D.J. on drawing lines

Some comments deserve their own post. This is one of them. D.J. Jones on why Democrats have power still in the state house. From this post.


"It's gerrymandering. The Democrats in this state are masters of the art. After Baker v. Carr forced the White Democrat establishment in the state to reapportion the lines, the Republicans made huge gains within a few cycles. By the 1968 elections, the Republicans elected 49 House members (tied with the Democrats 49) with 1 Independent member. At the organization of the 1969 session, Republican leader Bill Jenkins (the future Congressman) persuaded a Black Democrat member to vote for him, and he won the 50 votes needed to become the first GOP House Speaker in TN since Reconstruction and the first GOP leader of ANY legislative body in the South since the 1890s.

After the Dems won a narrow majority in 1970, from that point on, they used ruthless gerrymandering tactics to prevent the emerging GOP majority from taking root. They have NOT received a majority of the vote for House seats, despite having a several seat majority, since 1992.

But how can the Democrat party hold a majority of seats when they get only a MINORITY of the vote ? Simple. By corralling Republicans into districts where they vote in huge numbers for the GOP candidate while more marginal districts and Dem districts vote in much smaller numbers for Democrats.

Nashville/Davidson County is a stark example. Of 10 legislative seats, only 1 is Republican-held (and is heavily so, the result of two Republican districts mashed together in the early '90s to eliminate the seat of the then-GOP House Leader).
That means the Democrats hold 90% of the House seats in Nashville, but only get (in contested elections) about a 60-40% (or less) margin of the vote. Meaning that there should be 4 Republicans out of 10 in Nashville.

Until we get control of redistricting, Democrats will continue their 40-year (actually, you could say ONE HUNDRED and forty year) tactic of disenfranchising what is now a Republican voting majority. That isn't "democratic" by any stretch of the imagination.

The liberal media will never report on this injustice in TN because only Democrats can be victims of Republicans. When we get control of redistricting, watch the Dem/media howl at how "unfair" we are to the poor Democrats. I'd say what's fair is to reduce them to less than a 70R-29D seat margin in the House until 2153. 140 years for us for a change is about right."


The one one bad example is where a prison population is used to count the number of constituents. They can not vote but their numbers in the thousands go into re appropriation of the district numbers. Lets just, for example sake, say Lois Deberry has a prison in her district that has 20 thousand prisoners in it. Her district will only have about 38 thousand people that could vote for her instead of 58 thousand. Of the 38K, some are not legal voters or registered so her election totals could only be a few hundred votes in a solid Democrat district. Where republican districts could be 4 to 8 thousand or more.