Matt Van Epps, a Republican former state official and Army veteran, won a special election for the House on Tuesday in Tennessee, holding off a surprisingly stiff Democratic challenge in an overwhelmingly Republican district that drew a flood of national attention and money.
Mr. Van Epps’s victory over Aftyn Behn, a Democratic state representative from Nashville, was called by The Associated Press. As of 9:40 p.m. Eastern, he was leading by roughly six percentage points.
The result is a boon in the short term for President Trump and his party, which had worried that its narrow House majority would grow even slimmer. But the tight margin in such a deep-red district nonetheless represents a warning shot about the party’s vulnerabilities heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
Mr. Trump carried the seat by 22 percentage points a little over a year ago. The Seventh Congressional District, which stretches from Kentucky to Alabama and includes part of downtown Nashville, had been drawn by G.O.P. state lawmakers specifically to elect a Republican.
But saving the seat required a multimillion-dollar intervention by national Republican groups, including Mr. Trump’s super PAC. They released a barrage of late attack ads that cast Ms. Behn as a “radical” who was out of step with Tennessee voters.
Ms. Behn, 36, narrowed the gap by focusing heavily in the final stretch on affordability, the issue that helped lift Democrats in elections in New Jersey and Virginia last month. She argued that high prices had been caused partly by Mr. Trump’s tariffs and blamed Republicans for rising health care costs, and cast herself as an agent of change.
Even in defeat, Democrats remain bullish that the contest portended some of Mr. Trump’s political weaknesses entering 2026. Roughly 100 Republican-held seats were less pro-Trump in 2024 than Tennessee’s Seventh, and Democrats need to flip only three seats to win a House majority next year.
Democrats have outperformed Republicans in a series of special elections throughout 2025. These lower-turnout elections are driven by the most intensely engaged voters, who are likelier to have gone to college and have tended to favor Democrats in recent years. The strong results for Democrats — even in the reddest of areas — are a sign of voters’ eagerness to provide a check on Mr. Trump’s power.
The two sides poured a total of $5.7 million in advertising into the general election in Tennessee, and prominent national figures dropped into the state to rally voters.
The late Republican scramble included a visit on Monday by Speaker Mike Johnson, who warned that “special elections are a funny thing — anything can happen.” He dialed up Mr. Trump, who had appeared via phone at multiple rallies for Mr. Van Epps, to speak live to the crowd.
“The whole world is watching Tennessee right now, and they’re watching the district,” Mr. Trump said, the phone speaker crackling.
Ms. Behn drew national support, too. Former Vice President Kamala Harris headlined a get-out-the-vote event for her in November. And Ms. Behn attended a virtual rally on Monday with one of the Democratic Party’s biggest stars, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the type of polarizing progressive that others in such red seats might have sought distance from.
The election on Tuesday was held only because former Representative Mark Green, a Republican, abruptly left office this year for a private sector job. The seat is a result of gerrymandering after the 2020 census, when Republican state lawmakers carved liberal Nashville into three seats.
Even within her party, Ms. Behn was not necessarily seen as an obvious choice to try to flip the district. An unabashedly progressive legislator, she had a history of fiery activism and left-wing social media posts that Republicans shined a spotlight on.
Republicans deployed a trove of video and audio clips highlighting her opposition to funding the police during the 2020 racial justice protests; her recordings of herself following immigration agents on patrol; her support for transgender Tennesseans; and even her past flippant declaration of hatred for Nashville, with its country music, pedal taverns and bachelorette parties that bring in valuable tourist dollars.
“I’m a very radical person,” Ms. Behn said in one clip that ran repeatedly in Republican ads.
Mr. Van Epps’s victory comes at a moment when Republicans in the House majority “are hanging on by a thread,” as Representative Tim Burchett, a Knoxville-area Republican, put it this week to a crowd of Republican voters, party officials and donors.
Mr. Van Epps hewed closely to Mr. Trump, whose endorsement helped him win a crowded Republican primary race, and promised to support “Trump’s MAGA agenda in Washington.” He also drew support from Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican who worked with Mr. Van Epps when he served as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services.
Democrats had to settle for the consolation prize of merely beating expectations.
Ms. Behn wrote in an essay even before the polls closed that the competitiveness of the contest had shown that “another world is possible” in red Tennessee.
At her election party in downtown Nashville, Democrats took comfort while sipping a vodka and orange liqueur cocktail called the “progressive pink lady.”
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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