Knox County has a range of rural, suburban, and urban areas, and Tennessee’s 7th state Senate District takes in a bit of all of them.

Briggs has a $220,000 campaign fund advantage over his Democratic opponent.

Improbably shaped in the manner of most districts drawn for partisan advantage, the district is something like a buttonhook that runs from Farragut east through much of northwest Knox County and dips down to swoop through downtown and north through Fountain City to Heiskell.

It was redrawn slightly in last year’s redistricting but retains what appears to be a strong Republican tilt. The district’s Republican incumbent, Sen. Richard Briggs, has represented the district since 2014, when he ousted conservative firebrand and then-incumbent Sen. Stacey Campfield in a primary challenge. He won a second term in 2018 relatively easily, defeating Democrat Jamie Ballinger by a 56-44 percent margin.

This year, he faces Democratic challenger Bryan Langan, a first-time candidate challenging the Republican Party line on issues like environmental protection, school vouchers, marijuana legalization, access to abortion and LGBTQ rights.

Briggs, a retired heart surgeon and military veteran, is running on a record that includes advocacy for expanded healthcare across the state and chairmanship of the Senate’s powerful State and Local Government Committee.

In the August primary, he easily held off a challenge from conservative medical cannabis activist Kent Morrell, winning 66 percent of the vote. To say his campaign funding dwarfs his opponent’s would be understating the case — as of the end of July, Briggs had $224,414 on hand, to Langan’s $4,100. 

Here’s a look at both candidates in the November election. (Portions of the section on Briggs previously appeared in our coverage of the Republican primary.)

Bryan Langan

Langan is a University of Tennessee graduate who grew up in Mississippi, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, and started college in Toronto before moving to Knoxville in 2000 to complete his degree. 

“I never left,” said Langan, who lives in Karns with his wife and 8-year-old daughter. “I’ve now lived in Tennessee the majority of my life, so this has become home.”

The self-described “jack of all trades” has run restaurant kitchens — he helped open Boyd’s Jig & Reel in the Old City — and worked in construction and water treatment, but found long and unpredictable hours incompatible with a healthy family life.

“It just got to the point where my wife had a fairly good job, and we were like ‘We can survive and this just isn't worth it,’” he said. 

So he has been a stay-at-home dad with a variety of short-term gigs, from plumbing to stockrooms. After one job at a grocery chain lifting heavy loads repeatedly, he developed a hernia and tendinitis, leading to some enforced time off. That, he said, gave him space to think about getting more engaged in local politics, which had long interested him.

He said he was concerned about “everything that was going on with the schools, just the myriad of things, with [conservatives] attacking LGBTQ rights, attacking our teachers, talking about banning books.”

So he and his wife agreed he should see if he could volunteer with a campaign or make a difference in local elections somehow. He reached out to the county Democratic Party and said he’d be happy to help out or even run for office.

“I know we have a lot of unopposed offices, and I’m kind of tired of seeing that,” Langan said. Still, he was surprised when county Chair Matt Shears suggested the race in the 7th state Senate district.

“I was thinking start small — school board or County Commission, something like that, because I've never been in politics,” he said. “It’s just not my background.”

But he had high school experience in competitive debate and a long interest in policy issues and politics. And he saw many areas where he thinks the Republican supermajority in the Legislature and Republican governors have failed to deliver.

“If you’re really a proponent of the workers in Tennessee, you really believe in the workers of Tennessee, you’ve had 12 years to raise our minimum wage, and you haven’t done it,” Langan said. “I’m tired of seeing wealth chosen over our environment and our people.”

His experience in water quality work convinced him of the importance of protecting that natural resource, particularly as East Tennessee continues to develop as an outdoor recreation destination. He said the percentage of Tennessee waterways designated as “impaired” by the state — which is based on the presence of various bacterial and chemical contaminants — rose to 55 percent in 2020 from 32 percent a decade earlier.

“But yet, they keep passing things that override local control,” Langan said. “When it comes to waterways, localities cannot require contractors to do anything beyond the base (Environmental Protection Agency) levels of stormwater requirements.”

He supports expanding the state’s Medicaid program to take advantage of approximately $1 billion a year in federal funds the state currently isn’t receiving, which would subsidize care for hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans.

He also supports legalizing and taxing marijuana — to make it available for those who may benefit from it, to reduce its racially disproportionate criminal justice impact, and to raise funds for schools and other state needs.

