It is eminently possible that the much-ballyhooed 2026 congressional race between incumbent Steve Cohen and challenger Justin J. Pearson will never come to pass.
How so? It has to do with the Supreme Court’s ongoing consideration of Louisiana v. Callais, a case which, as Cohen himself noted in his October 17th newsletter to constituents, “is challenging the Voting Rights Act regarding majority/minority districts [including] Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, potentially greenlighting new district lines to dilute the impact of minority voters.”
Especially vulnerable is Section 2 of the 1965 Great Society measure, mandating fair opportunity for minority (i.e. African-American) representation in Congress.
The Court, so notoriously bound to the wishes of the Trump administration (and presumably its anti-DEI predilection), has already begun hearing evidence in the case and could emerge at any time with a ruling that seriously vitiates or overturns outright the landmark measure.
And such an outcome, if expedited, could enable the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly to carve and slice the 9th Congressional District in Memphis as it previously did the 5th District in Nashville, parceling out the severed portions of a historically Democratic district to adjacent GOP-dominated enclaves.
Such an act of gerrymandering could proceed forthwith, following the example of earlier this year, when several states, with a view toward the 2026 elections, undertook ad hoc redistrictings with the hopeful end result of altering Congress’ partisan ratios in their favor.
Should Republicans in the legislature convene their own off-year redistricting session, the Memphis district could go the way of Nashville’s.
In the state’s regular redistricting after the 2020 census, the General Assembly split the Nashville-based 5th District into portions, allocating substantial parts to Districts 6 and 7 and keeping only a fragment of the city population in a newly splintered 5th. In the end, the reliably Democrat 5th District of Nashville was gone. The three reconfigured districts had heavily Republican majorities, and subsequently all three have reliably sent Republicans to Congress.
It’s easy to imagine Tennessee’s GOP supermajority, in an ad hoc session, going after the 9th District, splitting it up and parceling out portions of it to adjacent, basically rural territories in Covington, Fayette, and other nearby counties.
It’s theoretically possible, if unlikely, that all of this could come to pass in time to affect the 2026 election, specifically by transforming the 9th District from one that’s majority-Black and overwhelmingly Democratic to a remainder that, with add-on populations, is either Republican-leaning or politically balanced to the point of making the general election, not the Democratic primary, the decisive arena for selecting congressional representation.
In that eventuality, all assumptions regarding candidacies for the new Shelby County-based districts would have to be reevaluated.
Everything depends on the calendar — most immediately in the timing of any potential action by the Supreme Court adverse, as indicated, to the Voting Rights Act.
It’s a sooner-or-later matter. If sooner, before the election of 2026, the makeup of new Memphis-based congressional districts, and the identity of the candidates in them, would certainly be influenced.
If later, post-election, whoever will have been chosen by the voters to serve them in the 9th District will have to face serious partisan challenges for years to come in future elections.