Please don't get mad at me, but why did Gore lose Tennessee?

[Adlai Stevenson]

From The Almanac of American Politics 2006:

'This movement was still strong enough for the Clinton-Gore ticket to carry Tennessee 47%-42% in 1992.  But the narrowness of the margin was a warning of what was ahead.  In 1994 Tennessee turned against the Clinton administration and produced a kind of political revolution.  Republican Fred Thompson, famous as a Watergate investigator and movie actor, won the remainder of Gore's Senate term by a landslide, surgeon Bill Frist beat (Jim) Sasser, and Republican Don Sundquist was elected Governor.  Republicans won a majority of the vote for the U.S. House, gaining two seats and coming close in a third.  The Republican trend was strong enough in 1996 that only after extraordinary efforts - Gore made 16 appearances here and the campaign pumped money in for late ads - was the Clinton-Gore ticket able to win by a narrow 48%-46% margin.
    In 2000 the tide was even stronger.  George W. Bush targeted the state early and worked it energetically; the Gore campaign, though headquartered in Nashville, seemed to assume it would come round in the end, and only campaigned hard here in the last few days.  Bush carried the state 51%-47%...In his gracious concession speech, Gore noted that he had some fence-mending to do in Tennessee, but the problem was not that he was personally unpopular; the problem was that the issue positions and cultural tone of the Clinton-Gore administration was alien and grating in rural Tennessee and in the suburban subdivisions expanding from Nashville and other cities out into the countryside...In 2004 Bush carried Tennessee by a solid 57%-43% (technically 56%-42%) margin and Republicans won the popular vote for the House and, for the first time since Reconstruction, elected a majority of state senators.'