President-elect Donald Trump had already had an impact on Knox County politics well before he won a second term in office on Tuesday.

Harris won among city-limits voters — but by a little less than Biden in 2020.

The aggressive brand of conservatism that Trump has come to embody — hostile and contemptuous of perceived enemies, prone to name-calling, indifferent to political or governmental norms — has bolstered the force of the county’s Republican Party, even as it has created divisions within it. 

The Trumpian spirit is represented by — among others — conservative consultant Erik Wiatr, who delights in calling Democratic candidates “radical Marxists” and just a few days after the election was mocking county Republican Party Chair Buddy Burkhardt on Facebook. 

In a post about the lack of a Republican opponent this year to state Rep. Gloria Johnson — whom he calls “Big Bird” — Wiatr blamed the party leadership. “In 2023, 207 ‘Republicans’ elected incompetent Buddy Burkhardt as Party Chair despite his record of being incompetent in his previous terms as Party Chair,” Wiatr wrote. “A consequence of his election was his failure to recruit & support a candidate against Big Bird.”

Wiatr had some reason to crow. On Tuesday, one of his candidates — state Rep. Elaine Davis — was easily reelected to a second term despite facing a well-funded Democratic opponent, Bryan Goldberg. Three months earlier, two Wiatr candidates — Angela Russell and Andy Fox — were elected to County Commission. 

On the other hand, Burkhardt could point to the success of Republicans across the board on Tuesday as validation of his own more collegial style. Every GOP incumbent at the state and federal levels in Knox County coasted to easy wins.

Trump’s own numbers in the county told the story of a Republican Party maintaining political dominance and even reversing some gains Democrats had made four years ago. He won 58.9  percent of the Knox County vote, up from 58.5 percent in 2016 and 56.5 percent in 2020. 

The overall turnout was 223,580, making up 66.5 percent of the county’s 336,151 registered voters. The total number was up slightly from 222,028 in 2020, but accounting for population growth in the past four years it was close to flat.

The distribution of votes is what changed, in Knox County as in many places around the country. Trump received 130,134 votes this year, up from 124,540 in 2020 — gaining nearly 6,000 votes. Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris had 87,287 votes countywide, about 4,000 less than President Joe Biden’s 91,422 four years ago.

Altogether, Trump’s margin of victory in the county over his Democratic opponent grew by nearly 9,000 votes.

Blue Island, Red Sea

As has been its custom since the 1990s, city-limits Knoxville voted for the Democratic candidate this year. In 49 precincts located entirely or mostly within the city, Harris won 55 percent of votes to 43 percent for Trump and 2 percent for other candidates. 

That was down from about 59 percent of city votes that Biden won in 2020, while Trump’s share climbed 2 points from 41 percent. The overall turnout in the city precincts fell by about 4,000 votes. 

(It is hard to compare individual precincts directly because after redistricting in 2021 several new precincts were added. There is also another group of precincts where city residents make up a small percentage of the population and it’s impossible to break out their votes.)

Harris won 33 of the city precincts, with Trump taking the other 16. That included five precincts that Trump had won in 2016 but lost to Biden in 2020. As usual for Republicans in the city, Trump performed best in a swath to the north and west of the Interstate 640 loop, from Fountain City through West View to Amherst. 

Trump won nearly every precinct outside the city, where about 60 percent of the county population lives. Harris’ most suburban win was in precinct 68E, which stretches from Walker Springs to Cedar Bluff. 

Trump’s strongest performance, percentage-wise, was in precinct 57, which runs along East Raccoon Valley Drive on the Anderson County line. It is the northernmost precinct in the county and one of the most rural. Trump won 441 of 532 votes there, for 84 percent of the total.

Harris’ biggest share came in precinct 14, which votes at Austin-East High School in the heart of East Knoxville’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. She took 90 percent of the vote, winning 451 of 502 ballots. 

Third-party and independent candidates received 2 percent of the county vote, with nearly half of that going to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., even though he had dropped out and endorsed Trump. Green Party candidate Jill Stein won about a half-percent of votes countywide.

In the most-watched local legislative race of the cycle, Davis beat Goldberg by the same margin that she won in 2022 — 54 to 46 percent. 

Goldberg won the same three precincts that Democrat Greg Kaplan won in the district in 2022, essentially showing no electoral progress despite running an energetic campaign and attracting the endorsements of a handful of moderate Republicans. (If there’s anything this election suggests, it’s that endorsements from moderate Republicans don’t appear to help Democrats much.)

As with Kaplan, Goldberg’s strongest precinct was 24Q, the Sequoyah Hills neighborhood. He won 63 percent of the vote there, outpolling Harris’ 59 percent. 

Davis won the other 11 precincts in the district, with her biggest win a 70-30 percent margin in precinct 90 at South-Doyle High School.

CORRECTION: Corrected to fix a typo in Trump's Knox County percentage, which was 58.9 percent and not 59.8 percent.