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The White House doesn’t often call White House, Tennessee. But on Monday morning at the Colorado Grill—a burger joint on the two-lane highway cutting through this town about 30 miles north of Nashville—Donald Trump was on the phone.
He was calling Speaker Mike Johnson, who was going through the motions of saying hello to patrons who had shown up for an early lunch. Johnson was there for some last-ditch campaigning ahead of Tuesday’s special election, when voters in Tennessee’s 7th District will send a new representative to the House. And Trump was checking in with Johnson for a status report on how the race was going.
Johnson put the president of the United States on speakerphone in the country restaurant and let Republican nominee Matt Van Epps chime in to profusely thank Trump again for his support. As they reminisced about when Trump had spoken (again via speakerphone) to a rally earlier that morning, the president noted he hadn’t had notes in front of him when he gave his speech. “It’s a good thing you’re a natural, Mr. President,” said the speaker of the House.
Trump reminisced about his line deriding the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn, over the telephone that morning: “She’s anti-Christian and anti–country music.”
Speaking to Johnson and Van Epps, Trump noted, “The anti-Christian thing was good.” Van Epps agreed. “That line really worked, Mr. President.”
(Bob and Doris Ness of White House, who had “just come in for a burger,” were just as impressed. The loyal conservatives never thought that the speaker of the House would be standing 6 inches from their restaurant booth broadcasting a call from Donald Trump.)
A more candid status report for Trump would have gone something like this: Van Epps is the favorite on Tuesday, when he faces off with Behn, a progressive activist turned Democratic state legislator. It’s, after all, a district where Trump trounced Kamala Harris by 22 points in 2024. But all is not well. Polls show the race uncomfortably close for Republicans, and the real shock wasn’t that Trump was calling to come up with attacks on a Democratic congressional candidate—it was that he had to call at all.
This special election for a Nashville-based congressional district will be the definitive barometer of the political environment ahead of the 2026 midterms. Despite the attention paid to recent governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey and a mayor’s race in New York, Tuesday’s race will give the nation the best gauge so far of Democrats’ chances of taking the House next November.
And if Behn does pull off an astonishing upset, it could lead to the collapse of the fragile Republican House majority even sooner. Johnson’s margin is thin already and is set to get more so next month, when Marjorie Taylor Greene is scheduled to resign. Matt Gorman, a top aide to the National Republican Campaign Committee in 2018, contrasted the GOP’s current situation with the one the party faced ahead of the midterms during Trump’s first term: “We just worried about the narrative,” he said. “They have the majority to worry about.”
It’s a lot of attention for a district that typically gets very little. The area is a gerrymandered slice of middle Tennessee that stretches up from Kentucky and down to Alabama, grabbing a hefty chunk of Nashville. No one gave it a second thought until suddenly, this spring, Republican incumbent Mark Green announced his retirement to pursue business ventures in Guyana.
In doing so, he set up a great weather vane for the state of national politics.
The gerrymandering left the seat a heterogeneous array, including many of the base demographics both parties will need to turn out next fall. It includes the bulk of metro Nashville’s Black population, plenty of progressive hipsters who’ve flocked to the city from across the South, traditional right-wing suburbia, and slices of Appalachia.
And, unlike the Virginia and New Jersey elections, it’s a federal race featuring relatively unknown candidates without any complicating state issues. In particular, Virginia’s contest spotlighted well-known candidates in the type of state race in which voters are still willing to cross partisan lines. The Democrat, former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, was widely considered an exemplary candidate who ran a nearly flawless campaign. The Republican, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, was considered a train wreck. Among the GOP consultant class, the question was not whether she’d lose but just how much of a drag she would be.
Tennessee’s 7th is a far cleaner test of what 2026 will look like—and not just because of the congressional election’s focus on federal issues. Rather, it’s a trial run for everything that will happen next year. Behn consistently emphasized affordability in her television ads and on the trail. In contrast, Van Epps—a more establishment-oriented candidate who locked down the Republican nomination after securing Trump’s endorsement—has rotated between touting his support for the president, stressing his own background, and, increasingly, going after Behn as “radical.”
