Republicans should freak out about Tennessee
Major alarm bells in Nashville for the GOP
There’s no good way to spin yesterday’s election result for Republicans. They won a special election in Tennessee’s 7th District by just 9%, after it voted for Trump by 22% a year ago. That’s a 13% swing left, which if replicated nationwide would be enough to flip states such as Iowa, Florida, Ohio and Alaska.
Now if we look at previous special election swings, this is relatively unimpressive, in fact it’s the smallest swing we’ve seen all year. But unlike these other special elections, Republicans have no excuse for their poor performance. All of these previous swings shown above can be attributed to some combination of low turnout, no real effort by national Republicans, and weak candidates. The same cannot be said in TN-07. If anything, it seems that it was the Democrats who had the candidate disadvantage here, potentially to a large extent. National Republicans were pretty engaged from day one, they spent a reasonable amount of money and managed to turn out their own voters at a solid rate. Turnout reached about 53% of 2024 President levels, still a lot less than what we’ll see in the midterms next year, but higher than in any previous special elections in the second Trump term. While the Democrats did have a turnout advantage, it was probably small compared to the massive turnout gaps we saw in races like FL-01. Just as in Virginia and New Jersey last month, one fact is inescapable: Democrats haven’t just been turning out their own voters, they’ve been flipping Trump voters.
It’s also important to remember that turnout patterns make it harder for Democrats to get big over-performances in deep red areas. Case in point: Democrat Aftyn Behn outran Harris by 20% in deep-blue Davidson County (Nashville), she outran by just 7% in rural Wayne County, which was Trump+77. This is good news for Democrats who don’t need to be competing in deep-red territory to flip the House, or even the Senate next year. For the most part, the House will be decided in disproportionately white seats that narrowly voted for Trump last year — Democrats have been doing well in these kinds of places, turnout-wise.
In some sense, the extent to which the GOP freaks out over these results should be heavily modulated by the question of whether Aftyn Behn was a strong candidate — my view is that she was pretty weak, given her history of far-left policy stances and talking about how she hates Nashville. But in another sense, at least for the House next year, it doesn’t really matter. If Behn was weak, then that makes this election result in Tennessee look even more damning for the GOP. But if Behn was strong, that just implies that Democrats can run seriously left-wing candidates without facing a penalty for it. Given that poor candidate selection is probably the main way Democrats lose the House next year, this would also be good news for them. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you probably know that I find this latter explanation unsound. But my point is that either way, there’s little silver lining for the GOP. They’re in for a rough year.
Your lips to the gods' ears on Florida. Home & auto insurance are already pushing the middle & working classes hard here. Rs screwing up on the ACA adds almost a year of monthly reminders that a vote for the other side might be a good idea if one wants health insurance--they might as well legislate a massive donation to the DNC. Granted, we're perfectly capable on the blue side of blowing that kind of advantage, but it's not nothing.
53% turnout doesn’t strike me as at all out of line for a midterm election. I think the national average is south of that. That’s a little low for competitive districts but if you told me 2026 would feature that nationally I wouldn’t blink.