US House Redistricting: Tennessee

[silverpie]

OK, here we go. It's in three images because Tennessee is a pretty long state.

For starters, this is without partisan data. Criteria I used were making the numbers (2008) fit, keeping counties/cities/communities-of-interest together, compactness, and not putting two incumbents in the same district.


Home counties are Washington (blue), Knox (green), and Hamilton (purple).
Blue includes all of the traditional Upper East area, as well as its neighbor counties. The few "stray" precincts are just to get the population right.

The green/purple boundary fixes a misfeature of the current map--there is no reason for both of those districts to stretch the full height of the state. In particular, the southeast corner is much more closely tied to Chattanooga than to Knoxville. Purple also reaches into Anderson County to keep the city of Oak Ridge together. I'd have preferred to have all of Monroe in green, but purple can't expand west as you would think (red's incumbent lives in Marion County).



Incumbents are in Marion (red), Davidson (yellow), and Sumner (dark teal).
Yellow, of course, starts from Nashville, which (as both a county and a city) I considered it a priority to keep intact. After trying several ways to bring it up to a quota, I settled on picking up the two cities now linked to Nashville by the Music City Star (Cheatham is much more rural, so less community-of-interest than Wilson, and Williamson would risk catching gray's incumbent.
Dark teal is a "suburban crescent" running from Murfreesboro, through Gallatin/Hendersonville, over to Clarksville. The non-Rutherford part is also a long-standing high school region (in Tennessee, that's something people think of a lot in terms of identifying "their" area). It includes Trousdale to preserve the traditional boundary between the Upper Cumberland and Mid-Cumberland areas.



Incumbents are in Williamson (gray), Crockett (blurple), and Shelby (turquoise).
To put it bluntly, two cross-river districts is a stupid idea, much less ones that touch both Nashville and Memphis. Gray thus starts with the rest of Middle Tennessee, and simply adds territory moving westward until it has enough. Weakley gets split because its multiple towns allow for adequate population tweaking without cutting through one. Finally, it seemed that turquoise could be made more compact by expanding it from its core (Memphis) up the Arkansas line instead of east along the border with Mississippi.

The largest deviation from quota in this map is 745. If that were a less strict requirement, I would move the one gray precinct in Robertson County into dark-teal with the rest of the county; the maximum deviation would then be just over 2,000.

[silverpie]

I don't see that happening for two reasons: (1) that could be seen as a minority-influence district--only 27.1% black and 7.5% Latino, but I doubt they want the appearance of trouble there (not to mention the risk of an actual court fight), and (2) it could backfire and yield two Midstate Democrats if there's a swing back.

The only way I see it happening is if the House minority leader (in TN, the maps are drawn by the party leaders and then submitted to the legislature as a whole) throws Cooper overboard to get a safer district for himself (he represents a curious district that includes the old-money part of Nashville). Other than that, having not quite won 2/3 for governor, I think they settle for the 7-2 they have now.