The 15th state House District has long delivered Knox County’s most reliably Democratic legislative seat. During the past two decades, the Democratic candidate has failed to garner at least 70 percent of the vote just once.

A potential statewide school voucher program has become a central issue in the district's Democratic primary.

That means that the winner of the Democratic primary will be the odds on favorite to win in the general election. The Republican candidate will be Justin Hirst, who is unopposed in the GOP primary.

This year’s primary pits incumbent state Rep. Sam McKenzie against Knox County Commissioner Dasha Lundy. McKenzie is seeking his third term in office, while Lundy opted not to seek reelection to County Commission before somewhat surprisingly deciding to take on the 15th District incumbent.

The district encompasses most of East Knoxville, Downtown, Mechanicsville and Lonsdale — the same core as the County Commission’s 1st District, which Lundy now represents and McKenzie formerly did. The difference is that the 1st Commission District extends to the west, while the 15th House District dips south of the Tennessee River to take in Island Home, Vestal and Colonial Village.

The district is racially and economically diverse. It has some of the city’s most economically challenged neighborhoods and the bulk of the city’s African-American population, but it also has pockets of affluence and numerous working-class neighborhoods.

As with other urban areas in the state, the district’s voters have told the candidates they are concerned about education, firearms safety, school security, Medicaid expansion, women’s healthcare and other issues that have been and will continue to be part of the legislative agenda.

A fundraising chasm exists between the candidates. Lundy reported raising $951 during the quarter ending June 30 and after expenses had only $267 on hand. McKenzie has yet to file his 2nd quarter report, but as of March 31 had $22,993 in his account. His financial supporters have included former school board member Sam Anderson, former state Rep. Joe Armstrong, attorney Ursula Bailey, LeRoy Thompson, Alvin Nance, Phil Lawson and Buzz Goss. 

Here is a look at the two Democratic contenders. We will profile Hirst prior to the general election.

Dasha Lundy

Lundy would have been a tough-to-beat incumbent had she run for reelection to County Commission this year, but she decided not to run after serving one term because she thought it was time to move on. She said in a recent interview that she didn’t initially intend to run for the state House of Representatives until she was approached by others and encouraged to seek the seat.

“I tell people I'm intentional, and I felt like, OK, this may be where I'm supposed to be.’” she said. “I love my community, and I want to see my community thrive. I grew up in District 15, and witnessed the decline from childhood. I see the possibility of being better, but it doesn't look like it's going to get better for people that look like me, because our community is changing, more people outside of our race are living in the community.”

She insisted that she’s not running because she’s dissatisfied with McKenzie’s representation: “It has nothing to do with Sam.”

Lundy, who until recently was vice president of Knoxville College, said she supports education and thinks politics shouldn’t be a consideration.

“Education, to me, is the path of liberation,” she said. “That's the foundation of how our society can become better. I am for education — period.”

Lundy supports charter schools — she's on the advisory committee of Knoxville Preparatory School, a new all-boys charter school opening this fall in North Knoxville — but has avoided publicly taking a stance on vouchers, which is a priority for Republican Gov. Bill Lee and generally anathema to her fellow Democrats. 

Team Kid PAC, which is affiliated with Tennesseans for Student Success, has distributed a mailer endorsing her. Tennesseans for Student Success is a pro-charter schools organization, though it supports candidates that also are pushing Lee’s voucher proposal.

“I am researching vouchers,” she said, referring to a post she wrote on Medium that examines how a voucher program could work — if it doesn’t impact public school funding, focuses on low-income families, and the private schools involved are held to standards. “I'm a researcher. I'm a thinker. I'm not gonna let anybody bully me.” 

Lundy said she wishes all sides of the abortion debate should be able to sit down and talk to one another without rancor. Though she did not say what exemptions she’d like to see in Tennessee’s abortion ban, she said reproductive decisions should be left up to women.

“At the end of the day,” she said, “a woman has the right to do what she wants to do with her body. No one should judge that.”

Lundy grew up in East Knoxville and graduated from Carter High School in 1998. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, a master’s in physical therapy from Tennessee State University, and then a doctorate in physical therapy from UT-Chattanooga. She works as a home-care physical therapist. 

She cited her experience with patients who have to choose between medication and food as a reason the healthcare system needs an overhaul.

Lundy also said that students and teachers need to be protected in schools, and understood why rural communities would want teachers to have the ability to carry guns because they don’t have the capacity to provide school security.

“I don't have any issue with guns,” she said. “It's just a matter of how to put regulations to keep guns out of the wrong people's hands,” citing domestic violence offenders as an example.

