A special election for a heavily Republican House seat in Tennessee that was on virtually no one’s political radar a few months ago has surfaced as the unlikely new front in the fight for control of Congress.
President Trump recently held a telephone rally for the Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps. Former Vice President Kamala Harris appeared at a canvassing event on Tuesday for the Democrat, State Representative Aftyn Behn. And super PACs on both sides are blitzing the airwaves before the Dec. 2 special election for a seat that was drawn with the intention of never being competitive.
The deluge includes more than $1 million from Mr. Trump’s allied super PAC in its first spending since his inauguration, as well as a quiet push by Democrats to promote an underfunded independent candidate to try to siphon off conservative votes.
The Republican candidate, Mr. Van Epps, remains strongly favored. Even Democrats privately acknowledge that he is likely to win the race to represent a sprawling district that stretches from Kentucky to Alabama and voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump a year ago.
But a drumbeat of strong Democratic performances in lower-turnout special elections — as well as the party’s emphatic victories in Virginia and New Jersey while campaigning on affordability and opposing Mr. Trump — has Republicans nervous. They fear not just an upset loss but the possibility of an excruciatingly narrow victory, which would send an ominous and dispiriting signal heading into the midterm elections.
“The entire country is watching this race,” Ms. Behn told Black business owners on Monday evening at a community meeting in a strip mall in Nashville, parts of which sit inside the district. “And they love an underdog story.”
Both parties are rallying their bases.
On Tuesday, dozens of students gathered at a park between two of the city’s historically Black colleges and universities, some in their Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority salmon pink and apple green, after word spread about Ms. Harris’s possible appearance.
“I know the power is in the South,” Ms. Harris declared, flanked by local and state Black representatives.
But in an unusual move, Ms. Behn had already exited the stage. And Ms. Harris never uttered Ms. Behn’s name then, or at a later event in Nashville. The result: no actual photos of the candidate with the former presidential nominee, who lost the Tennessee district in a landslide. Some Republicans, including at the Republican National Committee, cheered Ms. Harris’s cameo, suggesting that it could energize their voters.
Turnout is always unpredictable in special elections, and the fact that the contest — Tennessee’s first House special race in nearly four decades — will be held on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving further clouds the outlook.
In an interview, Mr. Van Epps said he wanted to win with “as big of a margin as we can going into 2026.”
“We want to set a really good tone,” he said.
The national attention is striking.
Mr. Trump slammed Ms. Behn as “the A.O.C. of Tennessee” in his rally call. Vice President JD Vance has signed fund-raising emails for Mr. Van Epps. And the campaign arm of House Republicans posted a 52-page research dossier on Ms. Behn in late October, along with unflattering video clips, in hopes that outside groups would put the attacks on the airwaves.
Republican super PACs have done just that.
“As often happens, these special elections gain national focus,” said David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that began airing ads attacking Ms. Behn on Tuesday. “Everybody wants to see if there are any trends happening nationally.”
Mr. McIntosh warned that “the Democrat electorate is going to be supercharged,” which is one reason that Mr. Trump’s super PAC has aired ads linking Mr. Van Epps to the president and casting Ms. Behn — in her own words — as “a very radical person.”
On the Democratic side, Ms. Harris’s visit — her first campaigning for another candidate since leaving office — followed one by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin. A Democratic super PAC called Your Community PAC is spending in the race, using a jingle to attack Mr. Van Epps for initially opposing the release of the Epstein files. (Mr. Van Epps said that he had always been in favor of full transparency and was “100 percent behind the president.”)
The same super PAC is simultaneously promoting a third-party candidate, Jon Thorp, sending mailers “for Tennessee conservatives” that highlight his credentials as an “Army combat pilot” — the same phrase Republicans have used to laud Mr. Van Epps in TV ads.
Mr. Thorp, who has reported raising less than $7,500, learned of the mailers from someone who contacted him on his website. “I said, ‘I don’t have any mailers,’” he recalled in an interview.
“It is obviously confusing voters,” Mr. Thorp said. “It’s just typical ugly politics as usual.”
