On the Issues
Learn about Mandy’s core platform and her views on a variety of issues. Her top priorities are lowering costs and lifting families — by strengthening healthcare access, investing in public education, and making daily life more affordable for Tennesseans.
Explore Mandy’s views on key issues, including:
Core Platform
Read through Mandy’s core platform, or skip directly to any of the following issues:
Healthcare Access
As a healthcare worker in one of Nashville’s major hospitals, Mandy has seen firsthand how broken our healthcare system is. Too much of our current system is set up to serve corporate interests instead of empowering providers and prioritizing patients.
Mandy is committed to doing what’s best for patients — not insurance companies or healthcare corporations.
Mandy wants to improve healthcare access across the state, including in rural areas. She believes that everybody has a right to the full spectrum of care, no matter their job, income level, or zip code.
With her healthcare background, Mandy strongly believes in medical privacy, meaning that unless it’s a public health concern, medical decisions should stay between patients, families, and doctors — not politicians. This applies to everything from the decision whether or not to give blood or donate an organ to reproductive freedom and gender-affirming care.
She also believes that sensitive patient data should be fiercely protected, not shared with government agencies or private companies.
As part of Mandy’s commitment to fighting for Tennesseans, she’s taken the Patients Over Profits pledge. This involves refusing large contributions from the executives, lobbyists, and PACs affiliated with the corporate healthcare industry.
You can visit the Patients Over Profits website for more information, or watch the video explaining why Mandy took the pledge.
Public Education
Nothing pays more dividends than investing in our children. However, Tennessee currently ranks last in the nation in per-student spending for our public schools. Meanwhile, Republicans just voted to expand the voucher program that funnels public money into private schools.
One of Mandy’s top priorities is repealing the school voucher program. This program takes millions of dollars of taxpayer money to subsidize private education for a handful of families, most of whom were already sending their kids to private schools.
Instead of treating public schools as the second-rate choice for families, Tennessee should be making our schools the gold standard of public education.
To do this, we need to invest in our public schools and commit to setting both educators and students up for success. Increased funding for public schools can lead to:
Higher staff retention: Increased pay and more competitive benefits can help retain our most valuable educators.
Reduced class sizes: Hiring more teachers can reduce class sizes and increase individual student attention.
Upgraded facilities: Modernizing outdated facilities can increase energy efficiency, ensure ADA compliance, and provide students with a superior learning environment.
Increased support services: Investing in more school counselors, nurses, and social workers can help support student mental health and overall well-being.
Affordability
Life in Tennessee is too expensive, from housing costs to the price of groceries. As the mom of a four-year-old, Mandy understands how much pressure this puts on families, and she’s ready to work to make your daily life more affordable.
Nearly 9 in 10 Tennesseans say the cost of living here is expensive. The good news is that there are real, tangible things our state government can do to lower costs for Tennesseans — we just need people in office who are fighting for everyday people, not special interests.
Examples include:
Eliminate the grocery tax
Expand affordable childcare
Require existing AI data centers to offset utility cost increases
Regulate short-term rentals like Airbnbs
Raise the minimum wage
These actions can put more money in your pocket — money that you can put toward the things that really matter to you and your family.
“Nothing sets me in motion like my responsibility as a parent. And part of that responsibility is to be a good steward of the future my son gets to live in.”
Legalizing Cannabis
Like most Tennesseans, Mandy Cook believes in legalizing and regulating cannabis in the state of Tennessee. She believes it’s long past time to stop criminalizing marijuana – and start capitalizing on it.
Under current leadership, Tennessee recently banned THCa products state-wide. This ban further marginalizes cannabis users, while harming the small businesses that relied on revenue from these products. Laws like these leave money on the table and leave good people vulnerable.
Mandy supports Democratic legislation like Pot for Potholes. This bill from Senator Heidi Campbell and Representative Aftyn Behn would legalize recreational marijuana and use the resulting tax revenue for infrastructure repairs. That’s the kind of common-sense solution that Tennesseans are looking for.
However, too many of our current politicians pocket money from the alcohol and private prison industries, resulting in laws that reflect the will of corporations instead of the people.
Mandy doesn’t take corporate PAC money, because she’s running to serve Tennesseans, not special interests. Meanwhile, her opponent has accepted thousands of dollars from the alcohol industry.
As your state rep, Mandy will fight for common-sense policies like Pot for Potholes, and oppose bills that put corporate interests above the people.
AI Data Centers
Mandy Cook opposes AI data centers that:
Harm our land
Contaminate our water
Pollute our air
Raise our utility bills
Exploit our communities
These facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, straining local grids and driving up utility rates for Tennessee families. They’ve also been shown to pollute the surrounding environment, with the impacts disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities.
