At first glance, it may seem odd that in a county where the Republican Party controls five out of seven state House seats, it hasn’t even bothered to field candidates for the two that it doesn’t.

Republicans in the races have raised much more from PACs and donors than Democrats.

But that is mostly a product of the way the districts are drawn. In order to give GOP candidates an advantage in the other districts, the Legislature’s Republican majority has consolidated many of Knox County’s most Democratic-voting areas into just two seats.

So it is that Democratic Reps. Sam McKenzie in District 15 and Gloria Johnson in District 90 are coasting toward reelection, while their Republican colleagues in the county delegation are facing Democratic opponents — however disadvantaged they may be by the district maps.

This week, we’ll take a quick look at those two Democratic districts, along with Republican-held seats in districts 14 and 16. We’ll examine the three other competitive races — in districts 18, 19 and 89 — in a future story.

All four of the races featured here have incumbents seeking another two-year term in the state House. Besides McKenzie and Johnson, there are Republican state Reps. Jason Zachary in District 14 and Michele Carringer in District 16. But there are fresh faces on the other side of the ballot in the latter two races, with Democrats Lindsay Young Honaker and Eliza Boles running against Zachary and Carringer, respectively.

District 14

Rep. Jason Zachary, one of the most hardline conservatives in the county delegation, was initially elected to a partial term in 2015 and has been reelected five times since. Now 49, his rising level of seniority has brought him the chair position on the House Calendar and Rules Committee. He also served as deputy speaker under Speaker Cameron Sexton for the most recent legislative session.

Over the past decade, he has been on the front lines of several conservative causes in the Legislature. He famously provided the flipped vote that secured passage of Gov. Bill Lee’s initial school-voucher pilot program, and has become an avid advocate for expansion of the effort to provide taxpayer subsidies for private-school tuition.

He is staunchly anti-abortion and sponsored a 2024 bill that would have created criminal penalties for anyone other than a parent who assists someone under 18 in obtaining an abortion. He supported multiple restrictions on the rights of transgender minors, and sponsored a bill to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people and still receive government contracts. He was also a major force in pushing to remove public-health jurisdiction from medical authorities during the COVID pandemic and place it in the hands of elected officials.

A conservative Christian and member of the politically powerful First Baptist Church of Concord, he by all appearances remains popular in his suburban West Knox district, which encompasses Farragut, Hardin Valley and Concord. He has routinely won nearly two-thirds of the vote in each of his bids for reelection.

That might be why he appears to be taking this year’s race for granted. He doesn’t even have a campaign website, and he limited his campaign fundraising to a burst of about $83,000 in contributions early in the year. Those came from familiar Republican names like U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, former Knox County school board member Susan Horn and U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn.

He’s also received donations from political action committees including those representing home builders, highway contractors and retail-store operators. He had $94,322.61 on hand heading into August.

In his day job, Zachary is president of his family’s Americomm business, which works with telecommunications and utility companies to help survey and identify sites for service infrastructure and expansion. He and his wife, Holly, have a son.

He is facing a more active campaign from Democrat Lindsay Young Honaker, a Farragut resident and graduate of Farragut’s public schools. She and her husband, Brian, have two daughters in elementary and middle school. She has a degree in political science from Maryville College and works as a project manager for Cellular Sales.

Honaker, who is 43, easily won a contested Democratic primary on Aug. 6, taking 81 percent of the vote versus Shivam Zaveri (who had almost no campaign presence at all). The two repeated themes of her campaign platform are “People Over Politics” and “Community Over Chaos.”

Among her specific policy priorities are: opposing school vouchers; providing affordable childcare and housing; transportation improvements through West Knox County, including interstate bottlenecks as well as public-transit options; impact fees for developers to pay for improved infrastructure; expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to provide coverage to more working families; and opposing the “political theater” of aggressive immigration enforcement.

Her fundraising has been smaller-scale than Zachary’s, with a reported $14,550.26 in contributions through July. She had $8,361.31 on hand for the general election. Almost all her donations have been from individual donors, although she received $2,500 from the national March On PAC, a women-led group that supports progressive candidates. 

District 16

The 16th House District covers a chunk of North Knox County including Heiskell, Halls and Powell, as well as much of Fountain City. Rep. Michele Carringer, who is 64, has held the seat since 2020 and is seeking a fourth term in office.

A former Knox County commissioner, she is not an especially vocal member of the Legislature and rarely makes news or waves. She votes reliably with the Republican supermajority — including a vote in 2023 to expel three Democratic representatives for breaking House decorum, and another earlier this year to carve up Memphis’ majority-Black congressional district into three Republican-friendly majority-white pieces.

Carringer is a lifelong Republican who has been active in the local party. She won 69 percent of the district vote against Democratic opponents in both 2020 and 2024, and was unopposed in 2022. She serves as chair of the House Population Health Subcommittee. 

Her low profile hasn’t kept her from attracting significant contributions, as a reliable Republican vote in what’s considered a safe district. She started this election cycle with $203,000 already in her campaign coffers and has added another $80,000 this year. After subtracting for campaign expenditures, she had $255,471.65 on hand heading into the general election.

Her donors include numerous PACs, among them: Caesars Enterprise, the Las Vegas-based casino company; Tennessee dentists, radiologists, automotive retailers and firefighters; TN Advance Financial, the high-interest loan company; and wine and spirits distributors and retailers. 

She is facing Democrat Eliza Boles, a law librarian at the University of Tennessee College of Law, who earned both a law degree from UT and a master’s in library science from Wayne State University. A single mother of three children, Boles is running on a platform emphasizing kitchen-table issues like affordable childcare and paid parental leave. She also supports expanding Medicaid, repealing the state’s school-voucher program, and protecting reproductive rights including abortion. 

Boles, 41, grew up in Mosheim, Tenn., a small town in Greene County. She says she was raised by her grandmother, who lived on a fixed income, which sensitized her to the needs of struggling families across the state.

She has raised just $2,763 for the campaign, all of it from individual donors, and had $1,422.77 on hand for the general election — about one-half of 1 percent of Carringer’s campaign chest. 

Districts 15 and 90

Reps. Sam McKenzie and Gloria Johnson are getting a pass from the majority party this year as they seek reelection — McKenzie in the 15th District, which includes East Knoxville as well as much of city-limits South Knoxville, and downtown and areas to its northwest; and Johnson in the 90th District, which stretches from North Knoxville westward through West Hills to Cedar Bluff.

Both are stalwart and outspoken members of the legislative minority, often objecting vocally — though rarely successfully — to the Republican supermajority’s legislative priorities. Both have opposed school vouchers and the criminalization of abortion, as well as the redistricting of Memphis earlier this year.

McKenzie, whose district includes the largest African-American population in the county, is active in the Legislature’s Black Caucus. A former Knox County commissioner, he is retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he served as an environmental safety and health officer. He is seeking a fourth term representing the 15th District, and for the first time had no opposition in the primary or general elections.

This is Johnson’s second straight election without an opponent — which doesn’t mean local or state Republicans are happy with her. But rather than challenging the retired special-education teacher directly in a district they drew to be Democratic-friendly, they have taken other steps including: moving her out of her legislative office in 2021; redrawing her out of her own district in 2022, forcing her to move in order to seek reelection; nearly expelling her from the House in 2023; and stripping her of her committee assignments earlier this year along with other Democratic representatives as punishment for breaches of decorum during the redistricting fight.

Nevertheless, she will all but certainly return to the Legislature for a sixth term in January. 

As minority-party members running unopposed, neither of the Democrats has done much fundraising this year. McKenzie had $16,219.62 in his campaign account as of August, and Johnson had $14,406.61.