Tennessee voters delivered a striking result in Thursday's primary elections, handing Republican incumbent Andy Ogles a rare defeat despite an endorsement from President Donald Trump, while also choosing nominees for a dramatically redrawn congressional district at the heart of a national redistricting battle. Ogles, a congressman first elected in 2022 and a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus, lost to Charlie Hatcher, the state's former agricultural commissioner, by roughly 6.6 percentage points with nearly 90 percent of votes counted. Hatcher, who was endorsed by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and campaigned as strongly pro-Trump, will face Chaz Molder, the Democratic mayor of Columbia — a city south of Nashville — in November.
Ogles had drawn widespread condemnation across the political spectrum for a series of inflammatory statements targeting Muslim Americans. In March, he wrote on social media that "Muslims don't belong in American society" and that "pluralism is a lie." In 2024, when confronted on Capitol Hill by an activist about Palestinian children killed in Gaza, he initially said "I think we should kill them all" before clarifying he meant members of Hamas. Hatcher explicitly distanced himself from that rhetoric, telling a local publication that Muslim Americans serve as law-abiding citizens and soldiers. Ogles had also been under scrutiny after the FBI seized his phone in 2024 as part of a campaign finance investigation, though the Justice Department recently signalled it was abandoning that inquiry. His defeat marks only the second time this week that a Trump-backed Republican candidate has lost a primary.
In Tennessee's reconfigured 9th congressional district — which until recently was the state's only Democratic-leaning seat — Republicans chose state senator Brent Taylor, who carried Trump's endorsement, while Democrats selected state representative Justin Pearson, a 31-year-old lawmaker who gained national prominence in 2023 after being expelled from the Tennessee state legislature for protesting against legislative inaction on gun control measures, before being reinstated. The two will face off in November in a district that now tilts Republican.
The new 9th district is a product of aggressive redistricting carried out by Tennessee's Republican-controlled legislature following a US Supreme Court ruling that weakened the federal Voting Rights Act's protections for minority communities. The old 9th was a compact Memphis-based district with a majority Black population that had been represented for roughly two decades by Democratic congressman Steve Cohen, who decided not to seek re-election in the new configuration. The redrawn district now stretches approximately 320 kilometres east from Memphis across rural areas toward Nashville, with 71 percent of its voters having been moved from other districts. Shelby County, home to Memphis — a city where nearly two-thirds of residents are Black — has been split among three districts that all lean Republican. Many Memphis residents described the move as a deliberate effort to dilute Black political power and eliminate Democratic representation. "From a strategic standpoint, it is a great power play by the Republicans here in this state to ensure that Black voices are minimized," said one Memphis voter.
The Tennessee primaries are part of a broader national midterm election season in which all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and 35 of 100 Senate seats will be contested in November. Democrats are seeking to capitalise on public discontent over economic conditions and foreign policy, while Republicans aim to maintain their slim House majority through both candidate selection and map-drawing. In other Tennessee races, Republican senator Marsha Blackburn won her party's gubernatorial primary, and Memphis city council member Jerri Green secured the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.