"Lame, out of how many seats?"
Davidson County has 10 House seats.
"I’m very surprised to hear the GOP didn’t contest so many winnable State house districts and yet still have 73."
As it is, the GOP ran candidates in 83 out of 99 districts, with only 10 losing. The Dems, conversely, ran a paltry 53 candidates in which a majority of them, 27, lost. You need 50 for a majority. That the party has so completely collapsed to that point in just 3 election cycles (remember the Dems had de facto control via a puppet speaker going into the 2010 election) is pretty amazing.
In my estimation, as the GOP has effectively maxed out with 28 out of 33 seats in the Senate (barring a shift of Black voters to the GOP), I count only about 8 more seats that the GOP could potentially win (81), with the remainder largely falling under the boundaries of the 5 Senate seats (15 in Memphis & Nashville and the remaining 3 being Black districts in Knoxville, Chattanooga & a rural West TN seat).
As an interesting trivia point, the Black Knoxville seat back in the 1980s had a Democrat occupant named Pete Drew. Drew actually switched to the GOP while in office and remarkably managed to win reelection as a Republican. He lost reelection to another Black, Dem Joe Armstrong. Armstrong has held the seat ever since, but Drew has become a bit of a perennial candidate (he also ran in the Black Chattanooga district in 2002). He actually ran against Armstrong as an Independent last week, but got a paltry 24% of the vote in an incredibly low turnout in that district.
The number of state House seats where a major party doesn’t field a candidate always surprises me. You would think they would at least want a name on the ballot, even if it only draws 10-20%.