By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
So I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. Knoxville is part of Knox County. As part of the Great Sort, the city has become more Democratic, and the County has become more Republican. (Though the city was always a Democratic enclave — even during the Civil War the city proper was a center of support for the Confederacy, even as most of East Tennessee was strongly pro-Union.)
Nonetheless, the city still has a large minority of Republicans. And since city elections — which are in an off-year cycle that does not coincide with federal or statewide races — have very low turnout, a large minority could win, if you could just get a substantial portion to vote. Sadly, that hasn’t been happening.
Knoxville has approximately 97,856 registered voters (as of late 2025). The 2023 Knoxville mayoral primary (the last contested mayor’s race) saw only 16,400 votes cast (17% turnout). Knox County as a whole has ~318,000 registered voters, but county commission and other local races in off-years often see turnout in the teens or low 20s percent in individual districts.
Because elections are nonpartisan (there is no party registration in Tennessee), outcomes depend on who shows up. Knoxville city races tend to favor progressive/Dem-leaning candidates in low-turnout environments, while the broader county leans Republican. Conservative/GOP-aligned candidates often underperform relative to their strength in high-turnout races because their base (more suburban or conservative voters) participates less in purely local contests. Increasing GOP turnout—by mobilizing their potential voters while assuming opponent turnout stays roughly stable—can flip races with relatively modest absolute gains due to the small number of total votes cast.
Every time I look at local election results, I’m amazed, because if the GOP could achieve even a fairly low, but higher, turnout it could swing them. We literally have numerous local races decided by a few hundred votes, with many recent races decided by fewer than 25 votes. (And the Democrats can win in the County if they get high turnout from their voters).
I’m often reminded by a scene in the Apple TV show, Physical, set in the early 1980s when Republicans were still viable in California. The protagonist’s husband, a lefty enviro-type, is running for State Senate and it’s looking good: Poll watchers report a lot of people with long hair and birkenstocks showing up to vote. He thinks he has it in the bag when suddenly a fleet of buses pulls up and disgorges hundreds of Mormons, neatly dressed and obviously there to vote for his Republican opponent, who winds up beating him handsomely.
I sometimes ask local Republicans, “where are your busloads of Mormons?” Or the equivalent. If you could get 500 people to pull up to the polls, you could win a lot of local races here. If you could get 5000 you could win pretty much all of them. The former is eminently doable; the latter is certainly not beyond possibility.
But you need a turnout operation, and the Knox County GOP — like the GOP statewide — doesn’t have much of one. The local Democrats are better organized (much of it through the Democratic Socialists of America, who have a lot of money from leftist billionaires to aim at local elections, as they have done since 2017, with Zohran Mamdani being their showpiece victory). They also seem to have more active social media, and to keep their cadre more organized and motivated between elections using happy hours, speakers, and the like.
Republicans invest less of their lives in politics, which is healthier but also a vulnerability, especially in low profile elections. (That’s why the DSA has targeted those.) But as we’ve seen with the Soros campaign to elect lefty local prosecutors and judges, those local elections matter.
It’s also the case that people in deep red states are complacent. The refugees who come here from blue states — like refugees from Cuba or Venezuela or Iran — seem to have more fervor, because they’ve experienced first hand what it’s like to live in a one-party state.
But the GOP, both in my locality and elsewhere, needs to pay more attention to local turnout. Talking about Iran or Europe is nice, but much of the real action is at your doorstep.
Any thoughts on concrete steps that might increase turnout?
First published in Glenn’s Substack
