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Tanuki

(15,978 posts)
2. It happened in Nashville. We had a safe Democratic seat,
Sun Jul 27, 2025, 07:29 AM
Jul 27

Last edited Sun Jul 27, 2025, 08:22 AM - Edit history (1)

and citizens of our county vote Democratic by a 2 to 1 margin. The GOP state legislature carved us up into three parts and attached each one to a deep red rural district. My congressman in a MAGA creep who lives 80 miles away. The surgical precision with which my district was carved up made it mathematically impossible for a Democrat to win, and the GOP stole themselves a Congressional vote by effectively robbing us of representation.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2022/jan/25/nashville-tennessee-gerrymandering-congress-republicans

"Republican lawmakers in Tennessee gave final approval on Monday to an aggressive plan to split Nashville, a Democratic bastion, in a deeply Republican state, into several congressional districts as part of an effort to tilt the state’s congressional map in their favor. The plan is now waiting for approval from Governor Bill Lee, who is likely to sign it.

Nashville currently sits in the state’s fifth congressional district, represented by Jim Cooper, a Democrat who has held the seat for nearly 20 years. It’s a solid Democratic district – Joe Biden carried it by nearly 24 points in 2020 – but on Tuesday, Cooper announced he was retiring from Congress.

“Despite my strength at the polls, I could not stop the general assembly from dismembering Nashville. No one tried harder to keep our city whole,” he said in a statement. “I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three new congressional districts that now divide Nashville. There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path for other worthy candidates.”

The new districts crack the concentration of Democratic voters in Nashville and cram them into three districts that stretch across the state and are filled with reliable Republican voters. Donald Trump would have easily carried all three of the proposed districts in 2020. The plan is one of the clearest, and most brazen, efforts to dismantle a Democratic district to benefit Republicans."... (more)

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