In the past few years, Tennessee has become a lot less elastic. While in previous cycles Tennessee was undergoing a rapid realignment, the calculations below show that that realignment might be nearly over. Thread below!

First, what do we mean by elasticity? Elasticity is a measurement of how 'swingy' a county is. If a county has a tendency to swing wildly from election to election (or engage in a lot of ticket-splitting), it is more elastic.

So in the past few presidential races, the political landscape of Tennessee has changed a lot, particularly the rural, majority White counties. They are still classified as the most elastic, as they keep swinging Republican cycle after cycle.

Meanwhile, strongly Republican East TN has become very inelastic, signaling (at least to me) that Dems might have finally hit their floor there. The political infrastructure for Dems in East TN needs a lot of work, but Dems have an opportunity to improve there, albeit slowly.

Democrats actually managed to slightly improve in parts of rural East TN, and also the urban cores of Knoxville and Chattanooga. Meanwhile, ancestrally Democratic parts of the state (Grundy, Lake, Trousdale, Jackson, etc.) continued to swing strongly Republican.

As @lxeagle17 pointed out to me yesterday, it is quite peculiar that the Nashville suburbs aren't more elastic. In my opinion, this shows that these counties, while they are swinging Democratic, are moving more slowly than other suburbs in the country.

And speaking of @lxeagle17, I want to thank him for helping me with this! I hope you all follow him already, but if you don't.. you should! I used his formula for elasticity which you can find here: http://www.politicalsalad.com/2020/07/elasticity-metric-for-defining.html

@JMilesColeman @SenhorRaposa @kilometerbryman @Thorongil16 @krazgreinetz @rudnicknoah @tndp