There is no single origin point, or person, solely responsible for the electoral maps that today determine the balance of political power in Tennessee. Technically, the state’s nine U.S. reps determine which party has a governing advantage in the House of Representatives. Maps are power in democracy, and three years after GOP-controlled committees approved new state House, Senate and congressional districts, many are still unwilling to say who exactly controlled the process or who first suggested the new boundaries. Tennessee’s redrawn congressional districts are particularly shrouded — “Above my pay grade,” one Republican lawmaker tells the Scene, the issue still sensitive enough that he asks for anonymity.
Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) carried the maps in the state Senate, while Rep. Pat Marsh (R-Shelbyville) sponsored the legislation in the state House. The legislation itself directly amended state law, piecing together population quotas with counties, voting districts and 10-digit census block numbers. Tennessee’s population grew almost 9 percent between 2010 and 2020, unevenly across the state’s many counties, giving redistricting committees in the House and Senate a decade’s worth of new data to work with. Doug Himes likes to call it a giant jigsaw puzzle.
“ It’s a fun puzzle, and it’s not an easy thing to do,” Himes, the Tennessee House’s ethics counsel, explains by phone. “ I’ve never felt political pressure to draw a map any particular way, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not — there’s some element of a political process. That’s just part of it. The party with the majority typically tends to control the process.”
Himes produced new boundaries for the chamber’s 99 districts throughout fall 2021. The effort included meetings with all 99 incumbent state representatives. It was Himes’ fourth redistricting process. Today’s state House and Senate districts are still subject to a lawsuit pending in the Tennessee Supreme Court and closely followed by Himes, as it calls into question his work. The court heard arguments 11 months ago and has not yet ruled.
“ Congressional ones, there’s a little bit more ability to be — well, creative,” says Himes when asked about drawing districts toward specific electoral ends — political gerrymandering. “The House and Senate plans, there’s more guidelines built into our state constitution about how those districts are drawn.”
Himes doesn’t know when he first saw Tennessee’s redrawn congressional districts, but he traces them to Memphis attorney John Ryder. Formerly counsel to the Republican National Committee, Ryder was well-versed in election law and well-regarded by the national party. He died of cancer in May 2022.
When Republican leadership in each chamber’s redistricting committee brought the maps in, the new lines were immediately controversial. While state lawmakers hemmed and hawed about losing important constituents or gaining certain geographic areas, Davidson County’s longtime congressional seat disappeared altogether.
For decades, the county’s population had neatly matched a single U.S. House district, giving Nashville its own representative in D.C. Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat, held the seat for 10 consecutive terms. Cooper had hustled at hearings and public events to protest what he saw as a crime against democracy. On Jan. 12, 2022, he provided his diagnosis: “As I’ve been warning for almost a year, the General Assembly has formally begun gerrymandering Nashville and Davidson County into political oblivion.”
Even U.S. Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, a prominent Trump-aligned Clarksville Republican, blasted the new districts as “inherently unfair” and “drawn for politicians” instead of people. Green went on to win his new seat comfortably in 2022 and 2024.
State Democrats did not have the votes to put up any resistance.
“When we talk about ensuring ‘free and safe elections,’ many people think that’s about China stealing our votes or the Russians hacking our systems,” says state Rep. Bob Freeman, a Nashville Democrat who served on the House Redistricting Committee. “The reality is, these districts are guaranteed to be D or an R, and at the end of the day, they’re 80-20 seats. Either they can’t beat us, or we can’t beat them. The system’s broken.”
Freeman points out that the committee, led by Republican Reps. Marsh and Curtis Johnson (R-Clarksville), didn’t even vote on the alternative maps Democrats proposed.
“ The whole thing was just a show,” Freeman recalls. “I even looked at Pat because I was so mad, like, ‘Why are we even here?’ We’re supposed to be vetting these maps as a committee, but we haven’t seen them before, and we don’t consider anything else. It was just a rubber stamp.”
The Cook Political Report estimates just 18 of the country’s 435 House races will be toss-ups in 2026. Democrats in Texas ran into the same quandary in August, choosing to flee to Illinois to deny Republicans a quorum in the unilaterally controlled state capital. Newly proposed GOP maps in Texas will likely shift five more of the state’s 38 seats to Republicans. The highly publicized partisan battle has spun off counter-efforts by Democrat-held states like California and New York in retaliation. Seen as territory to manipulate, the country begins to look more like a puzzle or board game than a robust nation where elections test competing ideas and philosophies.
Before becoming a Democratic state senator, Charlane Oliver — at the time the executive director at Black voting rights nonprofit the Equity Alliance — underscored Nashvillians’ frustrations at a January 2022 hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“With no notice, little debate and no explanation for why these plans were drawn in such a manner, mapmakers have carved up Nashville-Davidson County into three congressional seats, creating an unprecedented extreme gerrymander that splits the Black voting age population down to 11.8 percent, 8.6 percent and 15.5 percent,” Oliver told her future colleagues. “I’m concerned that long-term Nashville residents like me are being forced to compete for our interests with rural residents in our district rather than share common interests.”
The Voting Rights Act, landmark civil rights legislation passed in 1965, offers some federal protections for Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District. It’s the state’s only majority-minority district and the only seat currently held by a Democrat, Memphis’ Steve Cohen. While the Supreme Court struck down the act’s powerful pre-clearance requirement in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder — a provision that required redrawn majority-minority districts to first get approved by the federal Department of Justice — slicing Memphis like Nashville would have provoked strong legal challenges for diluting the Black vote.
Instead, Republicans distributed Middle Tennessee’s Black voters across the 5th, 6th and 7th districts. Nashville’s heavily Democratic vote is now diluted, mixed in among the rural voters of three districts. Outside of Memphis, the only counties meaningfully split by congressional lines are Davidson, Williamson and Wilson, the engines of Tennessee’s population growth in the past 10 years. All three of Nashville’s districts avoid Murfreesboro, another population center with a burgeoning Democratic vote.
Oliver’s point goes beyond the lines’ deadening impact on Black political power: Gerrymandering produces districts that simply don’t make sense beyond having the required number of voters. Different economies, different demographics, different cultures, different education hubs, different ways of life all reflect different people with separate interests. Tasking one member of Congress with any one of these districts sets up an impossible balancing and advocacy act, making each member less effective at the job.
Democrats have little left to lose heading into the Dec. 2 special election for Tennessee’s 7th District. Green’s abrupt resignation in July put a national spotlight on the race and has already made the primary, set for Oct. 7, a proving ground for each party’s competing elements in an uncertain political environment dominated by Trump’s shadow. As Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee’s 5th sinks further into debt and scandal, a credible Democratic challenger has emerged in Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder.
Both races have caught the eye of the D.C.-based Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s powerful funding and operations control center, which scours the country for the six seats necessary to win back the House of Representatives. Republican U.S. Rep. John Rose’s campaign for governor leaves open Tennessee’s 6th Congressional District in 2026. Rose has not faced a serious Democratic challenger in any of his four campaigns for Congress.
History and data show that gerrymandering has worked, delivering easy victories for Republicans in two straight cycles. The future is less certain.
Disclosure: Rep. Bob Freeman is also president of Scene parent company Freeman Webb.
In 2022, Tennessee’s Republican supermajority carved Nashville into three new congressional districts. Here’s how that has played out since.
