|
The 3rd Congressional District of Tennessee is a congressional district in Tennessee. It currently includes a north-south strip in the eastern part of the state. Current Republican Representative Chuck Fleischmann has served since 2011. Principal cities in the district include Chattanooga, Oak Ridge, and Cleveland. Its configuration has remained more or less the same since the 1850s. Currently it includes all of Anderson, Bradley, Claiborne, Grainger, Hamilton, Meigs, Polk, Rhea, and Union counties, and parts of Jefferson and Roane counties. The southern counties are connected to the northern counties by a thin strip in Roane County. 〔(Third District map )〕 == History == The 3rd District is on the dividing line between counties and towns that favored or opposed Southern secession in the Civil War. George Washington Bridges was elected as a Unionist (the name used by a coalition of Republicans, northern Democrats and anti-Confederate Southern Democrats) to the Thirty-seventh Congress, but he was arrested by Confederate troops while en route to Washington, D.C. and taken back to Tennessee. Bridges was held prisoner for more than a year before he escaped and went to Washington, D.C., and assumed his duties on February 23, 1863; serving until March 3, 1863. During much of the 20th century, southeastern Tennessee was the only portion of heavily Republican East Tennessee where Democrats were able to compete on a more-or-less even basis. The Chattanooga papers--the moderate-to-progressive ''Times'' and the archconservative ''Free Press'' (now consolidated into the Chattanooga Times Free Press)--printed diametrically-opposed political editorials. This balance showed signs of changing beginning in the late 1950s, when rural and working-class whites began splitting their tickets in national elections to support Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, Governors Winfield Dunn and Lamar Alexander, Ronald Reagan, and two Chattanoogans, U.S. Representative LaMar Baker and Senator Bill Brock. It also warmly supported George Wallace in his third-party run for president in 1968. The district has only supported a Democrat for president twice in the last half century, in 1956 and 1992. Even in those cases, that support was almost entirely attributable to the presence of native sons as vice presidential candidates. In 1956, Senator Estes Kefauver, who had represented the 3rd from 1939 to 1949, was the Democratic vice presidential candidate. In 1992, Senator Al Gore was Bill Clinton's running mate, but even with Gore's presence, the Democrats only carried the 3rd by 39 votes out of 225,000 cast. Even as the district became friendlier to Republicans at the national level, Democrats still held their own at the local level. Brock won the congressional seat in 1962, ending a 40-year run by Democrats. He handed the seat to Baker in 1971, but conservative Democrat Marilyn Lloyd (the widow of a popular television news anchorman in Chattanooga) regained it in 1974 and held it for 20 years. As late as the early 1990s, area Democrats held at least half the local offices in the region, particularly in the southern portion. As the 1990s wore on, Democrats slowly began losing even county and local offices that they had held for generations. This trend actually began as early as 1992, when Lloyd barely held onto her seat against Republican Zach Wamp. Lloyd retired in 1994, and Wamp swept into office as part of that year's massive GOP wave. The Republicans have held it without serious difficulty since then, and it is now one of the most Republican districts in the state. The northern counties have predominantly voted Republican since the 1860s, in a manner similar to their neighbors in the present 1st and 2nd districts. However, Democrats have received some support in coal mining areas (dating from the Great Depression). Also, in the years since World War II, the government-founded city of Oak Ridge, with its active labor unions and a population largely derived from outside the region, has been a source of potential Democratic votes. Democrats still remain competitive in some local- and state-level races, particularly in Chattanooga and Oak Ridge. Chattanooga also elects some Democrats to the state legislature. However, even moderately liberal politics are a very hard sell, and most of the area's Democrats--particularly outside Chattanooga--are quite conservative on social issues. The 3rd District is home to several Evangelical Protestant denominations and colleges, contributing to the area's social conservatism. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tennessee's 3rd congressional district」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|