by Brandon Burley and The Redemption Project
Some communities offer voters real competition. Others remain civically active even when one party dominates. In still others, low turnout, limited candidate choice and weak participation reinforce one another. Treating all three as the same problem misses what may actually be happening.
Two Tennessee counties can vote overwhelmingly for the same political party and still have very different democracies.
In one, candidates compete.
People know who is running.
The primary matters.
Local races generate conversation.
Voters show up even when everyone has a pretty good idea which party will win in November.
In another, the outcome is just as predictable.
But there are fewer candidates.
Fewer contested races.
Lower turnout.
Less reason for campaigns to invest time or money.
Eventually, politics can begin to feel less like choosing government and more like being informed who will run it.
Those counties may share a color on an election map.
They do not necessarily share a civic culture.
That distinction could help explain one of Tennessee’s persistent election problems.
The state does not appear to have a single turnout problem.
It may have several different civic environments producing similar-looking results.
I think of them as three broad conditions:
Competitive civic ecosystems.
Dominant-party civic ecosystems.
Structurally hollow civic ecosystems.
These are not official classifications, and counties should not be permanently placed into one box. A community can move between them as candidates, issues, population, institutions and political competition change.
The framework is more useful as a question:
What kind of election is this community actually being asked to participate in?
Culture One: There is something to decide
The easiest civic ecosystem to recognize is the competitive one.
Candidates run.
Parties organize.
Campaigns spend money and knock on doors.
Local media have races to cover.
Voters hear competing arguments.
And the outcome is not predetermined.
Tennessee has evidence that this matters.
In the 2024 election, 70.4% of state legislative races featured more than one candidate, up considerably from 2020, when only about half did. ThinkTennessee’s analysis of historical state election data found that, other factors being equal, voter participation rises when more than one candidate — particularly candidates from both major parties — appears on the ballot.
Sometimes the competition is real enough that a small number of voters can determine the result.
Tennessee House District 67 in Montgomery County was decided by just 131 votes in November 2024.
That kind of race teaches voters something important without anyone needing to give a civics lecture.
Showing up matters because everybody can see that it matters.
Competition generates its own civic signal.
Candidates need voters.
Voters have choices.
The election contains uncertainty.
That does not guarantee healthy civic participation. A competitive race can still be ugly, poorly informed or dominated by money.
But there is at least a functioning electoral marketplace.
Somebody has to persuade somebody.
Culture Two: Everybody knows which party will win — and people still participate
The second ecosystem is more interesting.
One party dominates.
The November outcome may be highly predictable.
Yet civic life has not disappeared.
This is where looking only at general-election margins can mislead us.
ThinkTennessee has found that many of Tennessee’s closest recent contests have occurred in August primaries rather than November elections. In districts that strongly favor one party, the primary can become the election that effectively decides who will represent the community.
That changes what “competitive” means.
A district may not be competitive between Republicans and Democrats.
It may be intensely competitive among Republicans.
Or among Democrats.
Or around a county office, school board race, referendum or other local contest that does not match the partisan structure of the presidential vote.
The problem is that voter behavior has not fully adjusted to where the competition moved.
Historically, turnout in Tennessee’s August elections has averaged about 33 percentage points lower than turnout in November elections, even though some of the state’s closest and most consequential races occur in August.
That creates a strange civic arrangement.
The election with the greatest public attention may not be the election with the greatest practical uncertainty.
And yet dominant-party politics does not automatically mean civic collapse.
In the 2024 presidential election, 77 of Tennessee’s 95 counties exceeded the statewide registered-voter turnout rate of 64%, according to ThinkTennessee’s county data.
Many of those counties were hardly presidential battlegrounds.
That should slow us down.
Political dominance is not the same thing as civic apathy.
People can continue voting because the habit is strong, local races matter, the primary provides meaningful competition or participation itself remains part of community life.
The challenge in those places may not be convincing people that voting matters.
It may be helping voters recognize when the decisive election is actually happening.
Culture Three: The ballot begins to hollow out
Then there is a third condition.
Low participation.
Limited competition.
Weak candidate supply.
Registration gaps.
Few campaigns making meaningful contact with voters.
Perhaps weaker local news and civic institutions connecting citizens to government.
I would call this a structurally hollow civic ecosystem.
The word matters.
It does not mean the community is hollow.
It does not mean the people do not care.
It means the democratic structure surrounding them may be offering less to participate in.
Tennessee has warning signs.
