Under normal circumstances, an election in Tennessee’s Seventh District would not draw much attention.
Republicans have dominated the district, which was drawn as part of an effort to splinter Nashville’s liberal voters into three safely red districts. President Trump carried it handily in 2024, winning by 22 percentage points — about the same margin as that of the Republican representative who was running for re-election there at the time.
But special elections, like the one being held on Tuesday to replace the seat vacated by Representative Mark Green frequently favor Democrats because the Democratic base is likelier to turn out in off years. And this year’s elections have seen consistently large swings toward Democrats that seem to have been driven by a combination of Democrats’ turnout advantage and changes in support among voters who previously cast ballots for Mr. Trump.
The pattern was most recently seen in November’s races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, two states where Democrats won handily despite relatively narrow wins in 2024. And in special congressional elections earlier this year, Democrats outperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 margins by 16 to 23 points.
Polling is scant in the race, and off-year races are notoriously difficult to poll: In this year’s higher-profile races for New Jersey governor and attorney general of Virginia, pollsters underestimated the Democratic candidates significantly.
The only independent poll of the Tennessee race, by Emerson College, put Matt Van Epps, a Republican who is an Army veteran and former state commissioner, ahead of State Representative Aftyn Behn, the Democratic candidate, by just two percentage points. That came a few weeks after the Cook Political Report changed its rating of the race to “Likely Republican” from “Solid Republican.”
Special elections draw substantially fewer voters than regular elections do, and the voters who do turn out are generally highly engaged, partisan, older and more likely to be college graduates, thus complicating attempts to create seats that are “safe” when filled through regular elections. Who turns out for Tuesday’s election may be further scrambled by the fact that it is being held in the relatively quiet period after Thanksgiving, and after a shortened early-voting period that ended almost a week before Election Day.
In 2023 and 2024, Democrats outperformed President Biden’s 2020 margins in five of the eight special congressional elections held those years, according to data compiled by The Downballot. But those results, which came as Mr. Biden’s approval ratings fell even within his own party, were driven almost entirely by turnout, according to a New York Times analysis.
And they were not a harbinger of victory for Ms. Harris in the 2024 presidential race. Republicans who had stayed home during the off-cycle special elections of 2023 and early 2024 showed up in November 2024. They were joined by voters who were disaffected enough with Democrats to flip to supporting Mr. Trump, propelling him to victory.
Now, the Democratic Party is the opposition party, and Mr. Trump’s approval ratings are on the decline. Even if Democrats do not pull off an upset victory in Tennessee, the race will be closely watched by all sides to see if the electoral backlash evident earlier this year continues to grow.
Christine Zhang is a Times reporter specializing in graphics and data journalism.
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