The most recent rumors coming out of Nashville, unsurprisingly, have to do with the matter of redistricting. The talk is mainly on the part of the state’s Republican officeholders, who for years have enjoyed control of every statewide office that counts, including a supermajority of the seats in both chambers of the legislature.
So hard and fast is GOP domination of the General Assembly, and so notable is the continuing population surge in the suburban “doughnut” counties surrounding the state capital of Nashville that the Republicans hope to gin up their numerical domination even further.
Corresponding with the rising population figures in areas of metropolitan Nashville already in Republican hands is the simultaneous population drain in districts still held up to this point by Democrats, especially in Shelby County, where the county seems certain to lose a seat apiece in state Senate and the state House.
Where the Republicans hope to show some real potentially game-changing ambition is in the area of congressional redistricting. For the last several years they have possessed seven of the state’s nine congressional districts, failing to gain only the urban areas of Memphis and Nashville, Districts 9 and 5, which have been represented by Democrats Steve Cohen and Jim Cooper, respectively.
Although redistricting efforts are technically proceeding under the aegis of a bipartisan commission of legislators, the group, like the legislature itself, is heavily dominated by Republicans, and the GOP’s word will hold corresponding greater sway.
Republicans involved with the process are said to be giving serious consideration to a slice-and-dice formula for Metro Davidson County’s District 5, the bulk of which, at present, consists of Nashville’s urban core and has been as dependably Democratic for Cooper as it was for his predecessor, Bob Clement, and had been for previous Democrats as far back as historical memory stretches.
Various GOP proposals currently being looked at reportedly involve splitting the Nashville urban core into several longitudinal slices, each of which could be paired with a generous portion of the surrounding and overwhelmingly Republican suburban “doughnut” areas, giving GOP contenders strong chances of prevailing in any or all of the newly configured districts.
The demographics and geography of Memphis and Shelby County make a similar reapportionment virtually impossible in this end of the state. Cohen is virtually assured of a Democratic voting base in any potential redistricting of the 9th, but the GOP strategy, if successfully implemented, could make him the sole Democrat representing any area of the state in Congress.
Democrats — and some Republicans — have cautioned that the slice-and-dice strategy could backfire and that several of the potential new hybrid districts to be carved out of pieces of Nashville could turn into politically competitive urban/suburban areas in the same way that so much of Atlanta’s adjacent suburbs did in the 2020 election — and in the same way that Tennessee House of Representatives District 96, spanning part of Memphis and Germantown, has done in the last two election cycles, electing Democrat Dwayne Thompson to what had been a dependably Republican seat.
