Governor Bill Lee signed Tennessee's new congressional map on Thursday 7 May, twelve days before the Alabama trigger. All nine districts are now Republican-leaning. The map carves Memphis and Shelby County across the 5th, 8th and 9th districts, eliminating the majority-Black 9th held by Representative Steve Cohen1. The special session that produced the map convened on Tuesday 5 May.
The redraw delivers up to two additional House seats by January 2027 without any vote being cast in Tennessee. Louisiana v. Callais removed the Voting Rights Act Section 2 majority-minority mandate that had protected Cohen's district, the same legal lift that cleared Alabama's map seven days later. Tennessee was one of the four states that opened special sessions in the days after the 29 April ruling, and Lee's signing is the cleanest of those four resolutions to land on the calendar.
The template is Ron DeSantis's Florida 24R-4D map, signed three days earlier on 4 May and immediately challenged. Tennessee and Florida together have moved roughly nine seats from Democratic-held or competitive to Republican-leaning before any 2026 ballot is cast in either state. Brookings Institution analyst Vanessa Williamson called Memphis the cleanest example of a single Black-majority city dispersed across three districts to dilute Section 2 protection; the counter-view, advanced by State Senator Jack Johnson in the Tennessean, is that the city's geography makes a coherent 9th district impractical without crossing Shelby County boundaries the new map respects.
Unlike Florida, Tennessee draws no obvious state-law challenge. The Tennessee constitution carries no Fair Districts equivalent, and the federal Section 2 path closed with Callais. That leaves the 9th's elimination largely uncontested in court, in contrast to the Florida challenge under Judge Hawkes that may yet land before 8 June qualifying.