Lundy is passionate about addressing poverty in struggling communities, but said tax breaks and other incentives should help businesses located in those areas.

“I wish and hope, especially when you're trying to rebuild marginalized Black communities, that the incentives will come to the Black community,” she said. “Somehow we're gonna have to figure out what is a way that we can get money to those Black businesses so they can build, too.”

Lundy said she has the temperament to work in the Legislature’s hyper-partisan environment.

“I have Republican friends, Democratic friends, independent friends,” she said. “People are people, and I look at the heart of people, and even though we may have some different beliefs, we can talk and have interesting conversations and try to figure out how to make our world a better place.”

According to Lundy, the voters she’s encountered during the campaign are pessimistic and need hope in their lives.

“I think people are just really hopeless about the world we live in, and there's a lot of frustration,” she said “It's OK to have disagreements, but there's a way that you can talk to people and try to understand people's different perspectives.”

Sam McKenzie

McKenzie first won election to the Legislature in 2020, and in 2022 he was unopposed in the primary. It looked like he would be unopposed in the primary again this year, until Lundy announced in March she would challenge him.

In a recent interview, McKenzie expressed surprise at her candidacy and noted the support she’s getting from school choice advocacy groups. He has been a staunch opponent of school vouchers.

“It's a direct reflection of the job that I'm doing, representing the people of the 15th District, that they found a very viable, a very capable person that's potentially gonna run their agenda, which is counter to what the people of the 15th District want.”

He continued, “I don't know why she's running. She has a lot of Republicans backing her.”

McKenzie said he’s running on his record, particularly his sometimes-successful resistance to Republican bills he deems to be harmful. As the chair of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators, he is a leader in the Democrats’ fight against the GOP supermajority.

“My type of leadership is key in Nashville,” he said. “This honest, effective leadership is what I ran on, and what I've done and want to continue to do.”

McKenzie is particularly passionate about fighting school vouchers. He emphasized that the vouchers proposed by Lee would not cover the tuition at most private schools, meaning the vouchers would end up going to families of means.

“The way I've been able to effectively block it is to make it make sense for those rural legislators,” he said. “We’ve had plenty of conversations. If you're in Hancock County, if you're in Claiborne County, how are you going to get your kids to a Webb or CAK? You don't really have those schools, so you're going to get these fly-by-night church schools, these strip mall schools that are looking at the dollar value, and they're going to come in right under the dollar value (of the voucher) and you're going to get an inferior education.”

McKenzie said Lundy should take a clear position on vouchers. “I think she needs to say, ‘I'm for vouchers or I’m against vouchers.’” he said. “At this point, if you're running for an office and this is the government's No.1 issue, you should come out with an opinion.” 

McKenzie said he was encouraged that Lee called a special session last year on firearms safety, but disheartened that nothing of significance was accomplished. He remains optimistic that mandatory firearms training for gun owners and a judicial process for taking firearms away from people with mental health issues, also known as “red flag laws,” could gain traction.

“Let's deal with people who are actually in a mental health crisis. And let's talk about at least getting the guns out of their hands for a short period of time,” he said.

He’s also optimistic that rural lawmakers will begin considering expanding Medicaid because their constituents are demanding adequate healthcare.

McKenzie grew up in East Knoxville and graduated from Austin-East High School. After graduation from Austin-East, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Fisk University in Nashville and a master’s in physics from Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). He worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Spallation Neutron Source for longer than three decades.

McKenzie was elected to represent the 1st District on Knox County Commission in 2008 (the same seat that Lundy currently holds), in the aftermath of the Black Wednesday scandal. He served two terms on the panel.

According to McKenzie, the partisan animosity in the House has been growing more intense as a result of the Tennessee Three incident last year, when two Black Democratic lawmakers were expelled and Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson narrowly avoided expulsion following their protest over the lack of action to curb gun violence in schools.

He said GOP lawmakers vet bills in their caucus and Democrats are in the dark until legislation shows up in committee, where Republican committee chairs limit debate. “I guess the supermajority felt that they were portrayed in a way that would be disparaging,” McKenzie said, adding that the GOP leadership “doubled down and kept trying to put their feet on our necks and prevent us from talking about the issues that matter.”

McKenzie’s message to 15th District voters is that by reelecting him, they will get a “man of integrity” who is “always listening to constituents, someone that understands the issues. … With Sam McKenzie, you'll get someone that’s made an honest and detailed evaluation of a situation, and that’s why you should vote for him.”