A narrow Tennessee victory is a big warning sign for NC Republicans | Opinion
Republicans may have won Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee, but they still have plenty of reasons to be nervous about the result.
GOP candidate Matt Van Epps averted a Democratic upset in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District — but he won by just 8 points in a district Donald Trump carried by 22 points in 2024.
Republicans had to fight harder than expected to keep the seat, pouring significant resources into an area where they normally wouldn’t have to fight much at all. That’s even in a race with a Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn, who was very liberal with a history of iffy remarks and social media posts that could be used against her. That should have hurt her more in such a red district. But the fact that the margin narrowed so significantly in just 13 months is further evidence that Democrats may be growing momentum as public discontent with Trump grows.
That Democratic overperformance is likely unnerving to Republicans across the country, including in North Carolina, where many congressional districts are less red than the one in Tennessee. Democrats didn’t invest much in North Carolina’s congressional races in 2024, but there were no margins as large as the one in Tennessee last year, except for in districts where Democrats didn’t field a candidate at all. In the NC districts won by Republicans in contested races, the average margin of victory was 17 points and the largest was 19 points, and that was in a good year for Republicans. Given that Tennessee’s district saw a 13-point swing in just one year, Republicans in North Carolina should be concerned, especially as recent gerrymandering has made their margins slightly narrower.
The swing suggests that districts typically believed to be safe may actually be competitive after all — even those that Republicans gerrymandered in their favor. The seat in Tennessee was specifically gerrymandered to favor Republicans, who carved the liberal city of Nashville into three different congressional districts in 2022. That’s also the case with North Carolina’s congressional districts, which were redrawn just months ago to create yet another GOP seat. But adding that seat has made other seats a little more vulnerable. The 3rd Congressional District, for example, favored Republicans by 17 percentage points under the previous map. Under the new maps, however, Republicans have just a 7-point edge. The 11th Congressional District goes from an 11-point advantage to a 6-point one.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that Tennessee’s outcome will necessarily be duplicated in North Carolina next year. Special elections don’t always follow the same patterns as normal ones, and it’s typically the most intensely engaged voters that show up, while demographics that typically favor Republicans tend to stay home. But Tennessee’s 2025 turnout was the highest of any special election this year — rivaling the turnout in the 2022 midterms — which could make it a better predictor of what may happen in 2026 midterms, when turnout will be higher.
Simply put: If a Trump +22 district can swing this far, so can anyone else’s. Because as much as Van Epps tried to steer the conversation away from Donald Trump in the past two weeks, painting his opponent as the “AOC of Tennessee,” voters went to the polls thinking about tariffs, health care, the cost of living, federal immigration overreach and other troubling parts of Trump’s agenda. For a lot of voters, those issues brought them to the polls in the first place.
The message that carried Democrats to resounding victories in Virginia and New Jersey last month also boosted their performance in Tennessee on Tuesday. A focus on affordability is something that’s resonating with voters right now, including many who have supported Trump and Republicans in the past. Van Epps, for his part, touted his victory as proof that “running away from Trump is how you lose, running with Trump is how you win.” That may be how he’s spinning it, but the math isn’t on his side. And if Republicans want to avoid disaster in 2026, they’re going to have to come to terms with that.
Paige Masten is a deputy opinion editor for The Charlotte Observer and McClatchy’s North Carolina Opinion team.
