Republican Matt Van Epps defeated Democrat Aftyn Behn in the special election in Tennessee’s 7th congressional district held on Tuesday, 2 December. The seat in the US House of Representatives became vacant after Republican incumbent Mark Green resigned in July to take a job in the private sector.
At 95 per cent reporting, Van Epps is leading by 8.9 points. That is a sizable margin. However, Green won the district by 21.5 points back in November 2024, which also means there has been a 12.6-point shift to the left in the region.
Given that it was a special election in an off-year (meaning in a year where no presidential or mid-term elections are held), that should not be of too much concern for the GOP leadership. The only poll for the race by a nationally known pollster showed a much tighter competition between the two candidates: Emerson College had Van Epps up by only 2 points. Given that Emerson heavily underestimated Democrats in the New Jersey gubernatorial race earlier this year (by double digits, 11 points!) Republicans even had to do a little ‘sweating’ before results started to come in.
Speaking of the gubernatorial races from earlier this year: while the GOP underperformed expectations then, those races took place during an unprecedentedly long government shutdown. It was not clear to what extent that had affected the outcome of those elections. Prior to that, voter registration data projected a very favourable environment for the GOP in next year’s midterms. Those projections have shifted towards the Democrats since the elections in New Jersey and Virginia in November.
As for the Tennessee special election, Democrat nominee Aftyn Behn has been dubbed as ‘the AOC of Tennessee’—a reference to progressive Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York—by right-wing media in the lead-up.
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez actually came to Tennessee to campaign with Behn, which only helped the term stick in voters’ minds. Behn has not been branded with her new nickname for her policies, rather, for statements she had made in a podcast appearance about her dislike of country music, a staple of the state of Tennessee, and even the state capital Nashville as a whole.
With the results, Republicans have held onto their 220 seats in the House of Representatives, while Democrats have 213, as two seats are vacant in Texas and Arizona, respectively, due to the passing of late Representatives Turner and Grijalva.
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