Despite the district’s Republican lean, this has developed into a tight race. A recent poll showed it in a virtual dead heat, with Van Epps clinging to a narrow 2-point lead.
The poll left Democrats drooling. One national party operative who had been tracking the race noted that even a 10-point win for Van Epps would signal a huge opportunity for Democrats, given that Trump had won by more than twice that. “You open up every single district that Republicans won by less than 10.”
USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
Speaking to Slate in a neighborhood bar crammed with twentysomething men in retro baseball caps drinking longneck beers, Behn was occasionally interrupted by patrons who viewed her as a hero. “I love you, Aftyn!” they exclaimed, approaching the candidate for a hug, as SEC football blared in the background.
Over a glass of red wine, Behn was occasionally interrupted when one of her TV ads would play in the background—she seemed struck with a mix of glee and sheer disbelief. This new Democratic standard-bearer didn’t apologize for the smattering of social media posts and podcast appearances that had turned her, almost overnight, into a Fox News bogeyman. A longtime progressive activist in Nashville, Behn had shared her views on social media. Some were simply hot takes, like her disdain for the near-constant presence of bachelorette parties in her city’s downtown. Others, like her 2020 calls to defund the police or apparent support for the burning of a police station, were far more politically harmful. Regardless, they all became grist for the right-wing content mill.
“There’s no nuance in politics,” she said. “I would ask for the same grace that I give people who voted for an economic agenda that hasn’t been delivered.” She added: “And I was a private citizen, right? I have definitely matured as a lawmaker.”
Behn, who was first elected to the state house in a 2023 special election, had served as an organizer for progressive groups like Indivisible. However, she seemed confident that none of her past controversies would be a political impediment in a special election for which there were few swing voters. After all, the race is the only contest on the ballot the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. “This is a mobilization race,” she said. “It’s about turning out your base, right? And it doesn’t matter what I do. The people that were never going to vote for me were never going to vote for me.”
The challenge for Democrats is that the district resembles not just Behn’s Nashville-based turf, replete with hipsters rolling their eyes at bachelorette parties cavorting on pedal bars. The Behn campaign was also canvassing in deep-red Williamson County, a prosperous jurisdiction that has become the bedrock of the modern Republican Party.
The Sunday before the election, in subdivisions where all the brick houses were perched on identical cul-de-sacs, volunteers drove from house to house to find the rare Democrat and remind them to turn out. The houses almost invariably flew flags, often of an SEC football team, but occasionally an American flag. Frequently, the Democratic voters were college age and off at school. The parents at home didn’t share their children’s political inclinations. One asked whether Behn was the Democrat. When told of the candidate’s party affiliation, there was the succinct response: “We’re not.”
However, chipping away at the Republican margins in a conservative bastion like this is essential not just for Tuesday’s special election but for Democrats moving forward. Williamson County is the type where the party’s suburban gains have been stopped cold. It’s well educated and prosperous, like many of the counties where Democrats have made their biggest gains in recent years, but they’ve made far less progress there. Harris got only a third of the vote there in 2024—the second-best performance there by a Democratic presidential candidate in the 21st century. It trailed only Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, in a county studded with evangelical megachurches and the sprawling McMansions of Nashville stars.
Republicans were pulling out the stops at the last minute for their candidate on Monday. The morning before the election, it felt as if a convention of local GOP elected officials had gathered along with Johnson on behalf of Van Epps’ campaign. For the event, held in a billionaire’s car barn and hosting roughly 150 people and about as many immaculately restored classic cars, the highlight wasn’t anything the speaker of the House said into the microphone but rather what came out of his cellphone, as—like he would again, later that day, at the Colorado Grill—he held his phone, on speaker mode, up to it so that Trump could address the crowd. Although the president falsely claimed that he had won the 2020 election before he even mentioned Van Epps’ name, Trump went on to deliver a standard monologue about the race. Johnson gripped the phone with a thin smile. The key line underscored Behn’s disdain for Christianity and country music, but there was plenty of other red meat offered for those assembled.
