Republican Matt Van Epps has won a hotly contested special election for a deep-red congressional seat in Tennessee, NBC News projects, seeing off a Democratic challenge for the longtime GOP district.
Though Donald Trump carried the 7th Congressional District by 22 points in 2024, Republican super PACs poured millions into defending the seat as Van Epps faced off against Aftyn Behn, a Democratic state representative. Democrats spent almost as much trying to capture it, as Trump’s political standing has taken a hit this year and the Democratic Party made gains in November elections in New Jersey, Virginia and other states.
But Democrats did significantly cut the GOP margin in the district from just a year ago. With most of the expected vote counted, Van Epps had a 9-point districtwide lead. It continues a pattern of Democrats making big gains in elections this year compared to the 2024 results.
Its pretty nuts here in Tennessee. I wouldnt say people here are progressive or pro democrats, but they are very tired of Republicans, at least when I talk to my coworkers, thats what I hear from them.
Except the Boomers who want to live in Techno feudalism.
we progressives need to focus all of our energy in tennessee from now until 2028 because if we don’t take tennessee in 2028 it’s just fucking over, hello fascism in america
Hey guys, we ignored 49 other states so we had 20 seats flip red, but we won 2 in Tennessee!
Why do you think that?
ahh…so i must take the ten…i see
Not a surprise, but cutting 13 percentage points out of a lead is pretty incredible.
My understanding of the world and it’s politics took many years of watching and learning. Now, after the last decade, it all feels like “Prophecy” to me.
If republicans are losing those kinds of numbers into midterms we could actually see a functional congress soon
And everyone’s voting Republican again next November, because Trump is Just Plain Folks! Sad.
Flyover state.
And that dismissive attitude is why Republicans control the United States.
While most of us here would have loved to see Aftyn win, forcing the Rs to heavily fight for a R +22 district is crazy. Both the Speaker and the President did campaigning for a random, deep-red seat, gerrymandered to be a safe Republican district. That’s saying a lot.
This also tracks similarly to the special elections in FL earlier, where while the Democratic candidates didn’t win, they over-performed by roughly the same margin (13 - 15 points).
Overall I agree with what you said, but…
gerrymandered to be a safe Republican district
That’s not what gerrymandering is/does. People do it to end up with more districts for a party within a state, and they get that by splitting them up such that margins are thinner.
This is just a typical “in the middle of nowhere” district that makes it so Republican
There are two types of gerrymandering, packing and cracking. A packed district is where you concentrate voters from the opposition party into one district. You give up a seat, but the remaining districts swing more heavily in your favor. A cracked district is what you are describing, where you dilute the margins of the opposition party by breaking up their strongholds into multiple districts and combine them with areas that vote in your favor.
This was not a “middle of nowhere” district as it included a chunk of the city of Nashville and its suburbs. It was a classic cracked gerrymander as Republicans split Nashville into multiple districts and combined them with large swaths of red countryside (see also the notorious Austin gerrymander in Texas). The margins can sometimes be close enough in a cracked district for the opposition party to win, but in this case it was unlikely as it was Trump +22 in 2024 (in spite of including some of Nashville).
I get what you’re saying, but the line I was quoting implied packing voters for your own party into one district, not the opposition. That would achieve the opposite effect.
They were able to spread the district out to the sticks to get more Republicans and dilute democratic votes. It’s a recent district. They basically sliced Nashville into thirds and included more County Americans and white flight bedroom communities.
The formerly-blue district around Nashville, yes, that was butchered and extended out to the sticks to get R votes. But in doing so, you also put more blue voters into those red districts. If you push it too much, a big enough blue shift in those now-kinda purple districts can get multiple Dem districts - all when you tried to take away the one.
Nashville was carved up, in order to dilute the democratic voters in the city. It was split between three different congressional districts.
The democrats were gerrymandered out of the safe Dem seat that the Nashville area should have.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/politics/us-redistricting/tennessee-redistricting-map/
Right, that link illustrates my point: they used to have one blue and two red districts, both very solid. When they split Nashville into pieces, the voter demographics haven’t changed so they ended up with 3 red districts, but less so than before.
