Aftyn Behn Lost Tennessee’s 7th – But Democrats Just Shaved A 22-Point Trump District Down To Single Digits
Republicans held the seat, but a double-digit Democratic overperformance in deep-red territory is the part that has national strategists spooked.
Aftyn Behn did not win Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District tonight. Republican Matt Van Epps will be the next member of Congress from a district that has been safely in GOP hands for years. On paper, that sounds like business as usual in a district Donald Trump carried by roughly twenty-plus points in 2024.
Look closer, and the picture shifts.
Preliminary returns show Van Epps taking just over 53 percent of the vote to Behn’s roughly 46 percent, a Republican margin of about seven to eight points. That is a far cry from Trump’s 2024 advantage in the same district, which was on the order of 20 to 22 points, and from the 2024 House result, when Republicans carried TN-7 by roughly 21 points.
In other words, Democrats just cut the GOP margin by around 14 points in a district that national handicappers still rate as solidly Republican. FiveThirtyEight’s model had the race at R+5.6 heading into Election Day. Behn outperformed the presidential baseline in hostile territory, and she did it under a microscope, with both parties pouring money and attention into a race that was never supposed to be competitive.
The headline is that Republicans held the seat.
The story is that they had to sweat to do it.
Why this race mattered
TN-7 is not a swing seat. It is a sprawling, conservative district running from the Nashville suburbs out through rural Middle and West Tennessee. Trump-style Republicans have treated it as safe territory. When former Representative Mark Green resigned earlier this year, most observers assumed his replacement would cruise.
Behn changed that math. A state representative and progressive organizer, she built her campaign around cost of living, health care and ICE raids in Nashville. National Republicans tried to paint her as far-left and soft on crime. National Democrats argued that if she could make it close here, it would send a message about Trump’s drag on the ticket and the limits of MAGA politics outside its deepest strongholds.
Polls heading into Election Day showed Van Epps with a mid-single-digit lead, already tighter than the district’s red hue would suggest. The final result basically matched those numbers. For Republicans, that is technically a win. For Democrats, it is a proof-of-concept.
A warning flare for Republicans
Special elections are noisy, but taken together they tell a story. Across the last two cycles, Democrats have tended to run ahead of Biden’s 2020 numbers and ahead of district partisanship in a majority of competitive specials, particularly in suburban and college-educated areas.
TN-7 fits that pattern. This is still red Tennessee, yet a Democrat just pulled within single digits where Trump was winning by more than twenty points a year ago. That is the kind of movement that freaks out party committees, because it suggests the GOP’s structural advantage is softer than it looks on a national map.
Republican strategists know how to read these numbers. A seven-point win in a R+22 presidential district is not a show of strength. It is a flashing yellow light that says the coalition is eroding among some mix of suburban professionals, younger voters and crossover independents who were willing to give Trump another shot in 2024 but are not sold on sending more MAGA loyalists to Congress.
What Behn’s showing tells Democrats
For Democrats, Behn’s loss is also a lesson. She did not win in a district that still strongly leans right, and there are limits to overperformance when the underlying partisan floor is this red. But she demonstrated that a message focused on economic pain, abortion rights, immigration enforcement abuses and democratic norms can narrow even very unfavorable terrain.
Her campaign also shows that organizing around “coalitions of the pissed off” – voters angry about bans, book removals, ICE raids and corporate price hikes – can be more powerful than the old model of chasing an imaginary centrist who never shows up on Election Day.
If Democrats can replicate even half of Behn’s overperformance in districts that are R+5 or R+8 instead of R+22, the House map looks very different very quickly.
The bottom line
Matt Van Epps will be sworn in as the next Republican representative from Tennessee’s 7th District. On the surface, that result maintains the status quo. Underneath, the numbers tell a different story.
Republicans held a seat they should have won in a walk, and they did it by single digits. Democrats lost the race, but they gained a data point that will loom large in every strategy memo heading into 2026:
In a deep-red district built for Trump, Aftyn Behn just proved the map is not as safe as Republicans think.
References
Associated Press. (2025). Tennessee special election results: TN-07. Retrieved from https://apnews.com
FiveThirtyEight. (2025). TN-07 special election forecast and district partisan lean. Retrieved from https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com
New York Times. (2025). 2024 House and presidential results by district. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/elections/results/us-house
Parnas, A. (2025). Democrats substantially overperform in deep-red Tennessee district. Substack. Retrieved from https://open.substack.com/pub/aaronparnas
Tennessee Secretary of State. (2025). Unofficial election results: U.S. House District 7 special election. Retrieved from https://sos.tn.gov/elections
WPLN Nashville Public Radio. (2025). Aftyn Behn’s campaign messaging and voter mobilization in Middle Tennessee. Retrieved from https://wpln.org
Cook Political Report. (2025). Partisan Voting Index for Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District. Retrieved from https://www.cookpolitical.com
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