Congress
No one will win from the gerrymandering of the Fifth Congressional District and the division of Davidson County into three separate congressional districts. Black and brown communities were outright targeted and will suffer adverse consequences as a direct result. Our city and region will also lose 32 years of seniority and institutional knowledge in the U.S. House in the form of Jim Cooper.
Strategic Miscues
Whether the GOP supermajority realized it or not, their redistricting scheme to win a single congressional seat may not have only violated the law but also the trust of rural voters. The latter violation should not be overlooked, because the GOP just undermined its decades-old “rural vs. urban” political strategy. The strategy is, in large part, built on a false narrative portraying legislators who represent cities as out of touch with rural interests and values and classifying one party as urban and the other as rural. Through this messaging, the GOP has fueled the false notion that a legislator cannot possibly represent the interests and values of both rural and urban communities.
Oddly, the GOP just gerrymandered four of nine congressional districts in such a way that those districts’ representatives will be expected to do just that. So if the GOP’s narrative is to be believed, they just intentionally created a situation for a majority of Tennessee families in which they expect someone to always lose - rural or urban communities - and signaled that they are okay with it. If this was not their intention, they are effectively conceding that there is no merit to the core of their strategy and that they’ve purposefully misled Tennesseans for decades simply for political gain.
Having both grown up on a farm in rural Tennessee and lived in and represented Nashville in the state legislature, I am uniquely aware that rural and urban Tennesseans have far more in common than the GOP would have voters believe. A lot of opportunities for compromise and progress have been missed because of unnecessary divisiveness.
STAYING IN TOUCH
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