What Happened to Tennessee? The Battle of Blue and Red

CNN Political Commentator and former Obama administration official Van Jones delivers an incisive examination of the state of politics in Tennessee. He returns to his home state in the lead-up to the Republican primary election on Super Tuesday. 

In April 2023, Tennessee's Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to expel two Black lawmakers a week after they joined a gun reform protest in the chamber prompted by a deadly shooting at a Nashville school. This remarkably rare and emotionally charged decision set the scene for Jones' return to his home state and his former place of employment in the state capitol, where he interned for the House Majority Leader in 1989. Jones unpacks how Tennessee's politics have swung sharply to the right since then by examining how gerrymandered redistricting, racial tensions, and "culture war" rhetoric have transformed the state government into a conservative supermajority. The trend set by Tennessee has played out across the southern US.

"In the Tennessee in which I was born and raised, we always had our struggles. But people usually tried to treat each other in a decent and neighborly way." said Jones. "But I returned to find the state legislature that launched my political career transformed beyond recognition — by a ham-fisted, hard-hearted politics of open hostility to minority viewpoints."

Tennessee represents a national tug-of-war over the direction of the country's politics at large. Jones speaks with politicians on both sides of the aisle to get their take on the tribalism between parties and its implications for the future of governing. This episode features interviews with reinstated Democratic State Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, Republican State Representative Gino Bulso, Republican Sumner County Commissioner Matthew Shoaf, Chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party Hendrell Remus, local organizers, and even members of Jones' family.