Pres-by-LD: Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation comes to Tennessee, where the GOP holds massive majorities in both chambers. You can find our master list of states here, which we'll be updating as we add new data sets; you can also find all of our calculations from 2016 and past cycles here.
Democrats ran both the Tennessee state House and state Senate from Reconstruction until the early part of the 21st Century. The GOP took a tiny Senate majority in 2004, but two Republicans voted to keep Democrat John S. Wilder, who had led the chamber since 1971, as speaker of the Senate. However, Team Red kept their majorities in 2006 and a Democrat delivered the pivotal vote that finally gave the GOP control.
A similar thing happened two years later in the state House, where the GOP seized a one-vote majority. Every Democrat backed Republican backbencher Kent Williams in the speaker race, keeping control out of the hands of the GOP leadership for another term. But the 2010 GOP landslide gave Republicans a hefty 64-34 majority (Williams won another two terms as an independent before retiring), and they got to draw the maps for both chambers. Today, just ten years after Wilder finally lost the Senate gavel and six years after the Republican leadership's choice finally took the speakership, the GOP holds a 28 to five Senate majority and a 74-25 edge in the House. Half of the Senate is up every two years, while the entire House is up each cycle.
Donald Trump carried Tennessee 61-35, a swing to the right from Mitt Romney's already-strong 59-39 win four years before. Trump took 27 of the 33 Senate seats, though he narrowly lost one Romney seat. SD-20, which is located in the Nashville area, went from 56-42 Romney to 47.3-47.1 Clinton, but Republican incumbent Steven Dickerson won re-election last year 56-44. All five Senate Democrats are confined to the Obama/Clinton seats, while the GOP controls all the Romney/Trump districts.
There's more crossover voting in the House, but still not very much. Trump carried 77 of the 99 seats (though we estimate that he won one district, HD-13, by three votes four years after Romney took it 51-46; because there are a few precincts split between HD-13 and other seats, its impossible to know which presidential candidate actually won this district.), losing two Romney districts. One of those Romney/Clinton seats is held by none other than GOP Speaker Beth Harwell, who recently announced that she was running for governor. HD-56, which is located in the Nashville area, went from 61-37 Romney to 47.2-46.8 Clinton, but Harwell won her final term 58-42. The other one is HD-96, located in the Memphis area. This district went from 55-44 Romney to 51-46 Clinton, and Democrat Dwayne Thompson unseated a GOP incumbent 50.65-49.35.
Harwell is the one Republican in a Clinton seat, though the ultra-tight HD-13 is held by GOP state Rep. Eddie Smith, while four Democrats represent Trump seats. The reddest is HD-41, which startles the line between East Tennessee and Middle Tennessee. This district went from 66-33 Romney to 77-20 Trump, but Democratic incumbent John Windle won a 12th term 55-45. Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh, a possible candidate for governor, also represents a conservative seat. HD-82, located in rural West Tennessee, swung hard from 52-47 Romney to 59-40 Trump, but Fitzhugh also won his 12th term 56-44. The New Jersey Senate is the only other chamber where we've found that the Democratic leader holds a Trump seat while the GOP leader holds a Clinton district.
Tennessee has become a very red state, but these GOP-drawn maps still give Republicans a huge edge in state legislative races. One way to illustrate this is to sort each seat in each chamber by Clinton's margin of victory over Trump and see how the seat in the middle—known as the median seat—voted. The median Senate seat backed Trump 68-28, about 14 points to the right of his 61-35 statewide win. The median state House backed him by an almost-identical 68-29 margin. Those are numbers that rival the North Carolina GOP’s infamous legislative gerrymanders.