After his expulsion Thursday from the Tennessee House in response to a peaceful protest for gun control, state Rep. Justin Jones — one of two Black Democratic legislators expelled by the Republican-controlled statehouse — said that “what the nation is seeing is that we don’t have a democracy in Tennessee.”
Chillingly, data offers some support for Jones’s contention. According to one scholar’s research on democracy in the US, Tennessee is indeed the least democratic state in the entire country.
The research here comes from University of Washington political science professor Jake Grumbach, who wrote a 2022 paper (later expanded into a book) developing the first-ever numerical system for ranking the health of democracy in all 50 US states.
Grumbach’s State Democracy Index (SDI) grades each state on a series of metrics — like the extent to which a state is gerrymandered at the federal level, whether felons can vote, and the like — and then combines the assessments to give each state an overall score from -3 (worst) to 2 (best).
The following maps, taken from his paper, shows each state’s grade on the SDI in 2000 and in 2018. You’ll see that Tennessee is by far the lightest-colored state on the 2018 map — meaning it has the lowest score of any state in the country:
Jake Grumbach/American Political Science Review
Tennessee’s low score in 2018 has a lot to do with its egregious partisan gerrymanders at both the state and federal level — a problem that only got worse in the post-2020 census redistricting cycle. Research from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project shows that there is not a single competitive seat in the state senate — Democrats are so efficiently packed in a handful of strongly Democratic districts that Republicans have a near-guaranteed super-supermajority (over 80 percent of seats!) in the statehouse’s…
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