Republicans avoided disaster on Tuesday night by winning a special election in a solidly red Tennessee congressional district.
But the single-digit race there is merely the latest in an unambiguously troubling series of recent election results for President Donald Trump’s party 11 months before the 2026 midterm elections.
Republican Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps led Democrat Aftyn Behn by about nine points with 95% of the vote counted.
That’s in a district that Trump carried by 22 points and former GOP Rep. Mark Green won by more than 21 points last year.
That means that, as things stand, Behn over-performed Democrats’ 2024 presidential margin by about 13 points and their 2024 House margin by about 12 points.
The swing is actually smaller than other US House special elections this year. Before Tuesday’s race, Democrats had over-performed Kamala Harris’ margins by an average of 18 points and their House margins by an average of 16 points in four special congressional elections held in three states: Arizona, Florida and Virginia.
The sum total of those 2025 races is pretty remarkable.
Democrats have now over-performed by double digits in every special election for the House held in 2025. And this year’s special elections account for 5 of their 15 biggest over-performances (compared to their margin in the previous presidential race) since Trump first became president in 2017. That’s across more than three dozen special elections in that span.
Special elections are, of course, an imperfect and infrequent gauge of upcoming elections. They tend to feature very low turnout, which places a premium on enthusiasm and can create larger swings than normal. Turnout in Tuesday’s contest actually rivaled the 2022 midterm election in the district, which could account for why Behn’s over-performance was below the average of the other special elections this year.
(Even if Democrats had somehow won this district, there is very little chance they’d have held it even in a strong 2026 election for their side.)
But virtually every other indicator has also pointed in Democrats’ direction this year.
That includes special elections held for state legislative seats, which have also swung harder towards Democrats than ever before in the Trump era.
Democrats also notched a double-digit over-performance in a high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April. And they had a very good Election Day last month that included double-digit wins in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races as well as winning their first non-federal statewide offices in Georgia in nearly 20 years. Democrats also overwhelmingly passed a redistricting ballot measure in California despite some early doubt about the measure’s prospects.
Given all the attention the Tennessee race received, it’s likely there’ll be a fair bit of dissecting the results.
One fair question for Democrats, given the smaller over-performance, is whether they failed to fully take advantage of the environment by running a quite liberal candidate in Behn.
She gave Republicans plenty of material with her past comments, which included saying she “hates” Nashville, expressing support for defunding the police and calling herself a “very radical person.”
But with 2025 soon coming to a close, all told, Democrats appear to be performing better electorally than they did in 2017. And Democrats went on in 2018 to win back the US House in a “wave” election.
That doesn’t mean a midterm victory is assured. Eleven months is a long time. But history shows the president’s party very often loses seats in midterm elections, and Trump right now appears to be at a low point of either of his presidential terms.
Tuesday’s results filled out that picture, even if Democrats fell well shy of a shock upset.
