Republican Matt Van Epps has won a special election in a race that turned out to be surprisingly closer than expected in a sign of the Republican Party’s increasing unpopularity going into next year’s midterm elections.
Van Epps defeated Aftyn Behn, a progressive state legislator, with 53.2 percent of the vote as of Tuesday evening with 93 percent of the vote being reported.
President Donald Trump was among the first to congratulate Epps, writing posts on Truth Social Tuesday evening after around 75 percent of the votes had been counted.
“Congratulations to Matt Van Epps on his BIG Congressional WIN in the Great State of Tennessee. The Radical Left Democrats threw everything at him, including Millions of Dollars. Another great night for the Republican Party!!! President DJT.”
The election gives Republicans in the House of Representatives 220 seats. That number will go drop in January when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) exits Congress after her resignation.
Epps’ race with Behn turned out to be much more competitive in an area of the country that voted for Trump by 22 points just 13 months ago.
The closeness of the race signals how hard Republicans will have to work ahead of next year’s mid-terms. A YouGov/Economist poll showed that 45 percent of voters would vote for a generic Democrat next year and 39 percent would prefer a generic Republican.
Both sides deployed their biggest resources in the Tennessee race. House Speaker Mike Johnson spent much of Monday traveling with Van Epps. He and Trump also held a tele-rally for Van Epps.
Behn received support from national Democrats. Kamala Harris traveled to Tennessee to speak to volunteers at Fisk University, a historically Black college, as polling showed the race to be tighter than expected.
On Monday, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, held a tele-rally. Former Vice President Al Gore, who served as a senator from Tennessee, also appeared at the tele-rally.
Republicans sought to paint Behn not as a generic Republican but a radical. Behn gave them fertile ground with deleted tweets reportedly made about burning down police stations and defunding the police.
She came under fire for an recording where she said in a podcast that “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.”
Still, the tightness of the race has caused Democrats to be more optimistic going into 2026. The same YouGov/Economist poll showed that only 38 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance as president.
That has translated into significant performances by Democrats in elections throughout 2025.
In April, Democrats performed better than expected in two special congressional elections in Florida and won a Supreme Court race in Wisconsin by double digits. In August, they flipped a state legislative seat in Iowa, breaking the Republican supermajority.
Last month, they won the governorships in Virginia and New Jersey by double digits and won public service commission races in Georgia by wide margins.
Despite this, Johnson guaranteed in his weekly press conference that Republicans would keep the House.
“Republicans are not just going to hold on to the majority,” he said. “We’re going to grow it.”
The election also reveals how uninvolved Trump has been in the welfare of the Republican Party now that he is constitutionally ineligible to run for president again.
As opposed to the past when the president would often travel to swing districts to help down ballot Republicans, he phoned in an appearance in Tennessee when Johnson held up his phone to a microphone for Trump to speak to supporters on Monday.
