Why Democrats want this scandal-plagued Republican to survive his primary
No one knows why Tennessee has Thursday primaries, but we've previewed all the top races
One of the biggest primary weeks of 2026 continues on Thursday—yes, Thursday—when Tennessee holds nominating contests for posts up and down the ballot.
The main event is the Republican primary for the open governor’s office, where Sen. Marsha Blackburn, long the apparent frontrunner, may have a rockier road than she anticipated. Unlike many other Southern states, Tennessee does not use runoffs, so nominees need to win just a simple plurality to come out on top.
This will also be the state’s first time employing the new congressional gerrymander that Republicans rushed through in May shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
GOP map makers radically transformed the 9th District, long a majority Black and safely Democratic constituency in Memphis, into a majority-white and heavily Republican seat. That transformation led Rep. Steve Cohen, the only Democrat in the state’s nine-member House delegation, to retire rather than face an all-but-certain defeat at the ballot box.
But that wasn’t the only House race upended by the new boundaries. The new lines also gave Republican Rep. Andy Ogles—whose two terms representing the 5th District have been defined by a series of scandals—some extra protection in his campaign for renomination. But Ogles isn’t in the clear, and he still has to win an expensive primary fight on Thursday.
And just why does Tennessee hold its primaries on the fifth day of the week—a day that no other state sets aside for elections? This perennial question surfaces every election cycle, but no one has been able to answer it.
Reporter Nicholas Fandos dove into this topic in a piece for Politico in 2014 and learned this policy has been in place since the state’s first constitution was drafted in 1796. However, no one left any records explaining why Tennessee’s long-ago leaders made this choice.
“I can’t find any rationale for why Thursday was in there,” state librarian Charles Sherrill said 12 years ago of the still-unsolved mystery.
You can find The Downballot’s calculations of the 2024 presidential results for each congressional district updated to reflect the boundaries that will be used this fall, as well as an interactive map from Dave’s Redistricting App.
While Tennessee is split between the Eastern and Central Time zones, all polls close at 8 PM ET / 7 PM CT. Join The Downballot on our private Discord server for this rare Thursday election night!
TN-05 (R) (61-38 Trump)
Republican Rep. Andy Ogles is about to find out whether Donald Trump’s endorsement and favorable new district lines will be enough to overcome a myriad of scandals and a well-funded primary challenge from former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher.
Ogles, who was elected in 2022 to represent a gerrymandered slice of Nashville and more conservative parts of Middle Tennessee, spent his first term dealing with revelations that he appeared to have fabricated much of his life story and that he’d loaned his campaign considerably more money than his apparent wealth indicated was possible.
But Ogles, who had Trump’s endorsement, nonetheless won a closely watched primary two years ago by a 57-43 margin. Soon after, he acknowledged that he was under FBI investigation over alleged campaign finance violations, though that didn’t stop him from easily winning in November.
Ogles, however, got some more unwelcome news last fall when Hatcher stepped down from his post in Gov. Bill Lee’s administration and launched a campaign to deny the incumbent renomination. Democrats also believed Ogles was vulnerable despite the 5th District’s conservative leanings, and Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder emerged as an unusually strong potential opponent for the general election.
Ogles, though, has friends in high places. Trump’s Department of Justice said in May it was preparing to drop its investigation into allegations he committed campaign finance fraud.
The very next day, the GOP-dominated legislature unveiled a new gerrymander that radically reshaped Ogles’ constituency, leaving him to run in a revamped district where he currently represents fewer than one out of every five residents.
While most incumbents would dread having to introduce themselves to so many voters in such a short period of time, Ogles had reason to be happy with the trade. The new lines made the 5th District, which now incorporates more rural areas on its way to Memphis, even more conservative by removing its section of Nashville. They also relocated both Hatcher’s and Molder’s homes into the new 9th District.
Both challengers are continuing to run for the 5th—candidates for Congress don’t need to live in the district they want to represent, just the state—and Hatcher is Ogles’ more immediate threat.
Hatcher, who received Lee’s endorsement two days before the primary, has brought in more money than the embattled congressman, and he’s benefited from $2 million in outside spending from a group called Invest In Tomorrow Coalition. The outfit, funded by wealthy clean energy investors, has aired ads charging Ogles “lied about his resume,” and that the congressman is “still under investigation.” (The House Ethics Committee, at least, is still looking into him.)
This intervention, though, has brought criticism from both the right and the left. Ogles’ backers at the House Freedom Caucus have spent over $700,000 to save the incumbent, an effort that’s included commercials warning that Hatcher is supported by “Biden’s green energy czar.”
Frustrated Democrats, meanwhile, told Punchbowl News that if Invest In Tomorrow gets its way on Thursday, it would be even more difficult for Molder, who remains the party’s frontrunner, to flip the redrawn seat. A spokesperson for the group responded by telling the site it was going after Ogles because he is an “extremist on American energy,” and that it didn’t want to be “sucked into those partisan games.”
A late July internal poll for Invest In Tomorrow found Ogles with a small 37-33 lead over Hatcher. No one has released any other surveys of this contest.
TN-Gov (R) (64-34 Trump)
Sen. Marsha Blackburn remains the favorite to succeed termed-out Gov. Bill Lee, a fellow Republican, but her nomination doesn’t appear as inevitable as it once did.
