When Tuesday night, November 4 arrived, Democratic strategists were on pins and needles as they awaited returns in 2025’s off-year elections. And there was a lot of good news for Democrats, from double-digit victories in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey to landslide wins in three Pennsylvania Supreme Court retention votes.
Those elections were widely viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump’s second presidency, giving Democrats some optimism about the 2026 midterms.
Now, Democratic and GOP strategists are paying close attention to a U.S. House special election in Tennessee that will be held this Tuesday, December 2. With former Rep. Mark Green having retired from Congress, the election finds Democratic State Rep. Aftyn Behn up against Republican Matt Van Epps.
Reporting for USA Today in late November, reporters Joey Garrison and Zac Anderson explain, “Fresh off Democrats’ domination in the off-year elections, a congressional race in Tennessee has become an unlikely test for whether a national blue wave is building that could produce a seismic shakeup in next year’s midterm election.”
Behn and Van Epps are competing in a very GOP-leaning congressional district. Yet Behn is surprisingly competitive in polls.
“Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District was never supposed to be competitive,” Garrison and Anderson report. “It’s the creation of Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature, which drew its boundaries in 2022 by splitting Democrat-stronghold Nashville into three districts, each dominated by conservative rural counties and different Middle Tennessee suburbs. One was District 7, which includes parts of Nashville’s Davidson County and 13 other countries.”
The USA Today reporters add, “Trump won Tennessee’s Congressional District 7 by 22 percentage points over Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. But both Democrats and Republicans are bracing for a close election next week. A poll from Emerson College Polling/The Hill found Van Epps leading by only 2 percentage points, 48 percent to 46 percent, within the survey’s margin of error. Even if Behn doesn’t win the race — something that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago — a defeat by single-digits could signal major trouble for Republicans in the 2026 midterms.”
Read the full USA Today article at this link.
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