Trump’s pick Van Epps wins special election in deep-red Tennessee

US President Donald Trump’s Republicans have won a closely watched special election in Tennessee, dashing a long-shot bid by Democrats to flip a deep-red district that last went blue in 1980.

Trump-backed candidate Matt Van Epps, a former state commissioner, comfortably defeated Democratic state Representative Aftyn Behn on Tuesday, in a race that was nonetheless relatively close by historical standards.

Van Epps had garnered about 54 percent of the vote late on Tuesday, compared with about 45 percent for Behn, according to a partial tally by The New York Times.

Trump carried the district, which includes parts of Nashville and large rural areas of the state, by 22 points in the 2024 presidential election.

Van Epps’s Republican predecessor, Mark Green, who resigned in July, won the district by more than 20 points in 2024 and 2022, and more than 40 points in 2020.

Trump, who had praised Van Epps as a “MAGA warrior”, congratulated the Republican on the win.

“The Radical Left Democrats threw everything at him, including Millions of Dollars,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Another great night for the Republican Party!!!”

Democrats had hoped to capitalise on the growing dissatisfaction with Trump ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

Prominent Democrats, including progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Vice President Al Gore, rallied on Behn’s behalf ahead of the vote.

“The very fact that this race is in play is showing that we are in a time when anything can happen, and that miracles can happen, including in Tennessee,” said Ocasio-Cortez, praising Behn for her “guts”.

“Now we have this race within striking distance: what we call the margin of effort.”

National spotlight on a local race

The result comes less than a year before the US holds pivotal midterm elections in November 2026.

During the midterms, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs.

Currently, Republicans have a narrow majority in the House, as well as in the US Senate.

Given how small the margins are, both Democrats and Republicans have been angling to win every seat they can.

The right-wing stronghold of Texas, for instance, passed a bill in August that would redraw the state’s congressional districts with the aim of giving Republican politicians five extra seats in the midterms.

The Trump-backed redistricting push has inspired other states to take similar efforts.

In Democrat-leaning California, for instance, voters approved a ballot initiative in November to redraw the state’s congressional map to help Democrats gain five more seats, effectively negating the Texas effort.

Tennessee’s 7th congressional district was not part of this year’s partisan redistricting push. But in 2022, the Republican-held state legislature did rework its congressional maps to give Republicans a greater edge.

The 2022 map split Nashville, a Democratic-leaning city, into three separate congressional districts, including the 7th congressional district, thereby diluting the power of its Democratic voters.

While the 7th district has long been considered a safe Republican seat, Behn had only narrowly trailed Van Epps in most polls.

A survey by Emerson College put her at 46 percent support, compared with 48 percent for Van Epps. An additional 5 percent of those surveyed remained undecided.

With the candidates seemingly running neck and neck, money poured into the race.

MAGA Inc, a super PAC named for Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, poured $1m into the race in its first donation since the 2024 presidential election season. The left-leaning House Majority PAC spent $1m to back Behn.

The win in Tennessee is a boost for Republicans as they try to recover from a series of stinging election losses to Democrats in November’s off-year elections.

In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill trounced a Trump-backed candidate to win the governor’s seat, and another Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, likewise emerged victorious in Virginia’s gubernatorial race.

Some political analysts had viewed the Tennessee race as a barometer of an increasingly hostile political landscape for Republicans before the midterms.

A recent Gallup poll showed Trump’s popularity at its lowest levels since he began his second term, with just 36 percent of voters saying they approved of his performance. Sixty percent said they disapproved.

In the lead-up to Tuesday’s vote, Republican leaders had urged supporters to make their voices heard at the ballot box.

“Special elections are strange animals, and anything can happen. And when you’re in a deep-red district, sometimes people assume that the Republican, the conservative, will win,” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters.

“You cannot assume that, because anything can happen. So we encourage everybody to go out there and make that happen.”