Tennessee's 2nd congressional district

The 2nd congressional district of Tennessee is a congressional district in Tennessee. It currently includes the east central part of the state.

The district is based in Knoxville, and is largely coextensive with that city's metropolitan area. It includes most of that city's suburbs. It includes the cities and towns of Alcoa, Dandridge, Farragut, Harrogate, Jefferson City, Jellico, Loudon, Lenoir City, Maryville, Powell, Rutledge and Tazewell.

The 2nd is one of the safest districts in the nation for the Republican Party. It is one of the few ancestrally Republican districts in the South. No Democrat has represented the district since 1855, and Republicans (or their antecedents) have held the district continuously since 1859. It was one of only two districts in Tennessee (the other being the neighboring 1st district) whose congressmen did not resign when Tennessee seceded from the Union prior to the Civil War.

Because most of its residents supported the Union over the Confederacy, the people almost immediately identified with the Republicans after hostilities ceased. Much of that sentiment was derived from the region's economic base of small-scale farming, with little or no use for slavery; thus, voters were mostly indifferent or hostile to the concerns of planters and other landed interests farther west in the state, who aligned themselves with the Democratic Party. This loyalty has persisted through good times and bad since then. Before the 1950s, its congressmen were among the few truly senior Republican congressmen from the South.

From the end of Reconstruction through the 1950s, the Republican Party in Tennessee was more or less nonexistent outside of East Tennessee. However, in the 1960s conservative Democratic whites, especially in suburban Memphis and Nashville, began voting for the likes of Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker (whose father and stepmother were representatives from the 2nd in the 1950s and 1960s), and Richard Nixon. At bottom, the conservative Democrats in the other Grand Divisions were almost as conservative as Republicans in East Tennessee. Traditional East Tennessee Republicans began welcoming conservative Democrats into their party, and they have worked more or less together as a coalition ever since.

A few pockets of Democratic voters exist in Knoxville, which has occasionally elected Democratic mayors and sends a few Democrats to the state legislature. However, they are no match for the overwhelming Republican tilt of the rural areas, the Knoxville suburbs, and most of Knoxville itself. Coal miners in the far northern fringe of the district also supported Democrats from the 1930s onward, but nearly all of the coal-mining region was drawn into the 4th district after the 1980 Census.

This district traditionally gives its congressmen very long tenures in Washington. In the last 106 years, it has had only five congressmen (not including caretakers). The current congressman is Jimmy Duncan who succeeded his father, 24-year incumbent John Duncan, Sr., in a 1988 special election.