First House Retirement of the New Year Brings GOP Congressional Departures to 26
January 6th 2019
Tennessee Valley Corridor Summit 2018 Congressman Phil Roe Oak Ridge (doe-oakridge)
By Jeff Singer
We got our first House retirement of the new year on Friday when GOP Rep. Phil Roe announced that he would not seek a seventh term in Tennessee’s safely red 1st Congressional District.
Roe is the 26th House Republican to decline to seek re-election to the House this cycle, while just nine Democrats are retiring so far. That’s about the same number of Republicans who had announced their departures at this point in 2018, but because there were a lot more GOP members back then, a larger proportion of the caucus is calling it a career now.
Roe’s East Tennessee seat, which is home to Johnson City, Kingsport, and Dolly Parton’s Dollywood theme park, contains some of the most ancestrally red turf in the whole country. While the Republican Party barely existed in most of the South for almost a century after Reconstruction, the GOP dominated this seat and most of the rest of East Tennessee during that period. The last time this area elected a Democrat to the House was 1878, and at 77-20 Trump, this district isn’t going to break the GOP’s winning streak anytime soon.
The filing deadline is in early April, and the GOP could be in for a very crowded primary in August. Roe, a medical doctor who served as mayor of Johnson City, himself was one of 13 Republicans who competed here in 2006 when the seat last opened up. That contest was won by state Rep. David Davis, who defeated another candidate by a narrow 22-21 margin, while Roe took a close fourth place with 17%.
Two years later, though, Roe sought a rematch against Davis. The incumbent had a solidly conservative voting record, but Roe ran ads tying him to the oil industry. One spot declared, “While East Tennesseans have been struggling with out-of-control gas prices, David Davis has pocketed thousands from oil companies,” and continued, “Why is 'Big Oil' trying to buy our seat in Congress, and why is Davis accepting their cash?” Roe self-funded a large portion of his campaign, which allowed him to compete with Davis’ larger war chest.
Roe ended up winning the primary 50-49, a margin of just 492 votes, which made Davis the first Tennessee U.S. House member to lose renomination since 1966. Davis, though, initially refused to concede, and he argued that Democrats had illegally voted in the primary to put Roe over the top. Tennessee doesn't allow voters to specify a party when registering to vote, though, so the incumbent didn’t have much of a legal case. Davis finally threw in the towel a week later and admitted that he probably should have conceded defeat on election night, but petulant to the last, he still insisted Roe had won with “illegal votes.”
Davis threatened to challenge Roe in both the 2010 and 2016 cycles, but their third bout never took place. Instead, Roe won renomination with minimal opposition, and he also never had trouble in any of his other campaigns. Roe, who had said in 2008 that he’d only serve five terms, flirted with retirement in 2018, but he instead broke his pledge and easily won his sixth and ultimately final term.
Posted with permission