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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 going 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 in the morning, the President noted he didn’t have notes in front of him when he spoke. “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 six inches from their restaurant booth broadcasting a call from Donald Trump).
A more candid status report for Trump would go 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 a district, after all, 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 isn’t that Trump was calling to come up with attacks on a Democratic congressional candidate—it was that he had to call at all.
Tuesday’s 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 to the one they faced ahead of the midterms in 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 district 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, it 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 November. It includes the bulk of metro Nashville’s African American 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 election featuring relatively unknown candidates without any complicating state issues. In particular, Virginia’s election featured well known candidates in the type of state race where voters are still willing to cross partisan lines. The Democrat, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, was widely considered an exemplary candidate who ran a nearly flawless campaign. The Republican, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, was considered a train wreck. Among the Republican 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 it’s a congressional election focusing on federal issues. Instead, it’s a test run for everything that will happen next year. Behn focused consistently on 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 Trump support, his biography and, increasingly, going after Behn as “radical.”
Despite the district’s Republican lean, it’s developed into a tight race. One recent poll showed it as a virtual dead heat, with Van Epps clinging to a narrow two point lead.
The poll left Democrats drooling. One national Democratic operative who had been tracking the race thought that even a ten-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 ten.”
Matt Van Epps and Aftyn Behn
Photos by USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.
Speaking to Slate in a neighborhood bar crammed with twenty-something 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 as they approached for a hug as SEC football blared in the background.
Over a glass of red wine, Behn was occasionally interrupted when one of her television ads blared in the background, which she viewed with a mix of glee and sheer disbelief. The progressive activist turned Democratic standard bearer didn’t apologize for an array of social media posts and podcasts that turned her 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 downtown Nashville. Others like her 2020 calls to defund the police or seeming 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, is a longtime liberal activist who was an organizer for progressive groups like Indivisible. However, she seemed confident that all of her past controversies would not be a political impediment in a special election where there were few swing voters. After all, the race is the only contest on the ballot on 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 doesn’t just resemble Behn’s Nashville-based turf that features hipsters rolling their eyes at bachelorette parties cavorting on pedal bars. The Behn campaign also was canvassing in deep red Williamson County, a prosperous jurisdiction which has become the bedrock of the modern Republican Party.
There, in subdivisions where all the brick houses were perched on identical cul de sacs, volunteers drove from house to house to find the rare Democrats and remind them to turn out on a crisp Sunday afternoon before the election. The houses almost invariably flew flags, often of an SEC football team but occasionally an American one. Often, the Democrats voters were college aged 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 Democrats’ 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. Kamala Harris only got a third of the vote there in 2024 which was the second best performance by a Democratic presidential candidate there in the 21st century, trailing only Biden’s margin in 2020 in a county studded with evangelical mega churches and the sprawling McMansions of Nashville stars.
Republicans were pulling out the stops at the last minute for their candidate on Monday morning. The morning before the election, it felt like a convention of local Republican elected officials had gathered on Van Epps’ behalf. Gathered in a billionaire’s car barn and speaking to a crowd of roughly 150 people and about as many immaculately restored classic cars, Johnson showed up to campaign for Van Epps, thoughThe highlight wasn’t anything that the Louisiana Republican said into the microphone but rather what came out of his cellphone, as—as 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 won the 2020 election before he even mentioned van Epps name, Trump went on to deliver a standard monologue about the race. Johnson held the phone with a thin smile. The key line of course was about Behn’s disdain for Christianity and country music, but there was plenty of other red meat offered for the crowd.
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 long series of close encounters with rocket propelled grenades that he and his family members had faced while serving in the U.S. military.
Afterwards, Jody Barrett, an ardently right-wing state legislator who finished second in the primary, acknowledged to Slate that Van Epps had a slow start to the general election after his primary victory but he thought the GOP candidate had finally gotten up to speed in the homestretch. He cited the crowd of elected Republicans in the car barn—which included the governor, two senators, and three members of Congress—as a sign of how serious the campaign was.
However Barrett still thought Republicans were greatly helped by the Democratic standard bearer. “The Democrats did us a huge favor. 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 run, 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 the 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 in a southwestern Pennsylvania seat that Trump had won by 20 points (just shy of the margin that Trump won Tennessee’s 7th district in 2024 by). Lamb was widely considered a model candidate and 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 either Ossoff or Lamb because of the sheer amount of opposition research available to Republicans from Behn’s long social media history as a progressive activist.
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 shock 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. Both Lamb and Ossoff avoided doing too much national media and avoided nationalizing 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?’”
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Want to Know How the 2026 Midterms Will Go? Look at Tennessee Today.
In contrast, Behn has consistently done national media, including interviews with progressive influencers like Joy Reid and Meidas Touch. It’s a calculation different than that made in those past special elections where there was more of a focus on persuasion—and where Democrats believed there were swing voters to persuade. After all, 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 woods to vote for Donald 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, as 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.
