” Johnston tells the Scene at a coffee shop in Brentwood. She’s about to head to The Heritage, an upscale senior living facility developed by former Nashville Mayor John Cooper, brother of Rep. Jim Cooper. “A lot of Republicans have disengaged and don’t recognize their party anymore. They want someone who can bring resources to the district, who understands the district, and who can represent Tennessee with dignity.”
“I don’t think [Johnston] can run on her record, because her Metro Council record speaks for itself, so the only thing she can do is call me names, and I’m totally going to ignore that,” Ogles recently told Scene sister publication The News. “I’m not gonna call someone silly names on the playground.”
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Johnston’s campaign ads, in which she identifies as a “conservative outsider,” smother Ogles from all sides while avoiding platform specifics. She emphasizes that voters, donors and Republican contacts typically object most to Ogles’ character, not his politics or votes. When pressed, there’s a little daylight between the Republican mainstream and her views on abortion (a ban at 16 weeks and some exceptions), guns (do more to vet owners’ mental health) and immigration (expand pathways to legal residence and deport individuals convicted of a crime), though her major selling point to voters is her willingness to comply with party leadership and support Trump.
Johnston’s sunny retail politics — a skill refined by five years’ worth of neighborhood meetings and local meet-and-greets — sharply contrast with Ogles’ aversion to public appearances; at a recent Maury County Chamber of Commerce coffee meetup, Johnston flitted through the crowd while Ogles’ proxy, James Amundsen, lurked on the fringes.
With early voting now open, see our coverage of state and federal primary matchups, the Nashville Banner’s extensive ballot guide and more
