TN-02: On Monday, longtime Rep. Jimmy Duncan announced that he would not seek re-election to his safely Republican Knoxville-area seat next year. Duncan, who has represented East Tennessee since 1988, is close to the Paulist wing of the GOP and he was one of the few Republicans in Congress to vote against the Iraq War.
Duncan never faced a serious primary challenger, but that may very well have changed if he tried to stick around a bit longer. Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett has said he will run either for the Senate or for Tennessee's 2nd District. Just before Duncan made his decision to retire public, Burchett said he would announce his 2018 plans on Saturday—and that he was unlikely to run for the Senate. A few weeks ago, Duncan got some negative attention after the Knoxville Sentinel reported that over the last decade, he had used his campaign treasury to pay family members hefty salaries during his uncompetitive re-election campaign. We'll never know if this story would have done Duncan any damage at the ballot box, and it's not clear how much Burchett's likely primary challenge convinced the 70-year-old that it was time to call it quits.
Burchett himself says he'll still announce his plans Saturday. A little more than 60 percent of this seat is in Burchett's Knox County, so if he goes through with a bid, he'll likely start out with plenty of name recognition. However, when Burchett was flirting with a bid for governor earlier this year, he predicted that he'd have trouble raising money. Instead, Burchett indulged in some Loser Speak and argued that his grassroots platform could break through, because "I think my message is pretty clear. And I don't need some New York advertising agency to help me talk to the regular folks, because I am the regular folks and I think that's my appeal."
A bid for the House is a lot less expensive than a gubernatorial campaign would have been, but if Burchett doesn't raise much cash, he could have trouble in what could be a competitive primary. But unlike in many Southern states, it takes just a simple plurality to win a Tennessee primary, so it's not implausible that Burchett could coast to victory on just name recognition in a crowded primary.
It didn't take long for other Republicans to start getting the Great Mentioner treatment. State Rep. Jimmy Matlock (all together now: Matlooooock!) acknowledged that he's wanted to run for this seat once it opened, though he says he's still considering. Last year, Matlock tried to unseat fellow Republican Beth Harwell as speaker, but he lost the party nomination vote 40-30. A few months later, Matlock was canned as chairman of the Transportation committee. However, Harwell is giving up her post to run for governor, and if Matlock ran for Congress, he'd give up any chance to succeed her.
Baptist Pastor Chris Edmonds, the son of a local World War II hero, says he's likely to run and could make up his mind within a few weeks. Normally, we'd wonder if Edmonds had the money or political connections to mount a serious race… but Edmonds himself says, "I have no money, no political connections – some would say no sense, to think about running." Still, weird things can happen in crowded races, and sometimes, candidates with a religious background can do well: Just ask Baptist pastor-turned North Carolina Rep. Mark Walker, or Baptist camp director-turned Oklahoma congressman-turned Sen. James Lankford, two Southern Republicans who both looked like Some Dudes throughout most of their first primaries but won.
The Knoxville Sentinel also writes that Blount County Sheriff Jim Berrong and state Sen. Richard Briggs are rumored possibilities, though neither man has said anything publicly yet. State Sen. Becky Duncan Massey, who is the congressman's sister, doesn't sound likely to get in, though when the Sentinel asked if she was definitively ruling it out, she replied, "I never say never, but I’m not considering it at this point. I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing." This seat has been in the family since John J. Duncan Sr. first won it in 1964, a family reign that's long for anyone who isn't a Dingell.
Trump won this seat 65-30, and it's not in much danger of going anywhere without Duncan. The last time a Knox County-based House seat elected a Democrat was in 1852, before the Republican Party was even formed. In fact, this seat has had a congressman from the nativist Know Nothing Party more recently than that! East Tennessee was the rare part of the South that was solidly Republican in the century after the Civil War when the Democratic Party dominated almost all of the region, and it's remained that way ever since.