Tennessee's 1st congressional district

Recent election results from statewide races

History

The 1st district 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). [[Image:Jackson Johnson TN1st.jpg|thumb|Democratic U.S. Representatives Andrew Jackson (1796–1797, at large) and Andrew Johnson (1843–1853, 1st) represented this area and later served as president of the United States.]]

Republicans (or their antecedents) have held the seat continuously since 1881 and for all but four years since 1859, while Democrats (or their antecedents) 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, which ended 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 in the rest of the state due to its mountain terrain, which was dominated by small farms instead of plantations. 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.

The 1st district 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.

Due to these factors, this area — except for "Little Confederacy" Sullivan County, with its deep ties to neighboring 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 the 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 to 1961, while Quillen held it from 1963 to 1997.

Composition

For the 118th and successive Congresses (based on redistricting following the 2020 census), the district contains all or portions of the following counties and communities:

Carter County (8)

: All 8 communities

Cocke County (3)

: All 3 communities

Greene County (5)

: All 5 communities

Hamblen County (3)

: All 3 communities

Hancock County (1)

: Sneedville

Hawkins County (8)

: All 8 communities

Jefferson County (6)

: Baneberry, Dandridge, Jefferson City, Morristown (shared with Hamblen County), New Market, White Pine

Johnson County (2)

: Butler, Mountain City

Sevier County (6)

: All 6 communities

Sullivan County (11)

: All 11 communities

Unicoi County (3)

: All 3 communities

Washington County (9)

: All 9 communities

List of members representing the district

Recent election results

2012

2014

2016

2018

2020

2022

2024

Sources

• Political Graveyard database of Tennessee congressmen

References

• Congressional Biographical Directory of the United States 1774–present

References

1. "Congressional Districts Relationship Files (state-based)". US Census Bureau Geography.
2. "My Congressional District". Center for New Media & Promotion (CNMP), US Census Bureau.
3. "My Congressional District".
4. (April 3, 2025). "2025 Cook PVI℠: District Map and List (119th Congress)".
5. Pathé, Simone. (January 3, 2020). "Tennessee's Phil Roe won't run for reelection in 2020". [[Roll Call]].
6. "DRA 2020".
7. "Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: Slavery".
8. "First Abolition Publications 1A82 - Jonesborough, TN - Tennessee Historical Markers on Waymarking.com".
9. ""A Patriot's Voice", Neal O'Steen, Tennessee Alumnus Summer 1997".
10. "Tennessee - Congressional District 1 - Representative Diana Harshbarger".
11. L.A. Coolidge. (1897). "Official Congressional Directory: Fifty-Fifth Congress". Government Printing Office.
12. (December 3, 2014). "November 4, 2014 General Election Results". Secretary of State of Tennessee.
13. (December 13, 2016). "November 2016 US House Results by County". Secretary of State of Tennessee.
14. Johnson, Cheryl L.. (February 28, 2019). "Statistics of the Congressional Election of November 6, 2018". [[Clerk of the United States House of Representatives.
15. (December 2, 2020). "State of Tennessee General Election Results, November 3, 2020, Results By Office". Secretary of State of Tennessee.
16. (December 2, 2024). "State of Tennessee - Totals November 5, 2024 State General". [[Secretary of State of Tennessee]].