Last week, the voters of Tennessee’s 4th state house district re-elected Kent Williams as an independent candidate.  He is the first person to win an election to the Tennessee legislature as an independent since 1982.  He had been re-elected as a Republican in 2008.  But in early 2009, when the state house was virtually tied, all the Democrats in the House had voted for Williams to be Speaker.  With the votes of all the Democrats, and his own vote, Williams was elected Speaker, but then he was expelled from the Republican Party, so in 2010 he ran for re-election as an independent.

Williams says he still identifies as a Republican.  After he was expelled from the party, he listed himself as a member of the “Carter County Republican Party” on the legislature’s roster, but of course there is no such ballot-qualified party.

Williams will no longer be speaker, because in 2010 the Republican Party won a large majority in both houses of the legislature.

Tennessee had also had an independent State Senator in 2008, but, unlike Williams, he was never elected as an independent.  He had been elected as a Republican in 2004, to a four-year term, and then had become an independent in 2007.  But when he tried to be re-elected as an independent in 2008, he was narrowly defeated.