Eventually, Van Epps took the stage too. His remarks focused alternatively on Behn’s left-wing views and his family’s military service, as he detailed a series of close encounters with rocket-propelled grenades that he and his relatives had endured while serving in the U.S. military.
Afterward, Jody Barrett, an ardently right-wing state legislator who finished second in the primary, acknowledged to Slate that Van Epps had had a slow start to the general election after his primary victory but had finally gotten up to speed in the homestretch. He cited the crowd of elected Republicans in the car barn—attendees included the governor, two senators, and three members of Congress—as a sign of the campaign’s seriousness.
However, Barrett still thought Republicans were greatly helped by the Democratic standard-bearer. “The Democrats did us a huge favor,” he said. “They nominated the most extreme, most radical, closest thing to a Marxist that they could have nominated.”
Special elections defined the political landscape in the run-up to Trump’s first midterms, in 2018. Before Jon Ossoff’s successful Senate race, his attempt to win a suburban Atlanta seat in the spring of 2017 captured national attention and set spending records, as Democrats narrowly fell short in what had long been considered a safe Republican seat. It proved a canary in a coal mine for the losses the GOP would suffer in suburban seats in 2018.
Ossoff’s House run was followed by a second special election that made national headlines. A few months later in 2018, Conor Lamb won a shock victory for a southwestern Pennsylvania seat that Trump had won by 20 points (just shy of the margin by which Trump won Tennessee’s 7th District in 2024). Lamb was widely considered a model candidate; his opponent, Rick Saccone, was not. As Lamb dryly noted to Slate last week, “Part of what you need [in a special election] is a little bit of luck, and we had that when they nominated Rick Saccone.”
Gorman, the former NRCC aide, noted that Behn was different from both Ossoff and Lamb because of the sheer amount of opposition research available to Republicans, given Behn’s progressive activism and significant social media history.
Republicans have long been operating with the slimmest of majorities, and
Democrats will finally fill a long-vacant safe seat in January. With Marjorie Taylor Greene’s expected resignation, a surprise Democratic win wouldn’t deprive Johnson of the gavel. However, it would leave him a tragedy or a sex scandal from being in a very vulnerable position in an already fractious conference.
The special elections were run with entirely different models. Lamb and Ossoff alike avoided doing too much national media and attempted not to nationalize the race. As Lamb noted, “In the last week or 10 days, the sort of attention span of all the people in your district is just really starting to open, and you have to deal with Do I want them hearing me give answers to national political questions, or do I want them to hear me continue and give the answers I’ve given throughout the whole campaign about what’s important for this district?”
In contrast, Behn has consistently done national media, including interviews with progressive influencers like Joy Reid and MeidasTouch. It’s a calculation different from that made in those past special elections, when there was more of a focus on persuasion—and when Democrats believed that there were swing voters to convince. As Lamb noted, “We now have eight years of data that shows every Democrat everywhere is very excited to come out and vote against Donald Trump, especially in special elections.”
The question is just how much excitement Republicans can muster. After all, while voters have come out of the woodwork to vote for Trump when he is on the ballot, there has never been the same level of enthusiasm shown by his MAGA base in off years. Further, his approval rating is at near-record lows. The result leaves Van Epps uniquely vulnerable to this discontent, the Democratic operative notes, as a first-time candidate. “He’s kind of an unknown, which allows him to be defined by what the Republican Party stands for in the minds of voters right now.”
The district is still safely Republican enough that the association isn’t fatal for Van Epps. However, while he can survive these political headwinds, there are a lot of other Republicans who won’t be able to next year unless something changes. And Tuesday will give an indication of just how tough that political environment will be.