“I think it's a win all around for Tennessee, because it will provide business opportunities, job opportunities, and a cash crop for our farmers,” Langan said. “So it seems to be pretty much a win. Plus it's a freedom that other Americans already have, so why are we restricting anything?”

He said he would work to overturn the state’s abortion ban. He noted that Briggs both voted for the ban and voted against proposed amendments that would have created exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

“They’ve told my daughter that she is less of a person here in Tennessee,” Langan said. “The fact that there's no exceptions for rape, or incest, or even really the health of the mother … This is just a cruel bill.”

Richard Briggs

Briggs was a hospital heart surgeon and a U.S. Army doctor, serving in multiple war zones including Afghanistan. He was elected to Knox County Commission in 2008, serving until his successful run for the state Senate six years later.

In the Legislature, he generally votes with his Republican colleagues in the supermajority, but he has been a consistent minority voice on some issues. He has advocated for increasing access to healthcare in various ways, including a so-far stalled expansion of the state’s TennCare Medicaid program.

He was a leader in pushing for state laws to crack down on “pill mills,” the high-volume opioid dispensers that helped create the current overdose epidemic. He has also pursued restrictions on smoking and vaping, and has raised concerns about the expansion of the legal Delta 8 THC industry. 

Briggs serves as chair of the Senate’s State and Local Government Committee, which reviews all legislation affecting governance across the state. He noted that with his colleague Sen. Becky Duncan Massey heading up the Transportation Committee and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally overseeing the entire Senate, Knox County is well represented in the body’s leadership.

“East Tennessee is in a really good, sweet spot to get things done,” Briggs said.

He emphasized that the state is in a strong financial position — it currently has $1.8 billion in its “rainy day fund” and another half-billion in TennCare reserves. 

“There's a lot of talk today about us descending into recession, but a very important point for folks to know is Tennessee now has large enough reserves that if we do have a major economic downturn, we'll be able to cushion that with our reserve fund,” Briggs said. ”Even during the COVID crisis, we did not have to get into the rainy day fund.”

On the State and Local Government Committee, Briggs said he is looking for ways to return some state revenue to local governments. He noted that the state in recent years has cut taxes that also affected city and county revenues, most prominently the Hall income tax on dividends.

“We’ve sort of squeezed them some to where they’re having to raise taxes,” Briggs said. He’s backing legislation to reduce the commission the state charges to process local sales taxes, and to bolster state sales tax revenue-sharing with county governments.

He also touted a bill that he cosponsored last year, requiring all election commissions in the state to use paper ballots starting in 2024. Knox County and many others have already made that change, but Briggs said 55 percent of Tennessee counties have not.

He voted with the Republican majority to pass the state’s so-called “trigger law” that has effectively banned all abortions in the state. But he said he wants to revisit it to provide for what he sees as needed exceptions.

"There's some big concerns that I have as a physician," Briggs said. "It does not address ectopic pregnancies until the ectopic pregnancy ruptures and somebody's bleeding to death. And then we also have cases of rape or incest. And I would have to add to it severe congenital anomalies, particularly those that aren't compatible with survival outside the womb."

He said he remains deeply concerned about the state’s surge in drug overdose deaths, being driven by the ongoing spread of addiction and the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl. He supported a bill to make it easier for drug rehabilitation clinics to prescribe Suboxone, which soothes the physical craving for opioids and has been shown to reduce fatal overdoses among users by 50 percent.

He also sponsored a successful bill to legalize fentanyl test strips, which had been banned as drug paraphernalia. The strips allow a user to test drugs for the presence of fentanyl.

“This carved them out so they can be purchased, they can be distributed by clinics,” Briggs said.

And while he remains a skeptic of legalizing marijuana for any purpose, he acknowledged that public opinion was shifting on it to an extent that might make it hard to keep out at least medical cannabis use.

“I’m not there yet,” he said, but added, “The public is ready for it.”

During COVID’s early peaks in Tennessee, Briggs often shared informational links on Facebook — or his wife did, he said, because he doesn’t like social media — pointing to reliable studies and data about the spread and response to the disease. He, McNally, Massey and other Republicans in the state Senate were their party’s most outspoken leaders in urging Tennesseans to get vaccinated (although they opposed any moves to mandate it).

He raised concerns about shifting public health authority from medical professionals to elected officials. But over time, he said he has become more sympathetic to Gov. Bill Lee’s efforts to balance health with economic and social needs. 

“In retrospect, and I evolved into this, I'm probably a lot more forgiving of some of the decisions that leaders had to make,” Briggs said. “I'm probably more understanding than I was.”