Former state trooper Mark Proctor hopes to keep the seat Democrat. Businessman Bill Hancock wants to flip it.
Image Credit: Bill Hancock for State Representative / Facebook & Canva.
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Article by Sarah Grace Taylor [The Nashville Banner, Creative Commons] –
A competitive state house race in Nashville may serve as a litmus test on scope rather than a simple measure of right vs. left.
Tennessee House District 59, which spans much of southern Davidson County from Belle Meade to Cane Ridge, is up for grabs in November after Rep. Caleb Hemmer (D-Nashville) decided not to run for a third term, vacating one of the closest districts in the state in terms of partisan makeup.
Now, retired Tennessee Highway Patrol Major Mark Proctor is vying to keep the district in Democrats’ hands by winning over centrists and Republicans tired of the state’s Republican supermajority.
Businessman Bill Hancock is trying to flip the seat red by arguing that Nashville needs a Republican in the statehouse to bridge the gap between the city and state.
When Hemmer was first elected in 2022, he narrowly beat Republican Michelle Foreman in the general, securing around 52.4 percent of the vote, winning by just 5 percentage points, or just over 1,400 of the nearly 30,000 votes cast. Hemmer’s was the first election after the district was drawn in its current form, designed to encapsulate the more affluent, sometimes conservative neighborhoods on the Williamson-Davidson County border and make a Nashville seat attainable for Republicans.
Now that the seat is open again, November will show whether and how, the nearly 50-50 partisan split has changed.
“I have a lot of country club Republicans, but I don’t have a lot of MAGA Republicans,” Hemmer said of the district, which he believes has shifted to the left. “This is, I think, the smartest, most attuned district, and they are pragmatic, and you know, normal, hardworking people.”
Hemmer, who immediately endorsed Proctor as successor when the latter launched his campaign last year, noted that this year’s competitive four-way Democratic primary drew more than 7,700 votes, compared to the roughly 5,200 in both of Hemmer’s own Democrat primaries.
By contrast, 5,513 primary voters cast ballots for Hancock, who was unopposed, despite a much closer gubernatorial primary for Republicans this year.
It’s hard to infer exactly what August’s turnout will mean for either party in the general election with an open governors race and national midterms on the ballot, but the raw numbers still suggest more participation from Democrats than before.
But Proctor, who retired from the Department of Safety to be a stay-at-home dad to his two daughters while running a property company on the side, is more focused on “persuasion” than just mobilizing his base.
“I’m knocking on a lot of persuasion doors right now and meeting voters who still don’t know me,” Proctor said Thursday. “But when they get to know me and my background, I am getting a lot of support from Republicans.”
Proctor has a consistent Democrat message on the major issues — supporting things like women’s reproductive health care and gun control while opposing private school vouchers and the state’s participation in immigration enforcement.
But his background as a state trooper and willingness to talk to people across the political spectrum have won him support from some unlikely allies, including endorsements from the Fraternal Order of Police and the Tennessee Professional Fire Fighters Association and a donation from former Republican Speaker of the House Beth Harwell.
Hancock, a West Meade native with a background in real estate and healthcare consulting, has earned support from many big-name Tennessee Republican donors, including megadonor Lee Beaman and Congressman Tim Burchett.
Hancock says those Republican relationships would make him a valuable asset to Nashville’s delegation.
“Nashville has no seat at the table with the governing party of this state, no seat in the caucus room. And that creates a whole lot of problems,” Hancock told the Banner Monday.
In District 59, where the partisan split is about even and many voters on both sides identify as moderate, there has been no public debate, but both candidates are aggressively knocking doors, hoping to win over individual voters.
“I’m seeing a lot of folks who are truly right in the middle,” Proctor said of the voters he talks to.
“It’s a lot of hardworking people who are not spending their time watching Fox News, and they’re not seeing Jerri Green ads,” Proctor continued, adding that “a lot of them will just vote the way they always have.”
“That’s why we door knock … so people can hear actual platforms and vote,” he added, sharing several stories about voters he’s encountered.
