Republicans managed to avoid a political nightmare in Tennessee, yet their overall electoral outlook remains deeply unsettling.
Republicans dodged a disaster on Tuesday night by holding onto a special election in a reliably red congressional district in Tennessee.
Still, the single-digit margin there adds to a growing and unmistakably troubling pattern of recent election results for President Donald Trump’s party, with just 11 months remaining before the 2026 midterms.
Republican Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps held a roughly nine-point lead over Democrat Aftyn Behn with 95% of the vote reported.
This comes in a district that Trump won by 22 points and former GOP Rep. Mark Green carried by more than 21 points just last year.
In practical terms, that means Behn outperformed Democrats’ 2024 presidential showing by about 13 points and their 2024 House margin by around 12 points.
Even so, the shift here is smaller than in other U.S. House special elections held earlier this year. Before Tuesday’s contest, Democrats had run an average of 18 points ahead of Kamala Harris’ 2024 statewide margins and 16 points ahead of their 2024 House results in four special elections across Arizona, Florida, and Virginia.
The overall picture from these 2025 contests is striking.
Democrats have now notched double-digit over-performances in every House special election held this year. Moreover, five of their fifteen biggest over-performances (relative to the previous presidential race) since Trump first took office in 2017 have occurred in 2025 alone—out of more than three dozen special elections in that period.
Of course, special elections are an imperfect and irregular measure of what’s to come. Turnout tends to be low, magnifying enthusiasm and often producing outsized swings. In this case, turnout was unusually strong—nearly matching the district’s 2022 midterm numbers—which may explain why Behn’s gain was smaller than the year’s average.
(Even if Democrats had managed an upset, it’s highly unlikely they could have kept the seat in a strong 2026 cycle.)
But nearly every other indicator this year has also trended toward Democrats.
Special elections for state legislative seats have shifted even more sharply in their favor than at any point in the Trump era.
Democrats also achieved a double-digit over-performance in a widely watched Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April. And last month’s Election Day brought a series of major wins: double-digit margins in the New Jersey and Virginia governor races, the party’s first statewide non-federal victories in Georgia in nearly two decades, and a decisive win on a California redistricting ballot measure that once looked uncertain.
Given the attention the Tennessee contest received, its results will almost certainly be closely analyzed.
One reasonable question for Democrats, given the smaller over-performance, is whether nominating a strongly progressive candidate like Behn limited their potential gains. She gave Republicans ample material with past remarks—including saying she “hates” Nashville, expressing support for defunding the police, and calling herself a “very radical person.”
Still, as 2025 nears its end, Democrats appear to be in a stronger electoral position than they were in 2017—a cycle that culminated in their 2018 “wave” victory to retake the House.
That doesn’t guarantee a midterm win in 2026. A lot can change in eleven months. But history shows the president’s party typically loses seats in midterms, and Trump currently appears to be at a low point in either of his presidential terms.
Tuesday’s results reinforce that trend—even if Democrats ultimately fell far short of a stunning upset.