Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson says he raised $860,000 in campaign cash after the GOP’s short-lived expulsion of him and another Black lawmaker for a gun-control protest. More than 31,000 people donated to Pearson, most of them in the week between Republicans’ vote to expel him and his reinstatement by local officials. “That amount of money is a testament to, really, how badly this issue went for House Republicans,” Kent Syler, a Middle Tennessee State University political science professor, told the Associated Press. “It gave Democrats an incredible platform in Tennessee that they haven’t had in a couple of decades.”
