The Republican project isn’t to win in November. It’s to make November cease to matter | Jamil Smith

New electoral maps are erasing Black representations. The effort takes its cues from American history Early this month, a single pen stroke effectively ended representative Steve Cohen’s career in Congress. The man who has represented Memphis for 19 years will turn 77 later this month, but he wasn’t planning on retiring. He hadn’t lost any primary. The reason was that his district had been erased around him. A new electoral map, passed by the Republican-led state legislature and signed by Bill Lee, the governor, divides the ninth district three ways. “Last week Tennessee Republicans silenced the Black vote here in Memphis to make Republican victories likely,” Cohen said in his statement. That’s succinct and accurate. The new map folds a significant portion of Cohen’s Black constituents into Williamson county, which sits south of Nashville and was, until recently, the subject of a different fight. To this day, the Williamson county seal depicts a Confederate battle flag draped over a cannon. It was adopted in 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement. A Tennessee court ruled in 2024 that the county could remove it. The state legislature responded the following y

May 19, 2026 → May 21, 2026