State Rep. Jason Zachary, R-Farragut, was first elected to his District 14 seat in a special election in 2015, after its previous occupant stepped down in the middle of a term.

Knox County's western suburbs tend to vote strongly Republican.

Since then, Zachary has faced and defeated Democratic opponents in four consecutive elections, by large margins. In 2016, the socially conservative lawmaker won 73 percent of the vote in the district, which includes Farragut and a swath of West Knox County. In 2018, he won 66 percent; in 2020, 65 percent; in 2022, after redistricting slightly jostled district lines, he won 64 percent.

If Democrats can claim some slight diminution of Zachary’s vote share over time, it’s on a scale that on its current trajectory would take a quarter-century to produce truly competitive races. The mostly white, affluent suburban areas Zachary represents have voted strongly and reliably Republican for decades.

That may be why Zachary sometimes appears cavalier about political opposition both in the chambers of the Legislature and at home. He has loudly backed the most hardline positions of his party on issues like abortion and gun safety, despite statewide polls showing the GOP is out of sync with a majority of Tennesseans on them. He routinely declines invitations to appear at public forums with opposing candidates, and he is selective about responding to the media. 

Case in point, for this article Compass contacted Zachary several weeks ago about an interview. He agreed to consider emailed questions, but after several prompts had not answered them as of press time.

Zachary’s Democratic challenger, Amanda Collins, is making her second run at the seat after losing to him in 2022. She is making an issue out of what she calls Zachary’s inaccessibility and disengagement from the concerns of his constituents. Whether that is sufficient to eat into his more than 7,400-vote margin from two years ago is at best an open question.

It is not a particularly high-dollar race, perhaps reflecting confidence on the Republican side and lack of it among Democrats. Zachary started the race with $77,356 already on hand from past fundraising. He has reported contributions in this cycle of $35,796.06. All but $96.06 of that has come from political action committees (PACs) or from other Republican elected officials. Collins has raised just $4,825, including $2,000 of her own cash.

For more background on both candidates, you can read our profiles of them from the 2022 race. 

Here’s a look at them from the perspective of 2024.

Jason Zachary

Zachary is among the most energetic and visible of Knox County’s legislators. He maintains a steady presence on social media, particularly X.com, where he touts both his own and the state’s conservative credentials, and assails Democrats and liberals.

In the last few weeks, his feed has been largely dedicated to collecting donations and supplies for flooding victims in East Tennessee, alongside Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs and other local officials. But he has still taken time to post critiques of Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration. 

He has also posted admiringly about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handling of hurricanes Helene and Milton, which echoes his early support of DeSantis in the Republican presidential primary. For much of 2023, Zachary was openly critical of former President Donald Trump’s chances at reelection, and endorsed DeSantis as a better option.

Once DeSantis’ campaign foundered, Zachary quickly got back on team Trump. “Yes sir!” he posted happily in July, after classified document charges against the former president were dismissed.

In his legislative life away from the internet, Zachary has continued to push for strengthening the state’s restrictions on abortions. He sponsored a bill that passed this year, making it a crime for anyone to help someone under 18 get an abortion without their parents’ consent. 

"As a Christ follower, my number one issue is life. It always has been, it always will be," Zachary told Nashville’s News Channel 5. He is a member of the politically influential First Baptist Concord Church in Farragut, where in 2015 he was administered the oath of office for the first time.

The “abortion trafficking” bill has been decried by supporters of women’s rights, who say that it could endanger minors who may have been raped by a parent or other guardian, or who are in abusive households and cannot safely talk to the adults they live with.

A portion of the law was temporarily blocked last month by a federal judge, who said that its prohibition on “recruiting” minors for abortion could effectively make it illegal for anyone to even raise the subject — which the judge said was an impermissible intrusion on free speech rights.

Zachary was defiant after the ruling, posting, “Unfortunately, the radical left’s obsession with aborting babies led to this legal challenge. I’m confident our AG will successfully defend the law, securing parents rights to make decisions for their child.”

He is also an ardent defender of gun rights, supporting efforts to expand access to firearms and opposing most proposals that would limit it. But he did cosponsor a bill with state Sen. Becky Duncan Massey, R-Knoxville, this year, which added some specificity to an existing state “duty to warn” for mental health care providers. If a patient expresses intent to harm an individual or group and a mental health care provider believes they have the means to do it, they must inform local law enforcement and take steps to try to protect the threatened parties.

Although it is a long way from a “red flag law,” which Zachary has strongly opposed, it was enough to earn him some ire from the hardline Tennessee Conservative website. 

