Electoral gerrymandering, extreme version | The Press

(Nashville, Tennessee) Jim Cooper was until recently a popular Democratic politician in Nashville, the country music capital of Tennessee.

Today, it is no longer. And he is bitter.

You can feel it in the content of his words. In the tone of his voice, too. A dull anger sometimes arises there. The tongue-in-cheek is over for him.

He served for more than 30 years in the U.S. Congress in Washington. He was the representative of the 5^e district of his state. But his political career ended abruptly last year.

“It was not political suicide. It was a political murder. That’s a good quote for you, that. No ? “, he says during an interview in the offices of a firm in the finance sector, where he now works – in addition to teaching law students at one of the universities in Nashville.

He was the one who threw in the towel. He decided not to run again at the end of his term in January 2023.

Except that we must also specify that we didn’t really give him a choice.

The district where he had been elected since his debut in politics in 1983 was completely remodeled… by his rivals.

He was the victim of a gerrymandering operation carried out by the Republicans, who control the Tennessee Legislature.

Previously, Jim Cooper’s district essentially corresponded to the city of Nashville, where Democrats are in the majority.

By modifying its borders, approximately a third of the original voters were retained and those from a vast territory extending to the southwest, more than an hour’s drive from the center of the metropolis, were added. .

A territory which includes a majority of Republican supporters.

Jim Cooper’s other traditional voters who live in Nashville were matched with two other districts, where Republican voters are also in excess.

A bit as if the government of François Legault had decided, to give a boost to the conservatives before the next federal elections, to review the boundaries of the riding of liberal MP François-Philippe Champagne to ensure that he would not be re-elected.

As a result, the vote of the Democrats in Nashville is diluted in such a way that, from now on, they are represented by three elected Republicans in the American Congress.

This is an extreme case of partisan redistricting, done in disregard of democratic norms, which is not uncommon in the United States today.

“It’s a natural human thing to abuse your opponent, and both parties do it. But Republicans are better at this. More professional and cooler,” assures Jim Cooper.

He notes that the political formation has been transformed, both in Tennessee and elsewhere in the United States. In recent history, several Republican elected officials in his state were “respectable people,” says Jim Cooper.

When we talk about this extreme redistricting, we often use the expression gerrymandering. A word derived from the name of former Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry. In 1812, this elected official reshuffled a district in such a crude manner that once it was butchered, it resembled a salamander.

In Tennessee, the gerrymandering is used to restrict Democrats’ access to the House of Representatives of the US Congress in Washington, where Jim Cooper sat, but also to the State Legislature.

This causes, both in Washington and in Nashville, an obvious problem in terms of representativeness.

Based on the results of the last presidential election, there are approximately four Democratic voters (37% voted for Joe Biden) in this state for every six Republican voters (61% voted for Donald Trump).

But Republicans control eight of Tennessee’s nine seats in the House of Representatives in Washington and nearly 80 percent of the seats in both chambers of the Legislature in Nashville.

The impact of this extreme redistricting on democracy is even more profound.

It’s simple: if a candidate is sure to win in a district, why would a rival be tempted to challenge him?

Voting is exercising a choice. But in the most recent elections for the Tennessee Legislature, in just over one in two races (56.2%), there was only one candidate running.

That’s what I learned from Dawn Schluckebier, one of the leaders of the organization ThinkTennessee, which is trying to revitalize democracy in a state that ranked last in the country in terms of participation rate in the most recent elections (2022).

A job that is anything but obvious.