Tennessee Democrats got ahead of the state Republican legislative majority Monday by offering their own congressional redistricting map.
States are charged with drawing new congressional maps following each decennial census, and that task is currently in the hands of bipartisan Tennessee Senate and House committees. If either of those committees has formulated a new map, they have yet to reveal it in public.
But Democrats, with information from five meetings across the state and other smaller gatherings in which they received input, compiled their own map and will submit it to the General Assembly when it meets again early next year.
The map, at first blush, looks more like one in which geographical and sociological communities of interest are kept together than the one under which the current congressional districts are drawn.
It keeps the 1st District in the northeastern corner of the state and draws a relatively narrow 2nd District to include Oak Ridge, Maryville, Knoxville, Sevierville and Gatlinburg, over to the Great Smoky Mountains on the eastern border of the state.