Republican Matt Van Epps has won a hotly contested special election for a deep-red congressional seat in Tennessee, NBC News projects, seeing off a Democratic challenge for the longtime GOP district.
Though Donald Trump carried the 7th Congressional District by 22 points in 2024, Republican super PACs poured millions into defending the seat as Van Epps faced off against Aftyn Behn, a Democratic state representative. Democrats spent almost as much trying to capture it, as Trump’s political standing has taken a hit this year and the Democratic Party made gains in November elections in New Jersey, Virginia and other states.
But Democrats did significantly cut the GOP margin in the district from just a year ago. With most of the expected vote counted, Van Epps had a 9-point districtwide lead. It continues a pattern of Democrats making big gains in elections this year compared to the 2024 results.
There are two types of gerrymandering, packing and cracking. A packed district is where you concentrate voters from the opposition party into one district. You give up a seat, but the remaining districts swing more heavily in your favor. A cracked district is what you are describing, where you dilute the margins of the opposition party by breaking up their strongholds into multiple districts and combine them with areas that vote in your favor.
This was not a “middle of nowhere” district as it included a chunk of the city of Nashville and its suburbs. It was a classic cracked gerrymander as Republicans split Nashville into multiple districts and combined them with large swaths of red countryside (see also the notorious Austin gerrymander in Texas). The margins can sometimes be close enough in a cracked district for the opposition party to win, but in this case it was unlikely as it was Trump +22 in 2024 (in spite of including some of Nashville).
I get what you’re saying, but the line I was quoting implied packing voters for your own party into one district, not the opposition. That would achieve the opposite effect.
They were able to spread the district out to the sticks to get more Republicans and dilute democratic votes. It’s a recent district. They basically sliced Nashville into thirds and included more County Americans and white flight bedroom communities.
The formerly-blue district around Nashville, yes, that was butchered and extended out to the sticks to get R votes. But in doing so, you also put more blue voters into those red districts. If you push it too much, a big enough blue shift in those now-kinda purple districts can get multiple Dem districts - all when you tried to take away the one.