Insofar as some degree of suspense has attached to the question of Steve Cohen’s reelection plans for 2026, it can now apparently be dispelled.
In a telephone conversation on Monday, the 9th District congressman said it explicitly: “I’m running!”
The Democratic congressman said he is convinced that his party will recoup the losses it suffered in 2024 and will regain a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s election.
“I’m looking forward to the change,” commented Cohen who, without specifying, said he looked forward to improved committee assignments and chairing opportunities.
The congressman said he’d been checked out thoroughly by his personal physician, who pronounced him in good shape to keep running and to attend to his future duties.
In an oblique reference to a famous Mark Twain quote (“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”), Cohen recalled a TV panel show of some years ago during which a local political figure, since deceased, claimed to have certain knowledge that Cohen, suffering from “post-polio” circumstances, would be resigning from his office, to be replaced by another local figure.
“My demise didn’t occur. Hers did,” Cohen deadpanned.
The congressman is indeed a survivor of poliomyelitis, a disease he suffered long ago as a child and which severely affected one leg but did not prevent a political career which has endured for numerous decades, including service on the Shelby County Commission, the Tennessee state Senate and, since 2006, the U.S. House.
Most recently, he has sponsored legislation to require training and integrity standards for income tax preparers.
Like several other observers and most elected Democrats, Cohen regrets President Trump’s choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.
Kennedy has been conspicuous over the years as a skeptic about the advantages of vaccination and has been widely condemned for his views, even by other members of his renowned political family. Criticism of the secretary has been compounded by the fact of recent measles outbreaks among the nation’s unvaccinated population.
“He’s made lots of money off his involvement in anti-vax organizations,” Cohen further charged.
• Cohen’s declaration of candidacy for 2026 does not, of course, preclude the possibility of his having opposition.
Among the local political figures most frequently mentioned as potential claimants to the 9th District congressional seat at some point are Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, state Senator Raumesh Akbari, and state Representative Justin J. Pearson — all Democrats.
Pearson received abundant national attention in 2023 as one of the “Tennessee Three” House members who incurred Republican wrath, including an expulsion effort, for protesting state government’s inaction on gun safety following a school shooting in Nashville.
Though still regarded as likely to be a long-term political eminence, Pearson has had a shaky, sparsely attended legislative session so far — one marked by, among other things, his inadvertent, apparently accidental, casting of an aye vote for Governor Bill Lee’s voucher legislation.
In delivering the 17th annual Murray Lecture at Vanderbilt University last month, Pearson touched on both his forebodings regarding the danger of firearms and the gun suicide in December of his brother, Timphrance Darnell Pearson — one obvious reason for his recent preoccupation.
Sharing the 988 suicide and crisis hotline number with his audience, Pearson said, “We have an epidemic of gun violence in our communities, and it is really imperative that we do everything that we can to help save anybody we can. I didn’t know what my brother was struggling with. We didn’t know about [the] mental illness that he had. You don’t know who’s struggling next to you or in your families.”