COLUMBIA, Tenn. — Republican Charlie Hatcher, who left Gov. Bill Lee’s cabinet as agriculture commissioner to run for Congress, captured Tennessee’s 5th District on Tuesday over Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder and kept the redrawn seat in GOP hands.
Unofficial tallies put Hatcher near 51.7% and Molder near 46.7% when the race was called late Tuesday. He takes the seat held by U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles after beating Ogles in the Republican primary despite an early Trump endorsement of the incumbent; the president later backed Hatcher and appeared with him at a Clarksville stop late in the race.
Hatcher runs a Williamson County dairy and works as a livestock veterinarian. Molder, serving a second term as Columbia’s mayor, drew heavy national Democratic money aimed at flipping a district Republicans first seized after the 2022 remap carved Nashville into three pieces.
Lawmakers redrew the 5th again in a May special session. The new lines pull the district away from Nashville into an upside-down L that takes in a slice of Memphis and stretches across northwest and far-west rural counties. That remap also shifted both candidates’ hometowns into the neighboring 9th District, though state rules let them keep campaigning for the 5th without living inside the new lines.
Democrats hoped Molder could peel away moderate voters after Hatcher’s primary upset of Ogles, a Freedom Caucus member. Hatcher had sold himself as a hire-a-farmer contrast to Ogles’ harder edge, then sat for a rare joint general-election forum with Molder in the closing weeks.
The win leaves the 5th under Republican control for a third term since the modern remaps, and it keeps Tennessee’s House delegation heavily tilted toward the GOP alongside other Tuesday results.
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