Did Tennessee do it the wrong way?

Drive them out. Drive them all out.

Or deport them. Whichever is cheaper.

There has been at least one weird district in Tennessee since the 70s and it centers on Memphis/Shelby County. The 7th would stretch from Memphis all the way up to clarksville at the Kentucky border just north of Nashville. And.or it would go from Memphis to the south/southwest suburbs of Nashville.
The 8th would usually get parts of Memphis and take all of teh northwestern rural part of the state.

And the reason it was created that way in the 70s was to benefit Democrats by putting the suburban voters in Memphis and Nashville, that were trending Republican, into one district, thereby creating 3 or 4 safe Democrat seats : the 9th, 8th, 5th, and most likely the 6th.

Not calling you out, but the reason Democrats can get people all emotional about this stuff is because most people do not understand the history. They think this gerrymandering business just started with the men ole Republicans doing it. Which is, of course, absurd.

The pragmatist in me wants geographic and culturally representative districts. If they happen to lean R or D, so be it. This comes from my belief in the philosophy of Utahism: that borders should reflect the geographical, demographic, cultural, and historical realities of the people living within them. Distinct populations should get to govern themselves. It’s the logical conclusion of nationalism plus balkanism.

The realist in me understands that the motivation of people drawing the districts will always be cynically partisan, and the only option will be either drawing everything red or everything blue. America has been in a cold civil war for over a decade now, and it’s going to get worse before it gets any better. The courts opened pandora’s box, and they will need to make a lot more rulings before we reach anything remotely logical or stable.

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They think this gerrymandering business just started with the men ole Republicans doing it. Which is, of course, absurd.

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The Dems did it years ago. The current status quo is changing and they are crying foul. How else it is possible that 7 states had 40% of the vote go to Trump and they have ALL dem reps in the house and senate.

Utahism allows consituents to vote with their feet. When states have arbitrary borders, they inevitably lump together groups of people who have very different philosophies on life, values, wants, and needs. This leads to a zero sum game between competing factions. Look no further than Louisiana. New Orleans and Shreveport barely belong on the same planet let alone the same state. Philly and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania is another such example.

Europe has borders that make sense because they were fought over. Their regional governments have boundaries that are rarely arbitrary, giving their regions distinct identities. This allows those regions to have representation that actually fits their identity.

One flaw in the American system is our arbitrary borders, imo. These borders create states where the residents have little to nothing in common with one-another even down to their more granular local governments. As a result, it is easier to nationalize politics because of the lack of anything unifying local constituents.

Redrawing state borders is, at this stage, impossible and impractical. However, we could achieve some semblance of this without redrawing state borders by ensuring congressional maps reflect the internal cultural and geographic divisions of a state as much as is practical. That way, the politicians elected to represent those districts are more likely to be recognizably identifiable as being of that district than merely being the political equivalent of professional athletes in free agency moving around wherever the money takes them.

13% of the population should have 13% of the representation. No more. No less.

It’s the faux conservatives not having the backbone to ever fight back: “meh it’s too hard and the media will outrage” argument

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The Dems did it years ago. The current status quo is changing and they are crying foul. How else it is possible that 7 states had 40% of the vote go to Trump and they have ALL dem reps in the house and senate.

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The timing is perfect as well. To so many, as proved by the democrat voters defecting countrywide to the GOP, it is obvious the policies created by those elected due to gerrymandering are killing the American way of living and life.