The New York Times usually does decent reporting, but on occasion, not so much. In what is touted as a straight news article, the Times veered off into editorializing:

If Tennessee’s Legislature Looks Broken, It’s Not Alone

State legislatures around the country — plagued by partisan division, uncompetitive races and gerrymandering — reflect the current pressures on democracy.

by Michael Wines | Thursday, April 13, 2023 | 3:54 AM EDT

WASHINGTON — There are 99 legislators in the Tennessee House of Representatives, the body that voted on Thursday to expel two of its Democratic members for leading an anti-gun protest in the chamber.

Sixty of them had no opponent in last November’s election.

Of the remaining House races, almost none were competitive. Not a single seat flipped from one party to the other.

“We’re just not in a normal political system,” said Kent Syler, a political science professor and expert on state politics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. “In a normal two-party system, if one party goes too far, usually the other party stops them. They put the brakes on.”

In Tennessee, he said, “there’s nobody to put on the brakes.”

And not just in Tennessee.

Nationwide, candidates for roughly four of every 10 state legislative seats run unopposed in general elections.

And across the country, one-party control of state legislatures, compounded by hyperpartisan politics, widespread gerrymandering, an urban-rural divide and uncompetitive races, has made the dysfunction in Tennessee more the rule than the exception.

It took reporter Michael Wines eight paragraphs to get down to the word he wanted to use, ‘gerrymandering.’ Mr Wines wants readers to think that evil reich-wing Republicans are being just unfair!

But look at the county-by-county map of the Volunteer State in the 2020 presidential election. There are 95 counties in Tennessee, and Joe Biden carried exactly three of them. Mr Biden didn’t carry a single county in the eastern half of the state, regions 1 and 2 as defined by the state Department of Transportation. Even Knox County, where the University of Tennessee is located, was carried by President Trump, 124,540 (56.47%) to 91,422 (41.45%). Of the three counties carried by Mr Biden, one, Haywood, is relatively small, and is one of the two counties which have a majority of the population being black. The other two, Davidson (Nashville) and Shelby (Memphis) are large, urban areas. The last time a Republican won Davidson County was 1988, and even in 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, Davidson County was carried by the Democrat, with a whopping 59.08% of the vote.

In 2020, President Trump won 1,852,475 votes, 60.66% of the total, from Tennesseans, compared to 1,143,711, or 37.45%, for Mr Biden. If Republicans have a super-majority in the Tennessee state legislature, it’s because Democrats have gerrymandered themselves, being heavily concentrated in three counties. There’s no way to apportion districts, other than some minor adjustments at the margin, to help Democrats very much.

The 2018 Senate election, 2018 gubernatorial election, 2020 Senate election, and 2022 gubernatorial election, all statewide races and thus not subject to gerrymandering by anybody, all showed the same thing: heavy Republican victories, with the same three counties being the only ones carried by the Democratic candidate. In the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, incumbent Republican even carried Haywood County, albeit by a small margin.

We have previously documented the same type of thing in Kentucky, where a liberal Lexington Herald-Leader columnist whined that “gerrymandered political districts do not represent the will of the people”, but the state legislative and congressional results fairly accurately represented the actual votes of Kentuckians.

Pennsylvania is a great example of the problem: in 2020, Joe Biden carried the Keystone State by 80,555 votes, 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377674 (48.84%), but only because he carried Philadelphia 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), a margin of 471,050 votes. Without Philly, Mr Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%). The Democratic vote has effectively gerrymandered itself, concentrating in major cities, smaller geographical areas, while sensible people are more likely to live in more suburban and rural areas.

In the 2004 elections, President George W Bush got zero votes in five Philadelphia precincts; John Kerry won twenty congressional districts by greater percentages than Mr Bush’s best district, yet President Bush won nationwide 62,040,610 (50.73%) to 59,028,444 (48.27%). In 2008, John McCain got zero votes in a whopping 57 city precincts, and four years later, Mitt Romney was blanked in 59 precincts. The Philadelphia Inquirer, of course, could find no evidence of fraud in any of this, but it points out a fact that everyone knows, but the Democrats just don’t want to talk about: Democrats, and Democrat votes, are very heavily concentrated in our major cities. At 142.7 square miles, out of Pennsylvania’s 46,055 mi², 0.31% of the state’s total area, how would you redistrict Philadelphia to not gerrymander the state of Pennsylvania?

Oddly enough, we don’t seem to see the left whining about gerrymandering in states like New York and California, where Republicans don’t have much of a chance.

But it is Republican-run states, many experts say, that are taking extreme positions on limiting voting and bending or breaking other democratic norms, as Tennessee did in expelling two lawmakers last week.

Perhaps Mr Wines has forgotten that congressional Democrats wanted to expel Republican members who they claim supported the Capitol kerfuffle, and probably would have, if they had a strong enough majority. While I disapprove of the Tennessee House expelling the two Democrat members — both of whom have been reappointed by their local governments pending special elections — this is an example of what goes around, comes around.

It’s simple: with accepted rules for drawing legislative districts calling for as close as is reasonably practical in the number of residents and that districts should be contiguous and at least reasonably compact, and cities in which Democrats have huge percentage advantages, there aren’t that many ways to draw district boundaries reasonably which don’t pack Democrats into a smaller number of districts, unless a state is heavily Democratic as a whole.

So when you hear about the left combitching — yes, I created that word myself, and the etymology ought to be obvious 🙂 — about gerrymandering, remember: they did it to themselves.
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Related article:

• The First Street Journal: A Republican Form of Government

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