If Republicans in Congress want to accomplish anything during the second Trump administration, they have about seven months left in which to do it.
Can you believe it? Yet another round of elections was held yesterday — the Tuesday after Thanksgiving no less, which is just about as antisocial a moment to stage an election as you could imagine. Why not just hold the vote on Christmas Eve? (As a note of local pride, Chicago still tops this: the powers that be here have intentionally scheduled our mayoral election to fall in late February of an off-off year, ensuring turnout is at its lowest. The result: Brandon Johnson.)
I’ll start with the good news up front: Republican nominee Matt Van Epps defeated progressive Democrat Aftyn Behn in Tennessee’s seventh congressional district by a 54–45 percent margin. I’ll immediately follow up with the bad news: it should have been by a far higher margin than that, and even once you control for factors like the race’s curious timing, it bodes ill for the Republican majority next November. There’s no spinning the implications of last night. The electoral reaper beckons for the GOP, waiting for a midterm cull.
All political eyes were on the special election — to replace retiring Representative Mark Green — because of the walloping the GOP took in early November, during the regularly scheduled elections. That was when Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Zohran Mamdani all joined America’s ruling class; it was also when Virginia voters handed a supermajority in the state house to Democrats and, as a bonus, elected a mad sadist as attorney general.
From that moment on, a perceptibly chill wind has blown through the halls of Congress: Republican lawmakers are beginning to quietly grumble about the frustrating pointlessness of their jobs and the transparent likelihood of their returning to the minority as they sail into the heart of next autumn’s electoral storm. They got a clear vision of their mortality on November 4 and are now either battening down the hatches or eyeing the lifeboats. (Expect the grumbles from those not retiring to get no louder than that; after having just seen Marjorie Taylor Greene tossed into the roiling sea like a pagan sacrifice to Trumpism, nobody is about to volunteer as the next tribute.)
One way or another, everyone is searching for bellwethers of 2026, and last night the bell tolled ominously for Republicans: In a district that Trump took by 20 percent in 2024 (and incumbent congressman Mark Green won by 22 in his reelection), Van Epps cleared the bar by only 9 percent. He underperformed his predecessor by 13 points.
It was still a comfortably easy win. Although both parties tried to nationalize the race during its last weeks, there were local — and therefore more relevant — factors to consider: One is that Matt Van Epps is a thoroughly inoffensive GOP candidate and should be a good fit for this district. A Democrat would have to be running against a positively radioactive Roy Moore–type to get over the top in a district like that, and there was nothing like that to tag Van Epps with. (Candidates like these, who sport neither notable pluses nor negatives, are often dismissively described as “replacement-level”; that damns him with faint praise in a party known for its own recent series of obvious primary own-goals.)
The other factor was that Aftyn Behn may have been quite possibly the worst candidate Democrats could have nominated to represent middle Tennessee, so much so that she quickly became the stuff of comedy. Leave aside the fact that the name “Aftyn Behn” sounds like it belongs to a forgotten ’60s Welsh Labour politician from an imaginary coal-mining constituency like the Vale of Llanfrythwyddych. Behn herself was a cardboard-cutout Karen, seemingly chosen specifically by Democrats to condescend to her voters.
A petulant-voiced former “community organizer” and state representative with a perpetually sneering visage — as if the world was forever botching her Starbucks latte order — Behn became much better known to both locals and national observers once bucket after bucket of oppo research was dumped on her by outside PAC advertising. Wherever you turned you could find old podcast footage of Behn saying loopy activist pablum (like expressing her solemn belief that men can give birth), but nothing could top her rant about Nashville, which she apparently loathes with the passion of an embittered alt-country singer-songwriter. “I hate this city,” she once said, ranting about everything from its mobs of female bachelorette party tourists rolling around in pedal-pubs, down to the miserable country slop cranked out by its world-famous music scene. (It was almost relatable, honestly; Steve Earle nods.)
It is easy to dismiss special elections as being, well, “special.” Low turnout, ideologically motivated electorate, quirky candidate, etc. — the list of excuses people will offer for waving them aside is long. But this was not a low-turnout race. In the 2022 midterms — the nearest relevant comparison, as opposed to 2024 — exactly 180,822 votes were cast. In this off-off-year special election, 179,899 votes have been tallied thus far. The composition of yesterday’s electorate was almost certainly skewed toward angry progressives, but you can rest assured they will show up once again next November. Assuming that Republican voters are more likely to show up in the midterms than for a special election, that will pad Van Epps’s margin next year.
The problem is that Matt Van Epps ran in a district where he could afford to underperform his predecessor by 13 points and still win by nine. However disaffected the GOP base is nationwide, there is still enough of a cushion to fall very far in central Tennessee with a soft landing. The Republican majority in Congress does not depend on seats like that, though; it depends on seats on Long Island and in suburban New York, on Hispanic support in Florida and Texas, on countless “reasonably red” seats in the Midwest where Republicans typically win by six or seven points. All of those people are in trouble. In the state of Texas, legislators inaugurated a nationwide redistricting war by re-carving their state to make five new “GOP” seats; I will be surprised if they win two of them next year.
The Republican majority is too thin — both in terms of raw numbers as well as the winning margins in those key “majority-making” districts — to survive a swing toward Democrats even half as large as the one witnessed in Tuesday night’s election. If Republicans in Congress want to accomplish anything legislatively during the second Trump administration, my guess is that they have approximately seven months left in which to do it. Good luck.