State Reps. Torrey Harris and London Lamar, both Memphis Democrats, would have to compete for one General Assembly seat under a Republican redistricting proposal, Harris said Tuesday, Dec. 14.

Harris said the boundaries of Lamar’s district were extended by several blocks, just enough to include his home at South McLean Boulevard and Union Avenue, according to a tentative map House Republicans allowed him to see.

The House redistricting committee meets Friday afternoon. The Senate redistricting committee met Tuesday but Senate Republicans have not made a proposed map public.

Redistricting begins, with big implications for shrinking Memphis

“They’re targeting certain people,” Harris told The Daily Memphian of Republican redistricting plans. “None of this has to happen the way that they’re doing it.”

Republican leaders say they’re being as transparent as possible with a difficult process. 

“We’re doing our level best to be as transparent (as possible),” Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin), who chairs the committee, told reporters after Tuesday’s hearing.

“(Drawing districts is) an enormous lift. It’s enormously complicated,” Johnson said. “When you push it on one side, it pops out on another.”

Lawmakers from Nashville and Knoxville also say they’ve seen draft maps that pit them against fellow incumbent Democrats.

They say the Republican supermajority has kept them largely in the dark and only allowed them to see their own proposed districts. They weren’t allowed to take pictures.

Most of Lamar’s district would remain intact, Harris said. He’s not sure if his district would be eliminated under this proposal or if it would just lose the area around his apartment building. He said he believed the map he saw was from a different proposal than the ones other Democrats criticized.

Harris and Lamar are the two youngest lawmakers in the state legislature, and they’re among the most progressive in the Democratic caucus. Harris is one of two openly gay state lawmakers.

Harris also said he might consider running for the Memphis City Council or the Shelby County Commission if he’s pitted against his fellow Democratic incumbent.

“Don’t know what I’m going to run for,” he said, “but I guarantee it won’t be against Rep. Lamar.”

West Tennessee shrinks as Nashville area grows

Lawmakers redraw maps every decade after census data reveals population changes.

The total number of lawmakers stays the same, but the boundaries change so that lawmakers have the same number of constituents.

The populations of Memphis and rural northeast and West Tennessee shrank since the last time districts were drawn, while counties in the Nashville metro area grew rapidly. Harris’s and Lamar’s districts were among those that experienced the greatest population loss.

State Senate Democrats, The Equity Alliance and a staffer for U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Nashville), among others, brought maps for the Senate redistricting committee’s consideration Tuesday.

Shawn Trivette, a sociologist and data scientist who used to teach about democracy at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, noted that Republicans have disproportionate power in Congress and the General Assembly. The percentage of seats they occupy is far greater than the percentage of voters who choose Republicans.

“The electoral maps we have been using for the last decade show significant evidence of gerrymandering,” Trivette said. “We see shapes that can charitably be described as odd.”

Trivette and the others who testified offered state Senate maps that keep cities more intact than they are currently.

“They almost make too much sense,” state Sen. Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville) said. “People ought to be able to recognize where their districts are.”

Trivette proposed a Congressional map that keeps U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen’s (D-Memphis) district largely unchanged, while Republican Rep. David Kustoff’s district would include more of rural West Tennessee.

Trivette suggests big changes to the Congressional map in the Nashville area — Cooper’s seat would be almost entirely within Nashville, with two districts covering the suburbs and one covering rural Middle Tennessee.

While neighboring states have held dozens of community meetings on redistricting, Tennessee’s leaders have only held a handful. Still, that’s an improvement over the process a decade ago when there was barely any public input.