Whither Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District  in the midterms?

State Rep. Aftyn Behn, a Nashville Democrat, turned out Democratic voters — and possibly Republican ones — in a December 2025 special election. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

Here in a deep red state where elections for federal office are mind-numbingly (and for Democrats demoralizingly) predictable, it was serious political fun—right?—to see Middle Tennessee briefly take center stage in the national spotlight for December’s 7th Congressional District special election. 

A favorable climate for Democratic gains in special elections combined with polling showing a tight race drew scads of outside money on both sides, juicing a campaign ad frenzy the likes of which we don’t usually see in congressional races here. The whole thing had Tennessee Democrats starry-eyed with possibilities.

When the moondust settled the Republican from central casting, Matt Van Epps, took down the activist Democratic state Rep. Aftyn Behn by 9 points. President Donald Trump won this district in 2024 by 22 points, so Behn’s campaign moved the district 13 points in a blue direction. That’s not nothing though it did lag heftier Democratic overperformance (16-22 points) in the four congressional specials in 2025 in other states. 

Now it’s on to the 2026 midterms, where Van Epps will seek to keep his seat in a regular election. Noting the inroads Behn made and the fact that she finished the campaign with an unspent $465,000 stash in her campaign account, the Nashville Scene’s Eli Motycka wrote last week that Behn “has positioned herself to take another shot at Congress.” In a post-election interview on the Nashville City Cast podcast in December Behn said “We’ll see if I decide to run again next year.” Should she?  

Penning her own campaign post-mortem on Substack in December, Behn sounded triumphalist notes: her single-digit margin (of defeat) “was years in the making,” powered by a door-knocking and voter contact enterprise that operated on a “jaw-dropping scale.” Behn wrote that “our theory of change was affirmed again and again.” As bullet-pointed in the piece that theory revolved tightly around Behn herself: a candidate with a history of turning out their voters (like her, she says), issue ownership (like her on the grocery tax, she says), and a command of grassroots dynamics (like she has, she says). 

In tight Tennessee congressional race, Republican Matt Van Epps pulls out victory

There is a bit of a tinge of “only I alone could pull this off” political vanity to it, which is scarcely more appealing in a populist well-meaning liberal than in the professional narcissist in the White House who regularly traffics in this sort of thing.

Behn justifiably takes credit for improved Democratic margins over 2024 in each of the 14 countries in the district. Importantly, though, the blueward shift Behn pulled off was engineered largely by gains in Davidson County (a 20 point gain over the 2024 presidential margin) with markedly smaller overperformance in the crucial suburban and exurban counties of Montgomery (10 point gain over 2024), Williamson (7 point gain) and Robertson (8 point gain). 

This led some analysts looking at us from the outside in to speculate that liabilities of the candidate herself might put a ceiling on Democratic overperformance in TN-7. NBC’s Steve Kornacki, for example, mused that Behn needed to do a lot better in Montgomery and Williamson to have a chance and wondered “if a Democrat without her baggage could have [made] far more meaningful inroads.” The baggage, of course, is the fodder some of her past actions and comments provided for scorched-earth attack ads.

Behn, it won’t surprise you to learn, flat out rejects the hypothesis that candidate quality explains the loss. Writing on Substack she dismissed what she calls “the delusion that with the right candidate thousands of MAGA or Republican voters would *poof* magically convert to Democrats.” It makes no difference who the Democratic candidate is, she argued, because “the cut-and-paste playbook exploited by the RNC would have been weaponized against any of us.”

Speaking of delusions, this feels half right at best. Yes, mass conversion wasn’t in the offing no matter who ran—a special election is a battle of turnout, not persuasion—and of course Republicans would have aimed their fire at any Democrat, but the weapons would have looked quite a bit different. The Democrats Behn bested in the October primary all came with progressive policy stances similar to Behn, to be sure. But those would have made them look more like run-of-the-mill Democrats, not feed into the AOC-brand far-left identity Behn’s past politically maladroit utterances served up. 

In a turnout race, to state the obvious, it’s about turnout on both sides. Behn rightfully claims credit for a field operation that elevated turnout well above where these special elections typically land—notably higher than the other 2025 congressional specials and actually reaching midterm levels. 

Yet the argument can be made that Behn was a turnout machine on both sides. Republicans spent what they needed to spend down the stretch (which to Behn’s credit was a lot) to make the case to their voters that they need to get off the couch and turn out to make sure the scary commie blonde lady gets nowhere near levers of power. Behn made this a relatively easy case to make. It won’t be any harder next time.