It hasn’t happened much in my life, but last Tuesday night a place I know very well was at the center of national attention. The bright red congressional district where I lived until this summer delivered a sharp warning to the Republican Party.
I’m speaking about the special election results in Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District, a mostly suburban and rural district that includes parts of Nashville. The Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps, defeated his Democratic opponent, Aftyn Behn, by just under nine points.
In some places, a nine-point Republican margin is considered a resounding victory. But not in Tennessee 7. In 2024, the district voted for Donald Trump by a 22-point margin. At the same time, Mark Green, the Republican Van Epps succeeded last week, won re-election by 21 points. This is not a swing district or one that Democrats expect to win this side of the apocalypse.
But for a few days in October, it seemed like the end was nigh. I’d been hearing rumors that Republicans were starting to worry about the race, and a poll taken between Nov. 22 and Nov. 24 showed Van Epps leading by only two points.
That it was close at all was stunning, not least because Behn is hardly an ideological match for one of the most conservative districts in Tennessee. She’s been labeled — and not as a gesture of love and respect — the “A.O.C. of Tennessee.” She once posted (then deleted) during the George Floyd protests in 2020, “Good morning, especially to the 54% of Americans that believe burning down a police station is justified.”
Since the seventh district includes parts of Nashville, it was also unhelpful that Behn said on a podcast (also in 2020): “I hate the city. I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music. I hate all the things that make Nashville apparently an ‘it’ city to the rest of the country.”
Some of us don’t love the pedal taverns, either, but if you hate the bachelorettes, and you hate country music, well then, there’s not much of modern Nashville left. What’s next? A tweet condemning Vanderbilt’s quarterback Diego Pavia and the 10-2 Commodores?
So, no, this race was not what it looks like when Democrats strategically nominate someone who will appeal to Tennessee Republicans. This is what it looks like when your coalition is coming apart at the seams.
The end of the Trump era is coming into view, and too much attention is focused on what Republicans think of Trump and too little is focused on what Republicans think of one another.
Last Monday the Manhattan Institute released the results of a poll of nearly 3,000 voters that was designed to identify the ideology and beliefs of the American right. What it found was fascinating — and almost exactly mirrors my personal experience living in a deep-red district in a deep-red state.
As the Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm wrote: “Roughly two-thirds of the coalition are what we call ‘Core Republicans’: longstanding G.O.P. voters who have pulled the Republican lever for years. They are consistently conservative on economics, foreign policy and social issues. They still prefer cutting spending to raising taxes, still see China as a threat, still support Israel, and remain firmly opposed to D.E.I. and gender ideology.”
And what about the rest? Roughly 30 percent are what the Manhattan Institute terms “New Entrant Republicans.” They are more diverse, younger and “more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past.”
So far, nothing about that seems alarming. In fact, expanding the tent to pull in new voters rather than adhering to rigid ideological litmus tests is smart politics.
But there’s more to the New Entrant Republicans than diversity and ideological moderation. Again, here’s Arm: “Many of them have also absorbed the ugliest content sloshing around online. One-third of New Entrant Republicans believe in all or most of the six conspiracy theories we tested — including about vaccines, 9/11 and the moon landing — compared with just 11 percent of Core Republicans. Sixty-three percent of that highest-conspiracy group previously voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.”
There’s also a significant culture clash with Core Republicans on the matter of political violence. The poll results were sobering: “Fifty-four percent of New Entrants say that violence is sometimes justified, versus only 20 percent of Core Republicans.”
It’s one thing to coexist — cohabit, even — with a faction that is more open to slightly higher taxes. It’s another thing entirely to coexist with a person who believes the Holocaust was exaggerated and feels an attraction to political violence.
You can see the culture clash with your own eyes in the seventh district. I lived in Williamson County, a prosperous suburban region just south of Nashville, and in the years since the pandemic, we made national news for multiple Republican intramural fights.
There was the time when a gang of far-right, anti-mask activists gathered around a small group of proponents of masking in public schools, shouting “We know who you are” and “We will find you.” Then, a local Moms for Liberty chapter tried to ban the book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story,” among others, from the elementary school curriculum — claiming that the book violated Tennessee’s ban on teaching critical race theory.
Next, a far-right alderman with ties to white supremacists ran for mayor against the establishment Republican incumbent. Thankfully, she — and the margin of victory — demonstrated that thousands of Republicans turned out to defeat her.
(Full disclosure — and yes, to show my closeness to the politics of the town — my sister-in-law ran the incumbent mayor’s campaign.)
Each of these disputes has created enmity between the different factions. And that enmity isn’t just rooted in ideological differences; it’s rooted in mutual resentment. Establishment Republicans resent the extremism and cruelty of the new right, and the new right is furious that the establishment — the Core Republicans — is not sufficiently radicalized.
In fact, the new right is often angrier at traditional conservatives than it is at the left. But as Rachel Brown, the founder of Over Zero, a group dedicated to fighting identity-based violence, told me, radical movements often train most of their fire on “in-group moderates,” the people who resist revolutionary change.
The depth of these Republican divisions has been obscured by two things: shared affection for Trump and shared revulsion at the left. But Trump is no longer on the ballot, and there is increased alarm over the new right. Those two factors are working together to shrink the Republican tent, and in the seventh district we watched the tent shrink right in the middle of the Republican heartland.
Core Republicans may like Trump, but they have much less affection for MAGA ideology or MAGA political figures not named Trump. As a result, they’re far more willing to take on figures like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel. They’re certainly more willing to take on the likes of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.
And when they do, the MAGA faction strikes back, hard. The dynamic isn’t dissimilar from that a number of center-left institutions experienced in the late 2010s and early 2020s — when more moderate liberals were often shocked at the ferocity of their far-left staff members.
But then MAGA took the ferocity and extremism and dialed it up. Now there are actual fans of Adolf Hitler in the new right universe, and explicit antisemitism and ethnonationalism is all over right-wing social media.
It’s a common human failing that it’s often hard to see extremism as a problem when extremists aim their fire outside the tent. But when the fire is aimed inside — at you — it becomes impossible to ignore.
If the internal Republican clashes are helping to push people out of the party, it’s still incumbent on Democrats to try to pull wavering Republicans and swing voters in. I don’t know if a more moderate Democrat could have won last week (nine points is still a big gap), but it’s worth noting that Behn’s 13-point blue swing has been the smallest among special elections and primaries thus far. Every other blue shift was between 16 and 28 points.
If a number close to 13 is the minimum swing for Democrats, then the consequences could be devastating for the Republican Party, and no amount of gerrymandering will save it. In fact, if present trends continue (and, of course, much can change between now and November 2026), it could backfire substantially.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued an order permitting Texas to use its newly gerrymandered districts in the 2026 midterm elections.
Republicans celebrated the win, but I had a different thought.
If you’re basing your new maps on 2024 — a year that might have the high-water mark of MAGA — you’ve presumed that you’ve realigned American politics. Republicans are assuming their coalition will continue to grow, or at least keep the gains it made in 2024.
For example, if you try to create more red districts by spreading out red voters — or if you count too much on new Hispanic voters staying in the party — then you can reach too far, lower your margin of error, and put a few additional districts in striking range for Democrats if there is, in fact, a big blue shift in 2026.
In other words, if you’ve been doing nothing but shedding support since Trump was sworn in, and if the Democrats work to win over decent Republicans who are repulsed by what their party has become, then the gerrymandering party may be reminded of one of Solomon’s most memorable proverbs:
“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
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