Cultivating Anti-Democratic Tendencies in Tennessee

The question of Tennessee’s democratic health in 2022 is more difficult to assess than you might expect. Several key indicators when examining the state of the state leads you to believe that democratic health is not good, but when Tennessee is placed within a more historical context, it would be easy to argue that Tennessee’s democracy has never been all that healthy. This brief assessment will examine the composition of the state government which ties directly to anti-civil rights and anti-democracy legislation the state continues to pursue. Second is the proposed restructuring of education, and last being the trend of turning non-partisan local offices and judgeships into partisan offices.

Tennessee is a single-party state currently dominated by the Republican Party, which holds the Governor’s office and all state-level elected positions and a super-majority in the state legislature. The State Senate currently has 27 Republican and 5 Democratic members. The State General Assembly House of Representatives currently has 72 Republican and 26 Democratic members. The partisan distribution of seats in the legislature gives the Republican Party a super-majority effectively rendering the minority party members powerless. Within the current partisan climate where state politics have been nationalized, the majority party can pursue their agenda with no check from the minority party, which means lawmaking in Tennessee is a focus largely on culture war issues that remove civil rights from many citizens while ignoring the structural and service needs of the state. There are several key examples of this.

First, with 2020 being a census year, the legislature recently passed their new district maps for the state level and for the US House of Representatives. Tennessee has 9 seats in the US House, currently held by 7 Republican and 2 Democratic representatives. The new map recently passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor would crack the Democratic controlled district of Nashville into 3 Republican incumbent districts, effectively removing one Democratic seat and swinging the partisan balance to 8 Republican and 1 Democratic seat. Similar efforts were made at the state level where Tennessee’s complex districting laws were abused to redistrict multiple Democratic incumbents into the same district while expanding districts for Republicans.  The cumulative effect of these efforts is solidifying and centralizing even more power for Republicans while diminishing opposing voices and reducing representation for non-Republican or non-conservative groups.

Tennessee’s single party state status directly connects to voter turnout, which is another metric of civic health. Turnout among the voting eligible population in Tennessee has been decreasing since the 1990s. Voter turnout in Tennessee during presidential election cycles between 1994 and 2020 averages 59.6% and is consistently below the national average. In 1996, turnout was 64.2% and in 2020 it was 59.8%. Turnout in midterm elections in Tennessee in 1994 was 57.14% and in 2018 it was 47.8%, averaging 43.3% during that period, again, below the national average. Average turnout during state office primaries in the same period is 36.8% as Tennessee holds state office primaries at different times than federal office primaries. Voter turnout in Tennessee remains low in comparison to the rest of the nation with the state consistently placing in the bottom 10 states for voter turnout.

The downward trend of low voter turnout over the past two decades has allowed for the election of representatives with more extremist views and policy positions, reinforcing the growth of culture war legislation despite many of these positions not being widely popular among the general public. As state politics have become more linked to national partisan polarization, Tennessee continues to align with other Republican dominated states in reinforcing the national “culture war” politics the Republican Party has pursued over the past 30+ years.

In Tennessee, low voter turnout coupled to partisan identity politics grounded in long-standing systemic racism leads to a state government unbeholden to the minority party or any citizens who fall outside the dominant Republican Party ideology. Since Tennessee Democrats hold so few seats in the legislature, there is no check on the worst inclinations of Republicans that prevent from pursuing an extremist policy agenda seeking to remove civil rights from large swaths of Tennessee citizens. The authoritarian and anti-democratic turn by Tennessee Republicans has been reinforced by their continued claims of election fraud in 2020 leading to the election being “stolen” for Joe Biden. Multiple legislators have backed a bill this year calling on the state to conduct a full audit of the 2020 election, regardless that former President Trump won the state by nearly two-thirds of the popular vote and all 11 electoral votes.

Indicators of declining civic and democratic health in Tennessee are shown by the dozens of bills introduced and passed in the state legislature that specifically target women’s reproductive health care and access to health care, anti-LGBTQ+ civil rights including numerous anti-transgender laws now being challenged in the courts, and more recently, bills targeting school and reading curriculum preventing the teaching of history and discussions about racism in America under the guise of anti-Critical Race Theory, an analytical theory that has never been part of the K-12 curriculum.

Tennessee is consistently in the bottom 5 states when it comes to education spending, a trend that has been reinforced by the Republican super-majority legislature and now used to justify spending more public money to a private, for-profit conservative charter school company based in Michigan. Currently, Governor Bill Lee’s proposal to spend millions of public-school dollars with Hillsdale College is in part driven by wanting a conservative version of American nationalism taught in Tennessee’s public schools that mirrors former President Trump’s 1776 Project, itself an extremist blowback to the popular 1619 Project. The dangerous rewriting of history Governor Lee’s proposal will have on Tennessee citizens if implemented will be felt for generations and once again seeks to diminish honest conversations of hard issues that can help grow civic health rather than hinder it.

In keeping with Tennessee’s history, there are community and statewide organizations seeking to protect civil rights and democracy in the state that held the first lunch counter protests for desegregation in Nashville in 1960. Statewide and local chapters of national organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the League of Women Voters (LWV) continue to be active with citizens and in legal challenges to state laws. Between the Governor and state legislature, millions of dollars are budgeted  to pay for legal fees in fighting lawsuits that arise from challenges to unconstitutional laws passed by the state. More recently, in response to attacks on civil and voting rights, new organizations are forming across the state including the Equity Alliance, Organize Tennessee, the Tennessee Vote Project, and the TN Campus Democracy Network. These groups seek to build community and increase civil health to reverse trends in low voter turnout and participation.

There are plenty of other examples and indicators showing poor democratic and civic health in Tennessee brought about by single-party dominance under an ever increasingly extremist Republican Party. While there are signs of hope as civic and community groups continue to work to organize and fight anti-civil rights and voting rights laws, in many ways Tennessee has not changed since the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow era. While the parties are different, Tennessee continues the trend of being a one-party dominated state grounded in more extremist views that center on opposing civil and voting rights for certain groups, demonstrating the prevalence of systemic racism within the state, its government, and its laws.