Republican Matt Van Epps held off a challenge from Democrat Aftyn Behn on Tuesday in the special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, with voters delivering both a result and a broader message.
The result preserves a House seat that the GOP badly needs, given how slim its majority is. But the margin — a 9-point win for Van Epps in a district President Donald Trump carried by 22 points last year — bolsters Democratic optimism heading into next year’s midterms.
The big picture
The final result is in line with all of the other House special elections this year, which featured strong Democratic performances. In the four specials before last night’s, Democrats had posted net improvements of 16 to 22 points compared to the 2024 presidential margin in those districts. Behn’s 9-point loss in Tennessee represents a net 13-point shift in her party’s favor.
These kinds of consistent gains by the opposition party in special elections have often portended strong showings in midterm elections. This was a feature of the run-up to Trump’s first midterm, when Democrats picked up 40 seats and won control of the House in the blue wave of 2018.
It should be noted that Democrats have been faring well in special elections and other low-turnout affairs for a while now. This reflects the intense motivation of their professional-class, anti-Trump base, which has swamped the polls at any and every opportunity.
There’s no doubt this played a role in the Tennessee result. But what is concerning here for Republicans is that turnout was actually quite robust. About 180,000 votes were cast, far more than in any of the previous congressional special elections this year and almost identical to the number for the 2022 midterm election in Tennessee’s 7th District.
Democrats paid a price for their nominee
Yes, holding the GOP to a 9-point margin in a district like this is something Democrats can and will crow about. But it’s likely they could have made it even closer with a different candidate.
Behn, who won a crowded and closely divided Democratic primary with a plurality of the vote, has been a vocal and unapologetic leftist for much of her public life — enough so that members of her own party dubbed her “the AOC of Tennessee.” Strident positions and inflammatory rhetoric from the recent past garnered significant attention and headlined the GOP campaign against her. And it looks like that limited her inroads in some parts of the district.
Notably, Behn notched her biggest gain relative to the 2024 results in Davidson County, where Nashville is. Demographically and politically, this is the outlier corner of the district.
It’s deeply Democratic and contains more than few voters who share the worldview Behn has articulated in the past. Not coincidentally, Davidson is where she’d already won office as a state legislator. On Tuesday night, it produced large turnout and an 18-point shift in the Democrats’ favor compared to last year.
But look at the two other population hubs sandwiching Davidson County on the chart. Williamson County is the home of Nashville’s fastest-growing upscale suburbs. Like similar suburbs across the Sun Belt, Williamson has been reliably Republican this century, but it took a step away from Trump and the GOP in 2016 and 2020. In other words, it’s home to a chunk of voters who might be open to backing a Democrat now that Trump is back in the White House and racking up a shaky job approval rating.
But Behn didn’t move the needle much in Williamson at all — a net shift of just 7 points compared to last year. It’s impossible to look at that number and not wonder if a Democrat without her baggage could have far more meaningful inroads.
The story is similar in Montgomery County, which is centered around the city of Clarksville. While not as upscale as Williamson, Montgomery is the closest thing Tennessee’s 7th District has to a swing county. If Behn was going to have a chance of actually winning the race, she needed a victory in Montgomery, but as in Williamson, she fell far short of her party’s hopes.
Again, overall, Behn posted a showing in this district that is very encouraging for Democrats. The fact that she did this even with her liabilities as a candidate will only bolster their optimism. But the results also suggest that her candidacy did give pause to swing voters, particularly in the suburbs, preventing Democrats from realizing a far bigger breakthrough here.
The perils of gerrymandering
This special election came against the backdrop of the mid-decade redistricting that a number of states are now pursuing. And the fact that this district became competitive illustrates the risk that parties take in when redrawing political lines.
The current boundaries for Tennessee’s 7th District were set in 2022, when Republicans in the state pursued a new gerrymander when drawing a new congressional map after the decennial census. Previously, Nashville and its 700,000 residents had been a unified entity in a single House district. Given the city’s political bent, that district was a safely Democratic one, represented until 2022 by Rep. Jim Cooper.
The GOP’s gerrymander broke Nashville up and scattered parts of it into three different districts, all of them Republican-leaning. Cooper opted to retire in 2022, and the GOP won each seat that year and again in 2024.
But the political climate has changed since then. Now, it is Republicans who control the White House and who must deal with tricky midterm environment — which means that suddenly, as we just saw in Tennessee, seats that looked safe when they were gerrymandered a few years ago can and will suddenly become competitive.
It’s an issue the GOP may confront elsewhere in 2026 — and that Democrats, who have instituted their own aggressive gerrymander in California, may ultimately face down the road, too.
