When a Legislature Goes to War With Its State’s Richest City

‘They’ve been stealing seats.’

Tennessee was not ever thus. This is, after all, a state in which then-Senator Al Gore, a Democrat, carried every county in his 1990 re-election bid. “When I started in 1994, Democrats were in control of the House, the Senate, as well as the executive branch” statewide, said Larry Miller, a Memphis-area Democratic representative who is one of the longest-serving legislators in the Tennessee House. His tenure has overlapped with those of five governors — two Democrats and three Republicans. He was in his third term when Gore lost his home state in 2000. When Barack Obama started running for president, sometime in Miller’s seventh term, Miller noticed the rightward shift really accelerate. “The Republicans,” he said, “began every two years to gain more and more seats in the state.”

In the decade or so since Republicans claimed a supermajority in both legislative chambers in 2012 — which effectively allows them to pass party-line laws without any votes from their handful of Democratic colleagues — the state has also grown, particularly the central zone that includes Nashville. Boosters have lately pitched the area to good effect as a kind of Silicon Valley of the South and, according to research from the Greater Nashville Technology Council, Middle Tennessee’s tech job growth exploded by more than 50 percent between 2015 and 2020, outpacing the national average. Amazon has set up shop there and Oracle has vowed to bring thousands more jobs to the area; other companies one wouldn’t think of as “tech” per se, such as Bridgestone and Nissan, have relocated their headquarters to Nashville and brought an army of tech jobs with them; and this being “Music City,” Apple, YouTube and Spotify all have a music tech presence here. The Wall Street Journal has dubbed Nashville 2022’s “hottest” job market, edging out Austin, Texas; another report found Tennessee leading the country in tech workers moving to the state since the pandemic. “Companies keep moving and opening new jobs. As soon as we fill them, we have more to fill,” said Elise Cambournac, the CEO of the Greater Nashville Technology Council.  

This is one reason greater Nashville is the economic engine of the state, accounting for some 40 percent of the state’s GDP. (Another major one is tourism and, if there’s one bipartisan issue in the city, it’s annoyance with bachelorette parties.) And, though no one measures this directly, the city’s growing hordes of millennial tech workers may have contributed to its slight blue-ening over time — a Vanderbilt University poll shows an uptick of city residents calling themselves liberal or very liberal since it was first conducted in 2015, albeit from 26 percent to 30 percent. (They outnumber conservatives by six points, and self-described moderates handily prevail over both.) But metro-area residents do vote for Democrats: In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden notched nearly 65 percent in the county that includes Nashville, a five-point improvement over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing there. So the “Silicon Valley of the South” thing isn’t necessarily driving a huge cultural shift as much as showcasing a low-tax, quite affordable alternative to living in the actual Silicon Valley.