Chas Sisk is a reporter with WPLN/Nashville Public Radio. He's covered the politics of Tennessee since 2009.

NASHVILLE—Two abortions. Maybe three, if you count the one he pressured a girlfriend—who happened to be his patient—to get. Pulling out a gun during an argument with his first wife. Prescribing pills to another patient while they dated. Getting reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners for dallying with patients, an ethics violation.

Voters in Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District had plenty of reasons not to vote for incumbent Scott DesJarlais last week. The Tea Party Republican might have snuck under the radar to win a first term in 2010 and held back an onslaught of negative publicity long enough to capture a second one in 2012, but a third time? When conservative voters in this district, which stretches from the edges of Chattanooga to Nashville, went to the polls, they were widely expected to run off a pro-life, family-values conservative who had shown in divorce court that he could bend those beliefs in his own life. If this was supposed to be a throw-the-bums-out kind of year in Congress, then DesJarlais was the ultimate bum, and he ought to have joined Ralph Hall, Kerry Bentivolio and Eric Cantor as the only incumbent members of Congress to lose thus far.


But clearly, the voters thought otherwise. If current results hold—and so far, there’s no reason to believe they won’t—DesJarlais appears to have captured the Republican nomination again by a mere 37 votes. All that would stand in his way to a third term is accountant Lenda Sherrell, the Democratic nominee in the heavily Republican district.

As a reporter who has followed DesJarlais these past 21 months, I have watched with a mixture of amazement and respect as he—running for re-election for the first time since it surfaced that his personal life could have been a storyline from “Nip/Tuck” and written off by political handicappers in both Tennessee and Washington—has managed to mount a comeback with little money or political support. In a year in which incumbents have beaten back challengers nationwide, a DesJarlais win could very well be the most extraordinary feat of them all, putting him alongside the likes of Ohio’s notorious James Traficant, who served nearly 20 years despite charges of tax-evasion, taking bribes from mobsters and forcing his aides to clean horse stalls on his farm, in the ranks of some the most improbable congressional hangers-on of all time.

So how did DesJarlais do it?

Charisma certainly wasn’t a factor. With a personality that could be described, generously, as taciturn, DesJarlais lights up few rooms. He has a knack for the bad photograph, frequently scowling in a way that I’ve been told is “terrifying.” But DesJarlais, a physician, is nothing if not smart, with an eager student’s approach to lawmaking and a tea partier’s zeal for punching holes in the Obama administration’s agenda. DesJarlais was one of the first congressmen to argue that the Affordable Care Act didn’t authorize the Internal Revenue Service to extend tax credits or impose penalties in states that hadn’t set up their own health insurance exchanges. The seemingly arcane point has since been upheld by a D.C. court, a ruling that some believe ( and others hope) could be used to gut the law.

To his supporters, DesJarlais embodies the ideal of the citizen-legislator. He had never run for office before 2009, when in the conservative backlash that followed Obama’s election he first decided to try for Congress. He emerged from a crowded field to win the Republican nomination, and it was only in the fall of 2010 that voters first got a hint that he had a salacious past. Allegations surfaced that DesJarlais had shown a pattern of erratic and potentially abusive behavior, including dry-firing an unloaded gun at a bedroom door while his ex-wife huddled inside and holding a pistol in his mouth for as long as three hours, all detailed in the 2001 record of his divorce. Most voters wrote off the claims, viewing them as a desperate attempt by Democratic Rep. Lincoln Davis to turn back the tea party tide.

DesJarlais was better prepared the next time around. In the fall of 2012, rumors began to circulate that he had engaged in a series of liaisons—with co-workers and patients—that had also been documented in his divorce file. (These eventually would form the core of the ethics complaint filed against him.) The file showed DesJarlais had supported two abortions by his ex-wife, one for “therapeutic reasons” and another because “things were not going well,” and had pressured a patient he’d been seeing to travel to Georgia for one. (DesJarlais claims he was trying to get her to admit she wasn’t really pregnant.) DesJarlais’ lawyers fought the file’s release, even though it was a public record. The day before the election, they and Democratic attorneys still were arguing in a Chattanooga courtroom over how fast the documents could be transcribed. DesJarlais lost the case, but the ruling came too late for the voters. Tennesseans didn’t learn the full extent of his behavior until after their ballots had been cast.

