By Adam Friedman | Reporter
Good morning, Lookout readers:
Today, I have the lead story for you about the Democratic Party’s chances of winning any of Tennessee’s U.S. Congressional races.
To catch you up, state lawmakers redrew Tennessee’s U.S. House map in May. It was the first midcycle redistricting in decades, and was triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states like Tennessee with a history of racial discrimination did not have to draw majority-minority districts anymore.
Republicans held an 8-1 advantage in the state after a 2022 redistricting cycle that saw the GOP split Nashville across three House districts to flip it. Lawmakers essentially did the same thing to Memphis in May.
As a result, if you take the map that passed in May 2026 and run the 2024 Presidential election results on it, President Donald Trump would have won every congressional district by 20 percentage points.
“A really effective gerrymander,” as one election expert told me.
So even in a good year nationally for the Democratic Party, Tennessee’s map is heavily tilted towards Republicans. In 2018, the last midterm election with Trump in charge, the most successful Democratic candidate won an upstate New York U.S. House district Trump carried by 15.5 percentage points in the previous presidential election.
Check out my story below for more details.
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