Voters in Tennessee are set to provide this year’s final big sign of where the political environment stands, as President Trump’s approval ratings slip and Democrats grow more hopeful heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
The state will hold a special House election on Tuesday for a seat that Republicans once thought was safe but are now nervously defending. The race for the Seventh Congressional District has unexpectedly drawn outsize attention and a surge of spending from national groups.
Mr. Trump has held multiple telephone rallies for the Republican nominee, Matt Van Epps, including calling into an event on Monday that Speaker Mike Johnson attended. On the Democratic side, former Vice President Kamala Harris took time on a book tour stop in Nashville this month to urge people to vote for the party’s nominee, Aftyn Behn, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Vice President Al Gore, a Tennessean, held a telephone rally on Monday.
Republicans are still favored to keep the seat, which Representative Mark Green abruptly vacated for the private sector in July. But they are nervous that Democratic enthusiasm elsewhere in the country could spill over into ruby-red Tennessee and lead to a disquietingly narrow victory or a shock defeat.
Democrats remain skeptical they can pull off an upset in the district, which stretches between the state’s borders with Kentucky and Alabama. But party officials are eager to prove that they can overcome their longtime struggles in the South and make the most of national investment.
Here are five questions heading into the election.
Why is Trump’s super PAC spending so much?
This is not the first congressional special election of 2025. But it is the first one where Mr. Trump’s allied super PAC, MAGA Inc., is spending money — nearly $1.7 million as of the final weekend — despite the fact that the president carried the district by 22 percentage points last year.
The reason is that Democrats, who have tended to turn out in droves in lower-profile races, have overperformed in previous contests this year, by as much as 20 points.
Mr. Trump wants to avoid both defeat — his party’s House majority is already slim — and a narrow, narrative-shifting victory that would give Democrats more momentum. As Ms. Behn wrote in one recent fund-raising email, “We’ve got Trump tweeting in all caps again.”
After national Republicans began to put money behind Mr. Van Epps, national Democrats have come to help Ms. Behn. The total ad spending has been $5.7 million, according to AdImpact, a media tracking service.
What is the final margin?
Winning is obviously the goal for the Democrats. But even a narrow defeat would be significant. In the two most recent special elections, for safely Democratic seats in Virginia and Arizona in September, the Democratic nominees outran the party’s margins in the 2024 presidential race by more than 15 percentage points.
“I have never seen the political tides shift as far and as fast as we’re seeing them move in this election,” former Vice President Al Gore told hundreds of Ms. Behn’s supporters on a Zoom call on Monday evening.
A similar result would lead to a small single-digit margin in Tennessee. There has been scant public polling in the contest, but an Emerson College survey last week showed Mr. Van Epps beating Ms. Behn by only two points — far too close for comfort in the view of Republicans.
“The message that we can send from here in Tennessee has to be loud and clear — not only is Tennessee a red state, Tennessee 7 is a red district,” Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee told a crowd of Republicans on Monday in Franklin, Tenn. “And the reputation of our state is on the line.”
The holidays are known as retirement season in Congress, with many older lawmakers reassessing their plans for re-election. Republicans don’t want skittish veteran lawmakers getting spooked at the result, calling it quits and putting even more seats at risk.
But does the margin really matter?
Yes — and no.
If Democrats come close in Tennessee, it does not necessarily portend a blue wave in 2026. The party has been doing increasingly well in off-year and special elections because the Democratic coalition now relies on college-educated voters who show up in these type of races.
On the other hand, sometimes a victory in unfriendly political terrain can galvanize the party faithful. Take it from Conor Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose upset victory in a special election in early 2018 proved a bellwether for the party ahead of that fall’s midterm elections.
“These races force the Democratic Party out of its comfort zone because they dare us to compete on territory we might not normally think we can win,” Mr. Lamb said. And while he said that “overperformance” could itself be encouraging, “There’s nothing like a win. It just convinces you that all the effort was worthwhile.”
What does turnout look like in Nashville?
After the 2020 census, Republicans carved up the blue city of Nashville into three districts, effectively eliminating a Democratic seat. Part of Nashville, including the downtown stretch known for attracting tourists and bachelorette parties, is now in the district up for grabs on Tuesday, the Seventh Congressional.
The rest of the district is predominantly rural, where Republican voters have reliably turned out and dampened any influence Democratic voters in Nashville could have.
But some officials in the state believe that if the Democratic base turns out in greater numbers than the rest of the district, the party could squeak out a victory. In the primary earlier this year, Democrats were less than 6,000 votes behind the Republican total.
“Even beyond tomorrow, the fact that this race is even this close is changing Tennessee,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said as she rallied Ms. Behn’s supporters on Monday.
Tennessee, however, has repeatedly had one of the lowest voter turnouts in the nation. And the deadline to register to vote in the special election was Nov. 3, long before national dollars and resources began pouring into the race.
Party officials are also eyeing a bitterly cold and rainy forecast for Tuesday that could dampen turnout. Mr. Van Epps, speaking on Monday morning in Franklin, Tenn., to a crowd of the state’s political elite, said “it doesn’t matter if it’s bad weather tomorrow — be safe, but get to the polls.”
Can a liberal Democrat close the gap in ruby-red Tennessee?
Ms. Behn won the Democratic primary race with an unabashed record of progressive activism and policy positions that conventional political wisdom would say are far too liberal for a state that once elected more centrist Democrats.
She has been vocal in her support for transgender people, tougher gun laws and abortion rights, stances that many Republicans firmly disagree with. Prominent Republicans and allied super PACs have also resurfaced and highlighted a series of unflattering video and audio clips aimed at convincing voters that Ms. Behn is out of step with the district’s political views.
Those clips range from her condemnations of police funding during the height of the 2020 racial justice protests to footage of her screaming and being removed from the State House gallery in 2019 as part of a broader protest of allegations of sexual assault against a Republican lawmaker.
She has at times clumsily tried to dodge scrutiny over whether she still wants to cut police funding, and has downplayed the Republican attacks as a sign that her campaign is surging. (At least one clip, in which she proclaims a hatred for Nashville and the pedal taverns and bachelorettes that populate downtown, probably mirrors some local sentiment.)
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
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