Take away Memphis and see how much the hue of Tennessee shifts towards 0°.
Take away New York, or Baltimore, or Detroit, or any city really. It has long since ceased to be a state level thing. The system however is still running like it’s the 1840’s.
Tennessee is somewhat of an outlier, as its other major cities skew red, though at least in part artificially so. Nashville, for example, is part of three different districts now, the 5th, 6th, and 7th. It’s been lost to gerrymandering. Knoxville, in the 2nd, and Chattanooga in the 3rd are heavily Republican cities.
The 4th contains conservative-leaning private universities and suburbs of Nashville and Chattanooga.
The 9th District, colloquially “Memphis” in my previous statement, is the only district in the state that currently has a significantly strong Democratic voter base. If anything, it became even more blue after the 2023 re-districting moved part of East Memphis to the already conservative 8th district.
Of the districts other than Memphis, the 5th, which can be thought of as the ghost of Nashville, is the closest to even resembling purple; even so, it has a CVPI of R+9.
