U.S. partisan divide now runs along rural-urban lines, and that has worsened rural-urban conflict in state legislatures

"The relationships between big cities and rural-dominated legislatures have often been hostile. But a rift between Nashville and the Tennessee Legislature suggests the nation’s partisan divide is making things worse," and there are examples in other states, The New York Times reports.

Michael Wines writes, "For most of American history, the rivalry has played out in state politics more so as a matter of parochial divisions than national ones. Now, a dispute in Nashville raises the question of whether the nation’s barbed political divide — which splinters along the rural-urban axis as well — is infusing old local antagonisms with contemporary partisan acrimony. It’s not just in Tennessee. In Wisconsin, North Carolina, Kentucky and elsewhere, old city-country political tensions have taken on a harder edge as Democratic-leaning urban areas become ever more isolated islands in an ever-redder, rural-dominated sea."

Music City Center (John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images)

In Tennessee, the Legislature split Nashville among three congressional districts, eliminating a Democratic seat. Then the city council's Democratic majority, citing security concerns, killed Republican leaders' bid to bring the party's 2024 national convention to Nashville, and the GOPers vowed revenge. The House floor leader has filed a bill to limit municipal legislaitve bodies to 20 members; only Nashville, with 40, exceeds the limit, and its voters rejected shrinkage seven years ago. The Senate president, Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, "is proposing to defund the largest civic project in the city's history," Nate Rau of Axios Nashville reports. His bill would repeal "tourism-related taxes dedicated for the $623 million Music City Center." A McNally spokesperson told Rau, "Metro has made it clear they are no longer interested in aggressively recruiting top-tier conventions to Nashville." Councilmember Bob Mendes, who opposed the convention, told Rau he expects the flogging will continue: "There's a massive culture war going on in this country, and the state of Tennessee's leadership doesn't like the culture of Nashville and is going to keep coming after us."

A 2020 study found that Tennessee "led the nation in overruling local laws and policies," Wines reports. "State laws that override city ordinances and policies have mushroomed over the last decade, especially in states where Republicans controlled both the governor’s office and the legislature." He cites examples, such as Missouri laws that keep St. Louis from banning plastic grocery bags and Kansas City from raising the minimum wage, the North Carolina House speaker's bid to block a local sales tax to finance mass transit in Charlotte and so-called "war on Louisville" laws in Kentucky "that sapped the authority of the elected board running the metro area’s 100,000-student public school system, weakened the ground rules of a city-county merger approved by voters two decades ago and limited the city’s mayor to two terms."

The study "found that such laws were more common in states with a Republican government, a strong conservative bent and a higher share of Black residents," Wines reports, quoting Professor Thad Kousser of the University of California, San Diego, who tracks the urban-rural divide: “A hundred or even fifty years ago, Democrats in Atlanta may have wanted different things than the Democrats who were governing the state of Georgia, but they were in the same party. Now they both have different legislative interests and different political interests, too.”

Wines notes, "The dynamic can work the opposite way, too: In New Mexico, the Democrat-controlled State Legislature has drafted legislation to overturn local ordinances passed in conservative towns that restrict access to abortion clinics and abortion pills. The state attorney general on Jan. 23 sued New Mexico cities and counties to overturn the ordinances."