We deserve better. We deserve clean air, clean water, and livable communities. And we deserve leaders who put people first.
Decisions about our land, our resources, and our future belong to the people who live here in Tennessee, not to billionaires and tech companies.
This isn't a matter of being anti-technology or anti-progress. It's a matter of standing up for our community's water, our power grid, and our quality of life instead of selling them off to the highest corporate bidder.
Civil Liberties
Mandy strongly believes in freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. She values personal privacy and opposes the growing surveillance state — from Flock cameras to the collection of sensitive medical data.
As a community organizer who has coordinated rallies, protests, and public gatherings, the right to assemble peacefully and speak freely are especially personal to Mandy.
In a time when we’re seeing books banned in libraries, cameras lining our streets, government collection of sensitive medical information, and data brokers commoditizing our online activities, Tennessee needs a strong advocate for privacy, liberty, and personal choice.
Additional Issues
Conservation
Tennessee is a beautiful place to live. However, the politicians currently in control of our state repeatedly disregard the conservation of Tennessee's ecosystems. Too often, they side with corporations and lobbyists over people and the natural environment.
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Elon Musk's xAI Data Center outside Memphis spans 271 acres, uses millions of gallons of Memphis drinking water daily, and produces smog that is damaging the health of local residents. Despite many of xAI's operating practices being non-compliant with environmental and energy law, they have faced no repercussions.
In Nashville, Musk was given a backdoor deal for his Tesla Tunnel — a proprietary tunnel that would primarily serve tourists, NOT Tennesseans — by Republican lawmakers and our Republican governor, Bill Lee.
We need laws that protect our residents and Tennessee's natural wonders. Data centers need to be strictly regulated to mitigate their environmental and social impact. Tennessee needs standards in place that all data centers are required to follow.
Tennesseans also need more options to utilize clean energy, mass transit, and progressive waste management systems. Investment in such infrastructure would create countless jobs and boost state and local tax revenue. It would also enable Tennesseans to spend less time in traffic and less money on the cars we are currently so dependent on in our state.
Immigration
In 2026, Tennessee Republicans introduced more than 40 anti-immigrant bills — despite undocumented people committing less than 2% of all state-wide crime (the vast majority of which is non-violent) and contributing millions of dollars in taxes every year.
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Our immigration system is, at its core, broken and complicated.
There are no clear and simple paths to citizenship for those not natively born here. Gaining permanent residency in the U.S. comes at a high cost in both time and money.
This is a federal issue that should be remediated. Our current Republican supermajority at the Tennessee legislature wants to punish the immigrant community for our federal government's failings. This is both cruel and short-sighted.
The alt-right have perpetuated lies about our immigrant population, claiming that they are dangerous and that they are here to take advantage of "handouts." In truth, immigrants are far less likely to commit to crimes than U.S.-born residents.
Furthermore, immigrants pay taxes and boost our overall economy. Undocumented Tennessee residents paid over $314 million in taxes in 2022. They often pay more than their fair share, because they pay into social programs like Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment, but do not qualify to receive those benefits.
In states like Tennessee, where a sales tax takes the place of a state income tax, undocumented people are paying just as much in tax as the rest of us to put food on their tables and shoes on their family's feet.
Immigration is essential to our culture, our workforce, and our economy. While a broken immigration system requires addressing at the federal level, our state policies regarding immigration are incredibly important.
LGBTQ+ Rights
Love is love, and transgender rights are human rights. The state of Tennessee needs to stand up for the rights and dignity of every resident, including the LGBTQ+ community, ensuring that all people can live freely, authentically, and without fear of discrimination.
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In American culture, we have held very rigid views of what it means to be a man or a woman for a long time. Because of this, Mandy can empathize with people who struggle to see the difference between sex (what the doctor put on your birth certificate) and gender (whether you feel like a man, a woman, or neither).
Mandy has had to personally do a lot of unlearning about ingrained gender roles and expectations for the sake of her own mental health. She finds trans people to be a positive force, and believes that they empower us to challenge society's expectations of who we should and shouldn't be.
The far-right trans-panic has caused so much harm, confusion, and misinformation. It's something Mandy hears brought up time and time again by people who dislike "political parties," but find themselves struggling with the concept of individuals who are transgender, and so default to voting for the party that stands against trans rights.
The people who struggle to understand our transgender population have been led to believe a lot of lies about transgender people and their influence on our society. For instance, many people are surprised to learn that transgender people currently make up less than 1% of the U.S. population.
I encourage people to look past the lies and realize that transgender individuals are being used as a scapegoat to distract Americans from the issues that are having a negative impact on their lives every day — like the soaring cost of groceries and gas.