 | |||||||||||||||||
| Turnout | 56.62%[1] | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||||||
 County results Thompson: 40–50% 50–60% 60–70% 70–80% Cooper: 50–60% 60–70% | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
The1994 United States Senate special election in Tennessee was held November 8, 1994. IncumbentDemocratic SenatorAl Gore resigned from the Senate following his election asVice President of the United States in 1992, and this led to the 1993 appointment ofHarlan Mathews and the subsequent special election.[2] Mathews did not seek election to finish the unexpired term, and RepresentativeJim Cooper subsequently became the Democratic nominee. However, theRepublican nomineeFred Thompson won the seat in a decisive victory.
The election was held concurrently with theregular Class 1 Tennessee Senate election, in which RepublicanBill Frist defeated incumbent DemocratJim Sasser. As a result of Thompson and Frist's simultaneous victories in Tennessee, the two elections marked the first timesince1978 that both Senate seats in a state have flipped from one party to the other in a single election cycle. The next time this was repeated was in Georgia in 2021 where both theregular election and thespecial election went from incumbent Republicans to Democrats.
U.S. RepresentativeJim Cooper, a moderate Democrat fromTennessee's 4th congressional district, won the Democratic nomination for the special election unopposed on August 4, 1994.[3]
Fred Thompson, aNashville attorney andactor who gained national recognition as minority counsel to theSenate Watergate Committee in 1973, announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in April 1994 to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated byAl Gore.[4]
Thompson faced only minimal opposition in the August 4, 1994, Republican primary from John Warnp, aMemphis salesman. He won the nomination easily, with little need for extensive campaigning.[5]
| Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ±% | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republican | Fred Thompson | 885,998 | 60.44% | +30.63% | ||
| Democratic | Jim Cooper | 565,930 | 38.61% | −29.12% | ||
| Independent | Charles N. Hancock | 4,169 | 0.28% | |||
| Independent | Charles Moore | 2,219 | 0.15% | |||
| Independent | Terry Lytle | 1,934 | 0.13% | |||
| Independent | Kerry Martin | 1,719 | 0.12% | |||
| Independent | Jon Walls | 1,532 | 0.10% | |||
| Independent | Hobart Lumpkin | 1,184 | 0.08% | |||
| Independent | Don Schneller | 1,150 | 0.08% | |||
| Write-ins | 27 | 0.00% | ||||
| Majority | 320,068 | 21.83% | −16.08% | |||
| Turnout | 1,465,862 | |||||
| Republicangain fromDemocratic | ||||||
.jpg)
