I will shortly be moving to East Tennessee and one thing I’ve spent a lot of time studying is the unique history of the region. It was mostly pro-Union during the Civil War and it supported the Republican Party consistently in the late 19th and 20th century. When the rest of the South was solidly Democratic, East Tennessee was Republican. It is still solidly Republican, but because of its different trajectory to the GOP – as the old party of Lincoln and not the party of Jesse Helms – East Tennessee Republicans are often less conservative than other Southern Republicans. There are, to be sure, some militantly conservative Republicans in East Tennessee, including failed Senatorial nominee Ed Bryant from the Tri-Cities area. But the most iconic East Tennessee Republican is former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, who epitomized the pre-Gingrich, pre-Lott and pre-Frist Republican Party.
With this in mind, it’s interesting to see how East Tennesseans view the Iraq war. One of only six Republicans to oppose the Iraq war resolution in 2002 was Knoxville’s own John “Jimmy” Duncan, a man who represents Tennessee’s 2nd district. The district has not voted Democratic since 1857. Duncan is no liberal, but his vociferous opposition to the Iraq war has given him unusual authority in today’s cantankerous debate within the GOP over the Iraq war resolution.
The other two East Tennessee Republican Congressmen, David Davis of the Tri-Cities area (Ed Bryant’s old district) and Zach Wamp of Chattanooga, all oppose the resolution. But they haven’t exactly been positive on Bush’s handling of the war as of late. Their opposition is mostly based on the idea that we can’t back out of the War on Terror as a whole. Of course the resolution doesn’t call for backing out of the War on Terror as a whole, just disengagement from the civil war in Iraq where our mission against Islamist terrorism as a whole seems murkier than ever.
That said, the really interesting shift is the lone Democrat among East Tennessee’s delegation: Lincoln Davis of the 4th district. His district technically straddles East and Middle Tennessee, but he comes from Pall Mall in the eastern Cumberland Plateau section of the district. And his district is very rural. He once supported the war and now opposes it. His shift suggests the utter loss of support for the war among Southern conservative Democrats and accurately reflects the drift away from Bush among Independents and other non-Republican though conservative voters. In this corner of old Republican Tennessee, then, the war seems to have fewer supporters than ever.