I voted last week. Early voting in Tennessee runs through Oct. 29, and like a lot of Republicans, I wanted my ballot banked early. My party holds the governorship, both Senate seats, and legislative supermajorities. This month a federal court upheld a congressional map drawn to make Tennessee's House delegation nine Republicans and no Democrats.
By every structural measure, Tennessee Republicans have never been stronger. So somebody should probably say out loud what plenty of us are quietly thinking: This November’s election could still go sideways.
How Republicans redrew the map
Recall how the map got here.
After the Supreme Court narrowed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, President Donald Trump urged Tennessee to act. Gov. Bill Lee called a special session in May,
and the legislature repealed the state law that barred changing districts between censuses, then passed a new map within days.
Memphis was split among three districts, the Nashville area among five, and the state's only majority Black district was dismantled. Republicans did not pretend otherwise. One of the bill's Senate carriers called the map Tennessee's attempt to maximize the party's partisan advantage, and said it like a man reading a weather report. Other than tears of the crocodile variety, there’s no crying in hardball partisan politics.
On the other hand, Republicans have a strong argument as to why they wanted to run the entire congressional delegation. Tennessee is a conservative state that gave Trump nearly two-thirds of its vote in 2024. Partisan redistricting is legal; the Supreme Court has said so plainly. Every serious forecast still has Republicans winning both target seats, and the smart money says the delegation wakes up on Nov. 4 at 9-0. If this election ran on the assumptions baked into the 2024 results, the conversation would already be over.
The margins are thinner now
Here is the problem.
The map was drawn on an assumption: that Republicans would remain the only viable electoral option in Tennessee for the decade, so nobody needed to price in an extraordinarily bad political cycle testing much thinner margins for error. But maps are not drawn on assumptions. They are drawn on voters, spread thicker or thinner, and this map spreads them thin exactly where it reached furthest.
The districts it engineered cluster around 60 to 40 on the 2024 vote, including an 8th District that fell from a 41-point Trump margin to a 20-point one. The old 9th District voted for Kamala Harris 71 to 27. The new one would have voted for Donald Trump 60 to 39. That is a flip on paper. It is also a majority that has never voted as one, assembled from pieces of Memphis bolted onto rural counties.
Consider the 5th District. Republicans redrew it to protect Andy Ogles, a scandal magnet who could not raise money, and Republican primary voters fired him anyway. His replacement, former Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher, is a credible nominee running in a district the president carried by more than 20 points. A poll released this month, admittedly paid for by his opponent's campaign, puts Hatcher ahead of Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder by five, 46 to 41, with very motivated voters split exactly even.
The same poll finds 51% of the district disapproving of the president. Molder has outraised Hatcher nearly 2-to-1. Molder is the closest thing Tennessee has produced in a generation to an electable congressional Southern Democrat: a mayor running on prices, tariffs, and ending a war, endorsed by the Blue Dog Coalition and backed by the national party.
Districts drawn this red are not supposed to attract that candidate, or give him a race. This one has done both.
Or consider the 9th, where Steve Cohen retired rather than run in the district built to end him, where a Democratic poll in September put the open seat within four points, and where Shelby County's early vote through the first three days ran nearly double its 2022 pace.
Early voting offers a warning
Statewide, more than 490,000 Tennesseans had voted by Tuesday, about two-thirds more than at the same point in 2022. The loudest surges are in Davidson and Shelby counties, the two Democratic strongholds Republicans worked hardest to dilute. Two weeks ago, I wrote that the Republican problem in these midterms is leadership rather than policy. A map cannot fix that. It can only decide how much of the bill comes due at once.
Vanderbilt law professor James Blumstein warned in May: "The danger to any gerrymandering party, whether it's Democrat or Republican, is it can slice-and-dice too tight."
The national weather is not cooperating either. The president spent this week in Iowa, a state he won by 13 points, shoring up Republicans who are breaking with him over war and prices. Midterm electorates punish the president's party in good years. This is not a good year, and Tennessee Republicans need nearly everything to go right in it.
The map cannot eliminate risk
None of this predicts a Democratic breakthrough in Tennessee. It predicts something more modest and more damning: state Republicans realizing that they can’t take their majority for granted, and Democrats finding out that running actual Blue Dogs is the only chance they have to win.
Gerrymanders do not eliminate risk. They concentrate it, quietly, in the districts drawn thinnest, and they send the invoice in the one year the mapmakers swore could not happen. Early voting suggests the Democratic voters in Memphis and Nashville noticed what was done with their ballots. If enough Republicans hit snooze instead of voting, Democrats might just pull off an unlikely upset – or two.
USA TODAY Network Tennessee columnist Cameron Smith is a Memphis-born, Brentwood-raised recovering political attorney raising four boys in Nolensville with his particularly patient wife, Justine. Send outrage or agreement to smith.david.cameron@gmail.com or @DCameronSmith on X. Agree or disagree? Send a letter to the editor at letters@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: TN Republicans bet big on redistricting. Now comes the test | Opinion
