Taking a Look at the Democrat Hoping to Unseat Glen Casada
In Williamson County politics, Glen Casada looms large.
He’s not just a member of the state House of Representatives — a post he’s held for the better part of two decades. He also rode a Republican wave in the 2010s to supermajority status, and eventually rose to the speaker’s chair.
And Casada’s not just a conservative. He’s among the party’s most combative figures, freely injecting some of the right’s biggest fever dreams into Tennessee politics with ease. He sued Barack Obama shortly after the president took the oath of office in 2009, claiming Obama was born in Kenya and, even if he wasn’t, he abandoned his citizenship by spending time in Indonesia as a kid. Casada also called for Syrian refugees in Tennessee to be rounded up and returned to ICE officials because he saw them as a terror threat.
And even when he was forced by his own caucus to abandon the speaker’s gavel in 2019, Casada refused to abandon his seat. It didn’t matter that his chief of staff had been caught soliciting sex from an intern and a lobbyist in explicit texts, or that he had hired a political operative for a no-show job on the House payroll. Casada just waited until the fury died down and announced his intention to run again early this year. Most voters never batted an eye.
So what type of district keeps returning such a polarizing figure to office year after year? Tennessee’s House District 63 runs from Brentwood south to the Maury County line, and from the east side of Franklin to Arrington. It’s one of the most affluent and fastest-growing areas in the state, and it’s full of voters with a certain profile: largely white, evangelical, upper-middle-class, college-educated, and many of them with a single issue on their minds when they enter the voting booth.
Read more: https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/features/article/21143770/taking-a-look-at-the-democrat-hoping-to-unseat-glen-casada