LENOIR CITY, Tenn. — As a Democrat in Tennessee, Memphian Jerri Green knows her campaign for governor is an uphill battle … but lately she’s been too busy to notice how steep the climb is.

The current Memphis City Councilwoman announced her intent to throw a hat in the ring last July, and has spent the better part of February making stops in Middle and East Tennessee.

From Clarksville to Chattanooga, she’s trying to blaze a trail that strays away from the GOP status quo and her most formidable opponent in the Republican Party — Senator Marsha Blackburn.


POLITICIANS PICKING THEIR VOTERS VS. VOTERS PICKING THEIR POLITICIANS?

On some level, her message seems to be resonating across party lines. Green told The Connection that one supporter brought his father to a campaign event she held in the Tri-Cities area, who had recently disassociated with the Republican Party. The man told Green that his reason for doing so was the implications of President Donald Trump’s association with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffery Epstein.

The recent convert left the event with a Jerri Green yard sign.

“There are people who are fed up with what they’re seeing across the board,” Green said in an interview with The Connection. “I know we have the Democrats in this state.

“We have been gerrymandered on the local and state level for too long, where politicians are picking their voters instead of the voters picking their politicians. They want us to feel hopeless and like [more people like us] aren’t out there.”

Green was greeted by a number of Loudon County Democrats upon her arrival to Calhoun’s in Lenoir City on a chilly Monday morning, including almost every local liberal running for either a Loudon County Commission seat, Loudon County Board of Education seat and even one independent candidate, Maureen Colvin, looking to challenge Mayor Buddy Bradshaw in an eventual mayoral election.

Notable attendees and fellow Democratic candidates included Mark Gregory, Voan Ivy Stone, Wendy Tittsworth, Andrew F. Bennett III, Brock Bigsby and State Senate Candidate David Miller. The event also saw a quick room change when the guest turnout far exceeded internal predictions.

While the welcome has been warm on most stops of Green’s tour, the audience isn’t always this jovial. She told The Connection a few harrowing stories of attendees, including a homeless veteran and a woman hoping for a cancer diagnosis that would allow her TennCare to finally kick in so she could afford medical treatment.

If anything, those anecdotes are just fuel to a growing fire for Green, who spent the majority of her professional career representing Tennessee’s most vulnerable. Beginning as a public defender in Memphis, she got a first-hand look at how drug offenses and crime in poverty-stricken communities is profiled differently from the similar instances in more affluent neighborhoods.

Green prides herself on being able to say that she never lost a case.

Not long after, she transitioned into her first term on Memphis City Council a few years later in 2024. Her victory made history in a few senses, making her the first Democratic Memphis City Council member in her specific seat, as well as the body as a whole becoming a majority woman-run municipal government thanks to her election.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS, GUN VIOLENCE

Green doesn’t want those sad stories to become more and more common in our state, and she’s adamant about her concern and concentrated effort to turn the tides for the sake of her three children and the Tennessee that’s left for them once they’re her age. It served as the foundation for her candidacy’s ethos, her tagline reading “One Tough Mother” on T-shirts and yard signs currently scattered across the state.

Motherhood bleeds into almost all of her policies, whether its a reform of the newly introduced private school “voucher scheme” as she calls it, stronger gun laws, childcare that’s less expensive than college tuition, more environmental protections in regards to AI data centers, and a more progressive outlook on the affordability crisis with houses and groceries are just a few of the key issues Green cited as an investment to make into future generations — mirroring her past efforts in ensuring a fair shake for those who didn’t have the means or the voice to advocate on their own behalf.

“When we talk about fully funding our public schools, I have children in public schools,” Green said. “When we talk about gun violence, it’s the No. 1 killer of kids in our state.

“That matters to me. Everything that I do, everything I fight for, goes right back to them.”

Times are tough, but the fight has never been more crucial, Green told The Connection. She’s received little recognition from her party establishment and, since her announcement to run for the seat, hostility has seen an all-time high.

Green told the Loudon County crowd that she’s received several credible death threats in the six months she’s been campaigning. She said she now wears a bulletproof vest into certain locations and carries a sidearm.

“You can be a Democrat and have a gun,” she quips.

But she’s not getting discouraged. As midterms start to creep up on American voters, Democrats around the country, and even in Tennessee, are hopeful of a historic turnaround from a virtual Republican sweep in 2024. Green seems confident that her grit-and-grind attitude can help push the needle.

“When people tell me that I’m an underdog, and that I can’t win this race, I say, ‘I’m from Memphis, watch me.’”

The Democrat primary ballot in Tennessee will be up for a vote on Aug. 6, 2026. Current potential candidates include Green, Carnita Atwater, Tim Cyr and Adam Kurtz.