Longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, of Memphis, Tennessee, declared on May 15 he was ending his reelection bid after representing it for 19 years.
Cohen said his decision was motivated by the Tennessee General Assembly's splitting the Ninth Congressional District, in which he represented, into three GOP-leaning districts last week.
Cohen said he considered running in one of the new districts but that the new districts had “no commonality” with the district he currently represents. State Rep. Justin Pearson, a Democrat, is running for the new District 9 seat and was previously primarying Cohen.
"I don't want to quit. I'm not a quitter. But these districts were drawn to beat me, they were drawn to defeat me," Cohen told reporters on Friday in his Washington office.
Cohen said redrawn boundaries of one new district stretch from parts of Memphis to areas as far north as Williamson County, south of Nashville. He said those areas share no common interest with majority-black neighborhoods in Memphis on issues such as health care, jobs, and education.
The 9th District as currently drawn is roughly 62 percent African American, Cohen said. He has won nine consecutive elections in the seat since 2006. He previously served 24 years in the state’s Senate.
Cohen, who is challenging the new map in court, said he would reenter the race if the lawsuit succeeds in restoring the prior district lines. If the courts do not act, he said, he would retire from Congress and public life at the end of his current term.
In a statement Friday, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Cohen's career "has been defined by the work he has done on a local, state and national level on behalf of the people he has been privileged to represent for decades."
Jeffries noted that Cohen contracted polio at age 5 and served on the Shelby County Commission before spending 24 years in the Tennessee Senate. Cohen is the first Jewish person elected to represent Tennessee in Congress, Jeffries said.
"The City of Memphis, the Congress and the nation are better because of Steve's commitment to making a difference," Jeffries said. "He will be deeply missed by the House Democratic Caucus family in the next Congress, and we all wish him the very best in this next chapter."
Pearson, the state representative seeking to represent the new District 9 in the U.S. House, was a member of the "Tennessee Three," which gained national attention in 2023 following a shooting at a Nashville elementary school.
Three lawmakers, including Pearson, were sanctioned by the Republican-led General Assembly for taking to the state House floor and leading demonstrators in a push for stricter gun control in the state after the shooting, which left three children and three adults dead.
Jones and another representative, Justin Jones, were expelled for violating chamber decorum. The third representative was spared from expulsion by a single vote. The qualifying deadline for the ballot in August’s primaries in Tennessee was at noon on Friday.