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Andy Ogles represents more Muslims than any other Tennessee congressman. Yet he has no interest in representing them. He doesn’t even want them in the country.
“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” the third-term Republican wrote on Twitter/X last week. He’s proudly doubled down on his incendiary statement, which joins a long list of Islamophobic beliefs. During last year’s New York City mayoral campaign, Ogles called Zohran Mamdani “a communist who has publicly embraced a terroristic ideology”. The US naturalization system, he said, required “any alignments with communism or terrorist activities to be disclosed. I’m doubtful he disclosed them. If this is confirmed, put him on the first flight back to Uganda.”
It’s hardly Ogles’ first brush with controversy. He’s proposed amending the constitution to grant Donald Trump a third term. He was part of the push to topple the former speaker Kevin McCarthy, tipping the House into chaos before finally voting in McCarthy’s support.
Then there’s the litany of outrages, exaggerations, and alleged campaign finance irregularities – like the time when Ogles raised $25,000 for a children’s burial garden using a photo of his stillborn baby. It seems to have never been built; Ogles won’t say where the money went, though he says it hasn’t been spent.
How is it possible that someone under a cloud of scandal, and willing to denigrate his own constituents, can win re-election by double digits? Ogles is the poster child for the absurdity and unaccountability that ensue when some of the most toxic forces in our politics collide: gerrymandering, noncompetitive districts, and crowded, one-party primaries.
Of course, he’s not the only one. We have a Congress filled with people like Andy Ogles – members who would rather stake out extreme ground on social media than work cooperatively and represent everyone, members happy to denaturalize their constituents – because our broken system has turned political incentives inside-out.
Andy Ogles and those like him are a feature, not a bug, of an electoral system where you do not need to win a competitive district – or even win a majority in a safe district – to serve in Congress. This can be fixed. Primaries with ranked choice voting (RCV) would elect winners with broader appeal, even in a gerrymandered district. A more proportional House would blunt gerrymandering for good, and give more voters real voice. But until we reverse these perverse incentives, things will only get worse.
Ogles represents Tennessee’s fifth congressional district, long centered around Nashville. From 2003 until 2023, it was represented by Jim Cooper, a moderate, thoughtful Democrat known for his bipartisan approach on healthcare, co-founding the space force, and routinely voting for Republican Colin Powell to be speaker of the House. During the redistricting before the 2022 elections, however, Tennessee’s GOP-controlled state legislature turned the fifth into a safe Republican seat by dividing blue Nashville in half, and pulling in smaller, rural, redder counties to its south.
The goal was to create an 8-1 Republican delegation and shift the Nashville seat into the Republican column. It worked: Cooper retired. And, in noncompetitive districts like this, the primary for the dominant party determines the winner – so a horde of 10 Republican hopefuls hopped in, hoping to claim a safe seat in Congress.
The primary was held amidst summer vacations in humid August. Barely 60,000 Republican voters took part. Ogles knew how to win a race like that. He’d done it before. Animate the hard-right base, preach to the polarized. Sure enough, it wouldn’t matter that a majority within his own party primary preferred someone else. Ogles won with just over 35% of the vote.
Ogles went to Washington – to represent a district of 760,000 – because he won the only race that mattered with 21,325 votes. He knew who sent him there – 4% of his district’s voters. He knew who he had to please. The others? They scarcely mattered at all. The Muslim community in his district, for example, encompasses some 30,000 to 40,000 people, and includes a large number of doctors who relocated to these rural counties because they were desperately needed to provide medical care. Nashville includes what’s considered the largest Kurdish community in the nation.
Just how unaccountable is Ogles in his gerrymandered district? As long as he maintains his grip on the extreme base of his Tennessee seat, he can not only dehumanize other constituents, but that lengthy laundry list of misrepresentations, obfuscations and even an FBI investigation can’t budge him from power.
The FBI and Office of Congressional Ethics have scrutinized Ogles’ claim that he loaned his campaign $320,000 in 2023 when financial filings suggest he didn’t have the money to loan. He has acknowledged the loan didn’t happen and called the financial reporting issue “at worst an honest mistake”.
Journalists in Tennessee have reported multiple examples of Ogles fudging his resume. He is not a trained economist. Not a graduate of Vanderbilt’s business school. Or Dartmouth. . Not an expert in international sex crimes, or healthcare, or tax policy. Not on the board of the YMCA of Franklin or Nurses for Newborns. His consulting firm, which Ogles claims represented Fortune 500 clients, exists nowhere in Tennessee’s corporate documents.
There’s one other thing to know about Ogles’ district, where he coasted to re-election by 17 points in the last election. This gerrymandered seat is still somehow the most competitive in Tennessee. Ogles’ colleagues won their last elections by an average of 41 points.
It’s no wonder the House Clown Caucus continues its exponential growth. We have done this to ourselves. Our national gerrymandering epidemic keeps deepening. It’s easy to understand why: the US House is so close, and the nation so equally divided, that political parties want to maximize every seat they can in every state that they control. They want to create as many safe seats for themselves as possible.
Their incentives might make sense. But the rise of members like Ogles, unrepresentative and unaccountable, have been the natural, if unintended, consequence. The dramatic growth of safe seats – only 37 of 435 House seats in 2024 were within five percentage points – has moved all the action to primaries. (This spring, we have already seen a New Jersey primary won with less than 30%. Last week in Illinois, three Democratic primaries for safe US House seats were won with less than 32% of the vote – one with as little as 24%.)
Crowded primaries can be won with as little as a quarter of the tiny primary electorate. Then, a plurality winner is almost impossible to dislodge, no matter how they behave in office.
This is not sustainable. By maximizing seats everywhere, the parties have pushed themselves to non-governable extremes. We need to step back from the ledge.
Party primaries in safe seats would be made better by ranked-choice voting, which works like an instant runoff and delivers a majority winner – at least ensuring that a nominee has to appeal to most voters within their own party.
Better still would be a more proportional House along the lines of the one imagined by the Fair Representation Act, which has been introduced by representatives Don Beyer and Jamie Raskin. That would create larger, multi-member districts that deliver congressional delegations more closely in line with the actual political breakdown of a state. Candidates would have to talk to more voters, not simply the few that constitute their own base.
Ogles is the Frankenstein’s monster unleashed by out-of-control gerrymandering and plurality winners of crowded primaries. We put an end to this crisis only by solving the root problem: by reforming our democracy with more democracy, to ensure representatives who serve the people rather than ignore or condemn them.
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David Daley is the author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count
