Inside the race for Tennessee’s 1st Congressional District

The race for Tennessee’s 1st Congressional district looks like an underdog story in which three Democrats seek to unseat two-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger of Kingsport.

Harshbarger has easily cleared her last two races with nearly 80% of the vote, with no challengers coming close in 2022 or ‘24. She vastly eclipses her Democratic challengers in funding this year, and is the only one with major funding from corporate political action committees in the race. 

Harshbarger declined to speak with Tennessee Lookout for this piece.

But this summer, the Democratic challengers — Kristi Burke, Herman Garcia and David Kerr — all think they have a shot at knocking her out of the seat in the November general election, despite Republicans holding the seat since 1881, and are making their case to the voters of east Tennessee.

Kristi Burke: ‘An outsider’

Burke said she had no intention of making the news in 2025 when she attended a Harshbarger town hall: she’d come to ask the congresswoman about Medicaid cuts. But she said security removed her as she was trying to question the congresswoman.

Friends and neighbors urged her to run for office, but initially she was reluctant.

“I said no, I was not interested — I would rally behind anyone who ran,” Burke said. “The deadline got closer and closer, and finally I said let’s do it. I jumped right into it. It was a very last minute decision.”

She said her campaign is rooted in a few “non-negotiable” policies. She wants free health care for all and believes “people should be able to see a doctor without going into debt.” She wants a fully-funded education system with pay raises for teachers. And she wants a fairer tax system where the rich pay their dues.

“After Trump introduced his tax cuts, CEO pay grew while our wages stayed stagnant,” Burke said. “Trickle-down economics is not working. We have to shift the burden onto billionaires and those not paying their fair share.”

Rather than politics-as-usual, she classifies what she’s doing as “building the future she wants to see” for her neighbors who are “scared of government overreach, food insecurity and not being able to afford rent or gas or groceries.”

Her campaign trail activity has included community outreach events to engage with people who don’t vote or haven’t been interested in local politics. 

“People don’t want to come to a political event but they will come to a friendship bracelet event, or a night where we just play video games,” she said. She’s critical of the Democratic party, too, saying she feels like regular people are “being played” as both parties support much of the same legislation and take corporate money.

“The system was designed so your pissed off neighbor could go into Congress and write legislation,” she said. “It was not designed on corporate checks, or special interests.”

Galvanized by ICE raids

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE,  raids in Sevier County in late May galvanized Garcia, a small business owner,  on how urgent it is for him to win this race.

“They’re trying to intimidate the people of the country,” he said. “They’re going after people like me, brown-skinned. A lady at the grocery store said ‘I don’t understand why (ICE)coming here, our economy was doing good, our businesses were starting to improve from a couple years.’”

“This is a tourist town. People were coming here and spending money,” said Garcia “[ICE is] scaring people. People don’t want to come out anymore. They’re too scared they’re going to be taken up in these raids.”

117 people were arrested by ICE between May 24 and 31 in Sevier County. While ICE touted the criminal histories of those it arrested, Garcia blasted the agency for not giving any of them a day in court.

He also spoke at length on the dearth of FEMA payouts for disaster repair in the area after 2024’s Hurricane Helene. He blamed ex-Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem for not signing off on the release of the payments before she was ousted from the job.

The town of Elizabethton was one such example of a local municipality which took out loans to repair their roads and bridges, but FEMA reimbursements never came.

“They were counting on FEMA to reimburse them,” he said. “None of that money has come in. These loans are coming due. The only people having to pay for all that is the taxpayer.”

While friends and family have urged him to run for local office, Garcia is convinced the only way to enact change was at the federal level. He’s been spending his time on the campaign trail at town halls and going out to meet people in the various small, rural areas of the district.

He wants to raise enough money to afford Knoxville-area TV ads such as Harshbarger has in past elections, which could reach many more people in areas like Sevierville and Gatlinburg. But while the primary is still going on, many donors are keeping their purse strings tight, he said.

‘Point me where you want me to go’

Kerr, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran  and a former Republican, was motivated to run as a Democrat after watching Trump’s attacks on people like former FBI Director Robert Mueller and the late U.S. Sen. John McCain. Those incidents represented a defiling of values Kerr held sacred, he said.

Kerr called Trump and his administration “inappropriate” for “questioning everything [Mueller] has ever done,” and admonished them for treating McCain “like dirt” when the late senator had been a prisoner of war for five years. Kerr has a problem with “Republicans who had never served talking to these guys like they were little girls.”

“They’re liars,” he said. “They love to tell you they love you as a veteran, but as soon as you do something non-veteranish, they don’t like you anymore.”

His platform is to remove Trump and MAGA from any influence on politics. If he gets in office, he said he’d be like “a bullet – you point me to where you want me to go, and I’ll go get it.”

He said he isn’t raising money for his campaign – “going out and meeting people” is his main strategy.

The uphill climb

Harshbarger won her 2022 and 2024 general elections with more than 78% of the vote, with the Democratic challengers scraping by with 19% both times.

She’s raised $871,000 for her campaign this year. BWX Technologies, which has become controversial in recent months as it attempts to expand its Jonesborough uranium facility, has donated $10,000. Other donations of $2,500 or more have come from the National Community Pharmacists Association PAC, Publix, Home Depot, Eastman Chemical Company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Verizon and Walgreens, among a long list of others, per the Federal Election Commission website.

Burke has raised $49,000, all from individual contributions. Garcia and Kerr aren’t listed on the FEC fundraising site. Both of the latter two have options to donate to them on their websites.

Harshbarger’s record

Since her 2020 election, which came after she rose to the top of a 17-person Republican primary, Harshbarger has championed President Donald Trump and his policies.

Among recent legislative actions, Harshbarger voted on June 9 to fully fund ICE for the remainder of Trump’s presidential term. She said this was a measure to support “the men and women standing between our communities and the cartels, the traffickers, and the fentanyl poisoning our kids.”

In late April, she and U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, introduced the Safeguarding the Overall Protection of Minors, STOP, Act, which would ban gender transition treatment for minors. Violators would face fines of “at least $100,000” collectible by the U.S. Attorney General.

Harshbarger said the measure was aimed at “protecting children,” claiming that tens of thousands of minors have been “manipulated” to undergo the surgeries. She offered no evidence for this in a press release.

Also in June, she introduced the Right to Try for Individualized Treatment Act, which  would let people seek medical treatments that aren’t sanctioned by government rules. 

“When someone is fighting for their life, the last thing they need is the government standing in their way,” said Harshbarger in a press release. “We are entering a new era of medicine where breakthroughs in genomics and precision therapies can create treatments designed specifically for an individual patient, but our regulatory system was built for a different time and simply hasn’t kept up. 

On social media, she praised the ICE raids in Sevier County for “keeping East Tennessee safe.” She’s made several posts calling for more transparency in medical billing.

Recently, she also posted a screenshot of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s post on X in which he wrote in Arabic, criticizing him for not speaking English. “If you can’t communicate to your constituents in English, you have no business running the largest city in America,” the post said.

The primary election on August 6 will decide which of the three Democrats moves ahead to square off with Harshbarger in November.