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.
I’m in Tennessee. We’ve had protests all over the state. The maga idiots here just laugh to themselves while our elected officials don’t listen to 36% of the population.
The retort is… yeah well look at Virginia… mofo they voted on that. I’d love to have the opportunity.
But honestly I knew after Nashville was busted up after 160 years in 2020 they were going to do everything they could to redden the state.
Fucking cunts.
Additionally fuck Marsha Blackburn.
It’s crazy how they try to predicate this on Virginia, when what Virginia did was literally a response to Texas and other red states gerrymandering…
It’s the Deep South. Are we surprised?
They’ve been itching to reinstate Jim Crow down there.
A bit more disenfranchisement and the
plantation ownerspoliticians will get slavery back.And not that it would’ve changed anything but they fucking kicked out the Democrats while doing it
I’m just waiting for when they realize this is a BAD thing — in that now all three of those districts need fewer non-voters to show up.
Yep. Congrats. Now instead of one solid blue district, they’ve got 3 districts that very well might turn blue in the next election.
Dummymander dummymander dummymander!
It’s a real thing. If I say it 3 times maybe it’ll happen.
I’d love that, but I’m not in the habit of believing things just because they feel good. Does that ever happen?
My wife’s cousin gave an opening speech for Bernie Sanders when he was in town. Part of what he said is that the oligarchs want us to not have hope; to be resigned to whatever they want to happen. Maybe this isn’t quite what he meant, but I think there’s something to that line of thinking.
All of these articles fail to mention that since 2007, Tennessee’s 9th district has been held by Steve Cohen… Who by all accounts is not a black man. In fact, since 1823, every representative has been white, except for Harold Ford and Harold Ford Jr, who were more of a political machine who represented the white areas than real representation of the black people of the district. Even then, they were only in power for about 20 years out of the time since 1823. This parallels what happened after reconstruction failed… Just using the system (gerrymandering) to disenfranchise other than polling taxes and literacy tests.
