Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.
A lot of these red redistricting maps are weakening their safe seats. I’m sure they’ve got some very skilled statisticians using very good software, but the datasets they’re using are from 2 years ago when they were in opposition, during a very anti establishment time. The cultural moment is still very anti establishment, but now they’re the establishment.
So by diluting their safe seats, they’re likely creating a bunch of seats liable to be much more competitive in the next few elections. If they spend resources and effort to sure up those seats, they’ll probably be able to win most of them, but that’s resources and effort they could have been spending in other races. These states were already gerrymandered favorably for them, have been for decades, the democratic states doing gerrymander in response have a much easier time creating new blue districts that will actually be safe, since they’re working with a blank gerrymander slate.
Easy, if that happens they’ll just cry foul and say it was rigged
And then nothing happens because they can’t substantiate the claims, nor do they have enough loyal goons to enforce their outrage.