Tennessee's 3rd congressional district

Infobox U.S. congressional district
state = Tennessee
district number = 3

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image width = 350
image caption =
representative = Zach Wamp
party = Republican
english area =
metric area =
percent urban =
percent rural =
population = 632,143
population year = 2000
median income = 35,434
percent white = 85.9
percent black = 11.1
percent asian = 0.9
percent native american = 0.3
percent hispanic = 1.6
percent other race = 0.1
percent blue collar =
percent white collar =
percent gray collar =
cpvi = R+8

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.

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, Tennessee, southwest of Knoxville. [http://tnatlas.geog.utk.edu/tea/CD108.asp?district=3&topic=]

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 3rd District is on the dividing line between counties and towns that favored or opposed Southern secession in the Civil War. The Chattanooga papers (now consolidated) vigorously printed diametrically-opposed political editorials (the moderate-to-progressive "Times" and the archconservative "Free Press"). As late as the early 1990s, Democrats held about half, perhaps more, of the local and county offices in the region.

This balance was upset in favor of the Republicans, beginning in the late 1950s, when rural and working-class whites began defecting from their historic Democratic preferences in favor of candidates such as Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Tennessee governor Winfield Dunn, Ronald Reagan, and two Chattanoogans, U.S. Representative LaMar Baker and Senator Bill Brock. The district has not supported a Democrat for president since 1956, and even then it was almost entirely due to the presence of then-Senator Estes Kefauver as vice presidential candidate; Kefauver represented the 3rd from 1939 to 1953. These conservatives obtained bipartisan support, but (except for Wallace) increasingly drew their supporters (or their children) to identify positively as Republicans. Although conservative Democrat Marilyn Lloyd (the widow of a popular television news anchorman in Chattanooga) held the district's seat for 20 years, area Democrats became increasingly unable to build upon her popularity, and slowly began losing even county and local offices that they had held for generations. Democrats still remain competitive in some local- and state-level races. However, even moderately liberal politics are a very hard sell, and most of the area's Democrats are quite conservative on social issues.

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.

The 3rd District is home to several fundamentalist Protestant denominations and colleges, bolstering the area's pronounced social conservatism.

Republican Zach Wamp of Chattanooga has represented the 3rd District since 1995.