The Other Way of Looking at Tennessee’s Special Election Results

There are two ways to evaluate the closely watched results of Tuesday’s special congressional election in Tennessee.

The first conclusion most political observers have drawn from Republican candidate Matt Van Epps’s nine-point victory is that it is a terrible omen for the GOP ahead of the 2026 midterms.

That argument is by no means indefensible. Tennessee’s seventh district, which is about ten points more right-leaning than the nation based on the 2024 general election results, was won by Trump last year by 22 points. Retired Representative Mark Green won reelection in his district by over 20 points in 2022 and 2024, and the Democratic nominee in yesterday’s special election, Aftyn Behn, improved on the party’s 2024 performance by 12.6 points.

Tailwinds like those might not be strong enough to topple a district like Tennessee’s seventh, but they would be more than enough to tip the House, at the very least, in the Democratic Party’s direction. And not by a small margin, either. “If Republicans can keep their net losses under 15 seats, they will be lucky,” the political analyst Charlie Cook wrote Tuesday.

There’s another way to evaluate this race, though. For all the environmental advantages that buoyed Behn, she was also a terrible candidate. Indeed, Democratic primary voters in the district seemed to know she was a terrible candidate. In October’s Democratic primary election, Behn barely managed to eke out a victory in a four-way race in which each candidate won between 23 and 28 percent of the vote.

Famously, Behn covered herself in scandal when it was revealed that she said she “hates” the city she sought to represent in Congress, Nashville. “Our problem with racism in this state is wild and untamed,” Behn wrote in a similarly notorious 2020 op-ed, and she defended “burning down a police station” as “justified” at the height of the moral panic that swept the nation after George Floyd’s arrest-related killing. Behn’s policy positions on a range of subjects lean far to the left of the median voter in her district, but her party nominated her anyway. And as such, she underperformed what looks like the emerging Democratic Party baseline in 2025 special elections.

That’s not much of an underperformance, but it’s not nothing. As omens go ahead of 2026 (or even 2028), that’s as inauspicious as the GOP’s chronic underperformance in elections in which Donald Trump’s name does not grace the top of the ticket. Democrats are liable to nominate similarly ill-suited candidates in competitive primaries next year or even oust entrenched incumbents in favor of progressive insurgents. It would be foolish to rule out the prospect that the party’s base voters will nominate enough unacceptable candidates to put downward pressure on the vote totals that an otherwise generic Democratic nominee would generate.

Could Democrats do that at a scale that would save Republicans from the wrath of an electorate that is losing patience with the party in power’s failure to rein in consumer costs? Probably not. But it is almost a certainty that Democratic primary voters will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in at least a handful of races, some of which could be key swing seats with the potential to make or break Democratic majorities. At least, Tennessee’s seventh suggests it’s possible.