In the 2022 midterm election, only 38.6% of registered voters statewide cast ballots. More than half — 53.9% — of Tennessee’s state legislative races featured only one candidate.
The 2026 primary cycle showed improvement in candidate competition, but the numbers remain striking. Of 254 possible Democratic and Republican state and federal primary contests, only 53 — 20.9% — had more than one candidate.
County-level participation varies dramatically too.
ThinkTennessee found that 22 counties averaged turnout below 60% across the three presidential elections it studied before 2024. Six rural counties — Hancock, Clay, Scott, Campbell, Lake and Perry — averaged below 55%.
Registration presents another layer. In 2023, eight rural Tennessee counties had fewer than 75% of their estimated eligible voting-age citizens registered.
Those numbers should not simply be stacked together and used to declare particular counties civically broken.
Low turnout can have many causes.
So can candidate scarcity.
And the counties with registration problems are not necessarily the same counties with the least competition.
But when several of those conditions begin appearing together, the feedback loop deserves attention.
Fewer candidates can mean less voter interest.
Less voter interest can mean less incentive to run.
Fewer competitive campaigns can mean less voter contact.
Less local coverage can mean less information.
Low participation can make office-seeking less attractive to potential challengers.
Eventually, the problem may no longer be:
Why didn’t the voter show up?
It may be:
What exactly were they being invited to show up for?
One turnout campaign cannot fix three different problems
This is where the framework becomes useful.
Suppose two counties both post low turnout.
It is tempting to prescribe the same answer.
Register more voters.
Advertise Election Day.
Send reminders.
Hold a voter drive.
Those efforts may help.
But they do not address every possible cause.
In a competitive civic ecosystem, the infrastructure may already be functioning. The need may simply be accurate information, accessible voting and enough local reporting for people to evaluate real choices.
In a dominant-party ecosystem, November turnout may be the wrong measurement to obsess over. The more important civic question may be whether residents understand the primary, local races and other contests where their choices carry more weight.
In a structurally hollow ecosystem, reminding someone to vote does not create a second candidate.
It does not rebuild a local newspaper.
It does not recruit someone to run for County Commission.
It does not create a candidate forum, civic organization or community network.
And it does not automatically convince someone that participation will change anything.
A participation problem and a choice problem are not the same problem.
Tennessee has evidence of both.
The statewide number can hide the local democracy underneath it
Tennessee’s statewide turnout was 64% in the 2024 presidential election.
That number is useful.
It is also incomplete.
It tells us how many registered voters participated.
It does not tell us what kind of political environment they encountered.
Did voters have two serious candidates?
One?
Was the real contest decided three months earlier in a primary?
Were local offices competitive?
Did residents know the people running?
Was there a local newspaper covering them?
Were civic groups creating opportunities to meet them?
Did voters believe the outcome was uncertain?
Did anyone ask them for their vote?
Those questions describe the ecosystem around the ballot.
And ecosystems matter because democratic participation is not produced by voters alone.
Candidates participate.
Parties participate.
Journalists participate.
Churches, civic groups and neighborhood organizations participate.
Election officials participate.
Schools and families teach — or fail to teach — civic habits.
A healthy election requires more than an unlocked polling place.
It requires something meaningful on the other side of the door.
Tennessee may need a different civic map
Political maps tell us which party won.
Turnout maps tell us how many people participated.
Neither tells the complete story.
A more useful civic map would layer several things together:
Voter registration.
Turnout.
Number of contested races.
Primary competition.
Local candidate supply.
Volunteer and civic-group participation.
Local-news availability.
Population change.
Voting access.
And perhaps survey data asking whether residents believe their participation matters.
Then we could test this framework rather than merely describe it.
Which counties are competitive and engaged?
Which are politically dominant but still civically active?
Which show signs that the democratic infrastructure itself is thinning?
And, most importantly, what changed in counties that moved from one condition to another?
That becomes a much more interesting question than whether Tennessee is simply a “low-turnout state.”
Competition is not the same thing as engagement.
Dominance is not the same thing as apathy.
And low turnout is not automatically a character flaw in the voter.
Sometimes the voter is part of the problem.
Sometimes the ballot is.
Sometimes the institutions connecting the two have weakened.
A statewide turnout percentage tells us how many people voted.
It does not tell us what kind of democracy they were invited into.
That is the map worth building next.
I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I am a commentary writer for Tennessee Lookout and a weekly columnist with Knox TN Today. My work examines public policy, public safety systems and civic responsibility. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.
