State Republicans take different paths to ‘cracking’ Democratic House members from power

Their target is the Nashville-based 5th Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper is a longtime incumbent. Under the congressional redistricting plan moving through the legislature and to be signed by GOP Gov. Bill Lee, the Volunteer State’s nine-member House delegation would move from seven Republicans and two Democrats to eight Republicans and just one Democrat (in a black-majority district Memphis seat).

To the north, state Republicans drawing congressional lines in Kentucky opted not to carve up Louisville, which like Nashville, Tennessee, is a Democratic stronghold. Instead, Kentucky’s redistricting plan effectively leaves in place the status quo, with five House seats held by Republicans and one likely to be held by a Democrat. Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth is retiring after 2022 from the 3rd Congressional District seat he first won in 2006.

The redistricting strategies may seem picayune and area-specific. But each seat can play an important role in which party wins the majority in 2022, for the second two years of President Joe Biden’s term. Republicans need to net five seats in the 435-member chamber and are presently favored to recapture the majority they lost in 2018.

This is why Republicans in the Tennessee General Assembly are breaking up the district held by Cooper since 2003. Cooper previously held a similarly drawn Nashville area district from 1983-1995.

The plans to chop up Cooper’s district were announced Sunday by Republican state House Speaker Cameron Sexton. The proposed map was debuted on Wednesday showing a split in three ways, a move Cooper says disenfranchises Democrats in Davidson County, Tennessee’s second-most populous county, which includes Nashville, the state capital and largest city.

“As I’ve been warning for almost a year, the General Assembly has formally begun gerrymandering Nashville and Davidson County into political oblivion,” Cooper wrote in a press readout Tuesday.

The last time a Republican-led committee began redrawing the state’s districts was in 2011, when Republicans also held a 7-2 advantage in the congressional delegation. However, Republicans at the time left Cooper’s 5th District seat “relatively untouched,” Jacob Rubashkin of Inside Elections told the Washington Examiner on Thursday.

The proposed map is “drawn with the intention of electing a Republican to the new 5th District and no longer having a Democratic-leaning seat anchored in Nashville,” Rubashkin added.

PROPOSED TENNESSEE CONGRESSIONAL MAP SPLITS DAVIDSON COUNTY THREE WAYS

The state Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Redistricting met Thursday morning and approved the new map for Tennessee’s state Senate districts, which were met with far less contention than the congressional redrawing.

Following approval of the Senate map, the committee discussed the proposed congressional redistricting map, which Democratic Sen. Jeff Yarbro called an “aggressive gerrymander.”

Odessa Kelly, a Nashville activist looking to primary Cooper from the left, tweeted Republicans should be “careful what they wish for” as some critics of the congressional map have warned the plan could backfire and turn the 5th District into a toss-up.

When asked whether the altered map could have inverse effects for the House GOP, Rubashkin said with such tactics, there’s always a possibility it could have “unintended consequences” despite the mild gains Republicans made among urban voters in the last election.

“Looking specifically at Tennessee, the rest of the state is so Republican that I’m skeptical this particular gerrymander is likely to backfire on Republicans,” Rubashkin added.

Republicans redistricting efforts in Tennessee mirror states such as Texas and Oklahoma, which have GOP-dominated legislators and are redrawing their existing partisan congressional districts to be harder to flip from one party to the other.

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Texas specifically drew an aggressive map in 2011, and by the 2018 midterm elections, the state congressional delegation changed from a 25–11 Republican majority to a 23–13 GOP majority, marking the most seats that Democrats have won in the state since 2006.

“So it’s a bit of a different philosophy than what we’ve seen in Tennessee, with which is they have an opportunity to go from a 7-2 delegation to an 8-1 delegation and they are going for it,” Rubashkin said.