Nashville: How Tennessee’s Blue Island Was Lost in a Sea of Red – By Louis Jacobson (US News) / Nov 4, 2022
Tennessee’s GOP legislature used redistricting to split Nashville into separate districts, diluting the city’s influence and costing the state a long-held Democratic congressional seat.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – In the public imagination, Nashville doesn’t seem like a very liberal city. It’s located in the solidly red state of Tennessee, and it’s the home of country music, which has a fan base that leans politically to the right.
But a more accurate description of Nashville’s politics would be that it’s a blue island in a sea of red. And that has been causing enormous heartburn here in Music City.
Earlier this year, the state’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature used the once-every-decade redistricting process to split Nashville into three separate congressional districts, diluting the city’s voting power so that the residents in each are now outnumbered by Republicans in the metro area’s outlying counties.
As a result, a congressional seat that has represented Nashville for decades – and has been long held by Democrats, often from the party’s moderate wing – has vanished. Now, after this year’s elections, Republicans can expect to increase their edge in the state’s congressional delegation to 8-1. That’s 89% of the congressional seats in a state where Donald Trump won a bit over 60% of the vote in 2020.
