To Allison Gorman, it’s clear state lawmakers in Nashville aren’t representing the interests of most Tennessee voters.
“We have a Republican supermajority that is responding only to special interest groups and (political action committees) and, to some degree, the most extreme primary voters,” she said in a phone interview. “They do not represent the majority of Tennesseans, and they’ve showed at times open hostility to people who have tried to make their voices heard.”
Gorman has announced she will run this year as a Democrat for the District 26 seat in the Tennessee House of Representatives, meaning she may again square off against state Rep. Greg Martin, R-Hamilton County. District 26 includes Lakesite and parts of Chattanooga. Gorman and Martin have both filed paperwork to run in their respective Aug. 1 primaries, according to the Hamilton County Election Commission website.
The General Election is Nov. 5. The qualifying deadline for candidates is April 4.
Martin won his last matchup with Gorman in November 2022 with 64% of the 23,545 votes cast. The Hamilton County Commission first appointed Martin to the seat in March 2020 to fill a vacancy left by the resignation of Robin Smith.
A freelance journalist and book editor, Gorman, 61, has lived in Chattanooga since 1997 and was originally raised in Memphis by a single mother. Her father, Maj. Donald Reilly, was a medical evacuation pilot who died during the Vietnam War when she was young, she said.
“I would like to think I at least took a lesson from him about what it means to be a patriotic American,” Gorman said. “To me, patriotism is sacrificial.”
Public education and reproductive rights are among Gorman’s priorities. In 2022, more than 700 Tennessee medical professionals wrote an open letter urging lawmakers to reconsider the state’s “trigger law,” which they said banned abortions without exception and criminalized doctors for providing lifesaving care.
Last year, Gov. Bill Lee signed a law allowing doctors to use “reasonable medical judgment” when deciding if an abortion is necessary to save a pregnant woman from death or severe injury, The Associated Press reported. That included ectopic pregnancies but did not include exceptions for rape or incest.
“We have now an entire gender that has been stripped of their bodily autonomy and is being endangered by this law,” Gorman said.
Two of Gorman’s three daughters live in Tennessee, and the third, a doctor, told Gorman she won’t move to the state because she thinks it’s too dangerous for pregnant women.
“She won’t move here until she has the children she’s going to have,” Gorman said. “That speaks volumes.”
State lawmakers need to allow people to make their own medical decisions, she said. Roe v. Wade, a 50-year-old Supreme Court ruling that protected abortion access, was overturned while Gorman was campaigning for office in 2022, and at the time, many of the voters Gorman talked to didn’t understand the state’s trigger law, she said.
“They did not believe me when I said there was no exemption for rape or incest or life of the mother, which was the case at first and … for all practical purposes is still the case,” she said.
People also feel strongly about their public schools, Gorman said. The governor and most lawmakers seems perfectly happy to “starve schools to death in order to reward the school choice industry,” she said.
“There’s money to be made with our tax dollars, and that grift seems to be what motivates everything in our state legislature right now,” she said.
Even with the state’s new education funding formula, Tennessee still ranks low for per-student spending, Gorman said. Lee’s proposal to create a statewide voucher program, she added, is being “shoved down the throats” of Tennesseans and school systems.
Gorman estimated she knocked on 4,500 doors during her last campaign and aims to double that this year.
“I just need to have conversations with people,” she said. “I call tell you that I don’t think taxation without representation is going to be any more popular in 2024 than it was in 1776. That’s what we’ve got now.”