The path for Democrats is tough. Mr. Trump won roughly 60 percent of the vote in the district in 2024 — carrying it by more than 22 percentage points and making it more pro-Trump than roughly 320 other House seats.
In other words, there are about 100 other Republican-held House seats that would theoretically seem more enticing for Democrats to contest.
Tennessee Republicans had gerrymandered their state after the last census to divide Nashville’s liberal base into three safe Republican congressional seats. The resulting Seventh District now carves through downtown Nashville and stretches to the state borders in both the north and south. Democrats need Nashville voters to turn out in droves to have any chance.
“There is the potential,” said Lisa Quigley, who served as chief of staff to former Representative Jim Cooper, the last Democrat to represent the area, “if Nashville voters will start voting at their strength.”
John Hagner, a pollster working for the Behn campaign, said that the seat wouldn’t typically be seen as competitive, but that the special election offered a unique opportunity.
“The current Democratic coalition — older Black voters, young women, college-educated suburbanites — is furious and motivated, and the Republican electorate is demoralized and unhappy,” Mr. Hagner said.
The seat is vacant because former Representative Mark Green, a Republican, abruptly resigned for a private-sector venture. Mr. Van Epps, a former state commissioner, overcame a crowded primary field of better-known state lawmakers, pointing to his backing from Mr. Trump, Mr. Green and Gov. Bill Lee.
At a veterans luncheon on Wednesday in a conservative enclave south of Nashville, Mr. Van Epps pitched his military credentials. At one point, a woman held up a clipboard reading, “Hold the House, make calls 4 Matt.”
“The Democrats are coming out harder than they’ve ever come out around here,” warned Debbie Ballard, the president of the Republican Women of Williamson County.
Oscar Brock, the R.N.C.’s national committeeman from Tennessee, said that his party remained confident but that “Republicans are pulling out all the stops in order to make sure we defend what in normal circumstances would be a safe Republican district.”
“We understand certain issues like tariffs and the shutdown have played a negative role against Republicans and excited Democrats to roll out the vote,” he added. “And we’re concerned that Republicans won’t turn out.”
In one warning sign for Republicans, turnout in the Democratic primary race for the seat was less than 6,000 votes shy of the G.O.P.’s total.
Ms. Behn made her name in Nashville as a progressive organizer, including a 2019 incident in which she was forcibly removed from the State House gallery for calling for the resignation of then-Speaker Glen Casada over his handling of allegations of sexual assault against another Republican lawmaker.
Mr. Casada, later found guilty of federal corruption charges, was pardoned by Mr. Trump this month.
Ms. Behn surprised some Nashville Democrats by winning a special election for the State House in 2023 and again by jumping into the Democratic congressional primary race as the lone woman. While she does not live in the congressional district, it overlaps with part of her state seat, and she has argued that her years of organizing make her best positioned for an upset.
She has focused her campaign on affordability and equity, building on her State House push to repeal the state’s grocery tax and drawing a contrast with Mr. Green’s final vote on Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill and its cuts to health care and social safety net programs.
“I have been diligent about the affordability crisis and who are the villains in the real story,” Ms. Behn said in an interview. “The only minority destroying this country is the top 1 percent.”
To win, she will need converts like Gina Coleman, 67, who described herself as an anti-abortion and pro-Israel conservative and who voted for Mr. Trump last year.
She arrived at a recent Behn event wearing “I voted” stickers after casting a ballot for the Democrat. Ms. Coleman said she had been impressed by Ms. Behn’s local focus at a recent town hall with Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas.
“I think we can flip this thing,” Ms. Coleman said in an interview.
But Republicans have focused on Ms. Behn’s unabashedly liberal political and policy stances, including her support for transgender Tennesseeans and her successful legal challenge to a law that would punish adults who assist minors in obtaining abortions without parental consent.
When immigration agents descended on Nashville this year, Ms. Behn filmed herself trailing them in protest of their presence — a clip that has become a cornerstone of conservative attack ads.
“The contrast is clear on a number of different fronts,” Mr. Van Epps said.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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