He voted along with most of his Republican colleagues in the House to expel the “Tennessee Three” from the chamber last year amid public outcry for gun regulation after the Covenant School shootings in Nashville. (That includes Knoxville Democratic Rep. Gloria Johnson — although she survived the expulsion attempt by one vote, her Republican colleagues in the Knox County delegation voted to remove her.)

Zachary figured prominently in a leaked recording of a House Republican Caucus meeting shortly after the expulsion vote, which brought national and even international attention and condemnation. In the recording, Zachary said he was deeply offended at being called a racist (because the two lawmakers who were expelled — Reps. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, and Justin Pearson, D-Memphis — are Black). He used nearly apocalyptic language to describe the GOP supermajority’s struggle to dominate the Democratic minority.

“We have to realize they are not our friends,” he said on the recording. “They can smile, and that doesn’t mean I can’t be polite to them, but they are not our friends. They destroy the republic and the foundation of who we are, or we preserve it.”

Zachary’s re-election campaign is so low-profile that it doesn’t even have a website. His fundraising this year consists almost entirely of contributions from PACs, including the state building and housing industry PACs, AT&T, Comcast, private prison company CoreCivic, and groups representing mortgage bankers, retailers, and the tobacco/nicotine company Reynolds American.

Amanda Collins

Collins, a former school psychologist, said that she saw her 2022 run as “laying the foundation” for her second effort to unseat Zachary.

“The off years, the non-presidential years, are trickier in some ways, because not as many people are engaged in general in the process,” she said. “But they are also easier in some ways. There's not quite so much competition for a very limited pool of resources.”

Having to some degree established her name and raised her profile in the district, she said this year’s run is focused on making a case that Democrats across Tennessee have gravitated toward: that Republicans in the Legislature are out of touch with the will of the state on major issues, and that they are doing the bidding of well-funded interests (many of them out of state) rather than their own constituents.

“Folks are really, really tired of my opponent’s — my current representative’s — antics that really don’t bring any benefit to our district,” Collins said. “There's a hunger there. We want somebody who can actually advocate for us, not spend time on whatever their personal things are.”

In talking to voters across the district, Collins said a few major issues have jumped out. The top two, she said, are “Guns and schools. And also guns in schools. That is still what is at the forefront of most voters, even if they don’t have children in our public schools.”

On firearms, Collins said she supports safe storage laws requiring firearms to be kept locked away when not in use and out of the reach of children. She would also support legislation creating “extreme risk protection orders” (ERPOs), which are a form of red-flag law to keep guns away from people judged to be a danger to themselves or others.

“I’m a responsible gun owner,” she said. “I’ve grown up around guns, I’m a survivor of gun violence. I own more than one weapon … But when you’re responsible, that means that you’re responsible for the whole thing the whole time.”

She is opposed to Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal to expand school vouchers across the state, which she said will primarily serve as subsidies for affluent families who already send their children to private schools. And she thinks Lee’s new public school funding formula remains insufficient to the needs.

“If we had advocates at the state level who were actually working for us, our schools would be seeing more of what they were promised,” Collins said. “Instead of that (money) sitting in our rainy day fund, it would be going out.”

She said she has also heard concerns from many small business owners about the difficulty of doing business in the state and working through state government requirements and bureaucracy. She said she thinks the state hands out money too easily to large corporations while neglecting the needs of entrepreneurs and mom-and-pop businesses.

“The process is sort of convoluted, and there’s not a lot of support,” she said. “And tossing web pages or web links at somebody isn’t support. Just because I send you a link doesn’t mean that I am helping you do the thing you need to do.”

Reproductive rights are a rallying cry for Democrats across the country and state. Collins said that at a minimum, she wants to see Tennessee’s current absolute ban modified with exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape and incest, and in cases where a fetus has no chance of survival. 

When she ran in 2022, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was still fresh and the state ban had just kicked in. This time, Collins said, she’s been struck by how many people want to talk about abortion and share their own experiences.

“Folks are so much more willing this time around to talk about their own experiences with situations that they don't want to necessarily call inappropriate or illegal, but they very much did not feel like they had a choice in the situation in the first place,” she said. “It resulted in a pregnancy, and they handled that, and they said, ‘No, I didn't feel any ethical qualms when I didn't have a say in the first place.’”

As for her chances in what by all appearances remains a strongly Republican and socially conservative district, Collins said change takes time but it does happen.

 “A lot of people think that Jason Zachary or any Republican in D14 is unbeatable, and that is not accurate at all,” she said.