That was supposed to be it for DesJarlais. That winter, Republican leaders in Tennessee began to hint or call outright for DesJarlais’ resignation. “I think the congressman’s decision is: Can I effectively represent the people who elected me?” Gov. Bill Haslam said. Many threw their support behind state Sen. Jim Tracy, an affable former high school coach and four-term state lawmaker who officially declared his candidacy for Congress just two months after DesJarlais’ divorce file was released. “I was hoping he would do the right thing and resign,” said Tracy, who had lost a winnable bid for Congress by a close margin back in 2010. But this was a different category altogether. When this race started, it was Tracy’s to lose.

DesJarlais did not resign. Instead, he stepped up his schedule of public appearances in the district, often brandishing his current wife, Amy (not the one that he had been accused of threatening, coercing and cheating on 15 years earlier). The topic might be the farm bill. It might be veterans affairs. It might be Obamacare. (It was never, of course, his first wife, the abortions she had despite his pro-life stance or the patients he had been censured for dating.) And in these discussions, DesJarlais unfailingly came across as knowledgeable, detail-oriented and genuinely concerned for his constituents’ interests.

The impact of these constituent-outreach efforts shouldn’t be underestimated. Over the course of the campaign, I found many conservative voters who were willing to set aside DesJarlais’ past because they agreed with him politically. “He’s got the track record so far,” a voter told me shortly after casting her vote for him. She shrugged off suggestions that his personal life might matter; she cared more about his rating as one of the House’s most conservative members.

DesJarlais found allies, too, in the Nashville area’s conservative radio hosts, many of whom have been frustrated Tennessee hasn’t moved farther to the right. They gave DesJarlais a platform to present himself as an outsider—an easy argument to make when most Republican leaders had abandoned him—who was being punished for misdeeds committed a decade before he entered public life. “I went through this divorce a long time ago,” he told a local host in one of his few interviews on the subject, shortly after the scandal broke. “I know God’s forgiven me.”

But it’s impossible to comprehend DesJarlais’ win without recognizing his opponent’s failures. Tracy did little campaigning in 2013, leaving DesJarlais free to talk policy with voters and friendly radio hosts without being forced to take any uncomfortable questions. Tracy then struggled with messaging as the primary heated up this spring and summer. His campaign was built around his personal appeal, albeit with some thinly veiled rebukes of the incumbent. Tracy’s advertising used the word “integrity” a lot. “Honesty,” too. Push cards handed out at campaign events and left in door jambs noted in red letters that Tracy is a “dedicated family man” and that, on the issue of abortion, he is “100% pro-life.” But, inexplicably for a candidate who had seemed so eager to chase DesJarlais out of office the year before, Tracy at first avoided hitting DesJarlais’ ethics problems head-on.

Tracy started with a big advantage in that he had represented a large portion of Rutherford County, home to nearly one in three voters in DesJarlais’ district, since 2004. Watching Tracy’s campaign, I was struck by how well known and well liked he was, even in a state where personal politicking is stock-in-trade. Almost every person I met could recall a time when they’d met him previously—a parade, a community event, a school function. DesJarlais did not represent Rutherford County until redistricting in 2012, but even if he had represented it for 20 years, he couldn’t possibly have matched Tracy’s retail appeal.

Outside his legislative district, however, Tracy offered voters few reasons to back him. An introductory commercial showed him playing ball with his son, leaving it to viewers to decipher the implied contrast with DesJarlais. Later, when it became apparent he could lose, Tracy turned negative. His campaign released an ad that declared “scandal makes DesJarlais ineffective in Washington.” The argument might have been more compelling if Washington itself weren’t ineffective. Whether because they did not want to sully Tracy’s image or because DesJarlais was being treated for cancer at the end of the race, the Tracy campaign never hit the congressman harder.

The election results show how poor a sales job Tracy did. He handily won Rutherford County by nearly 5,000 votes, but DesJarlais carried 11 of the 16 counties in the district. By piecing together big wins in rural counties and a solid victory in Maury County, a growing Nashville exurb outside Tracy’s legislative territory, DesJarlais appears to have eked out just enough votes to hold on.

This isn’t the first time Tracy has lost a winnable race. In 2010, when no one was giving DesJarlais any thought, Tracy finished third in a much-watched primary for Tennessee’s 6th Congressional District, losing the primary to Congressman Diane Black and a Tea Party candidate. If the 2014 current results stand, Tracy will have lost those two primary elections for Congress by 603 votes combined. To some, that might seem like a pair of near misses. But to those who have watched both races, it suggests a candidate who, though an appealing guy, hasn’t figured out how to close the deal with voters.

DesJarlais might have blown it with his ex-wife, his girlfriend/patient and the state Board of Medical Examiners, but clearly, he didn’t blow it with Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District.