A favorite pastime of election watchers and political operatives is to extrapolate every little detail possible from the results of an off-year or off-cycle election. This week was no different.
On Tuesday night, Republican congressional candidate Matt Van Epps successfully held Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District for the GOP, while underperforming the district’s recent GOP margins.
At first glance, Van Epps’s 9-point victory was hardly anything to celebrate. On paper, this congressional district overwhelmingly favors the GOP. Its last representative, Mark Green (R-TN), won his last two races by at least 20 points, including a 21-point victory last year. President Donald Trump likewise carried the district by 22 points in his historic 2024 election victory.
POLLS OVERSOLD DEMOCRATS’ CHANCES IN TENNESSEE SPECIAL ELECTION BUT PARTY STILL SEES HOPE IN RESULTS
By all accounts, the party that underperforms in special elections is poised to lose ground during the next general election. It’s a pattern that has historically held. In 2017 and 2018, with Trump in office, Republican underperformances presaged the 2018 blue wave. In 2021 and 2022, limited Democratic underperformances indicated that a Republican wave was unlikely in 2022.
But in 2023 and 2024, Republican underperformance indicated Democratic strength heading into a presidential year. And that’s where the historical trend line fell apart. Democrats were swept out of all levers of power as Trump triumphantly led the Republican Party to unified control of government in arguably the most impressive political comeback of all time.
As bad as a 13-point swing may look, it is also hardly indicative of the political climate for next year’s midterm elections. In fact, it hardly tells us anything about those elections because it is impossible to predict the electorate that will show up in the midterm elections. That is because the Republican Party of 2025 has absorbed a large number of low-propensity voters who do not turn out in special elections.
Republicans, long before the special elections in Trump’s second term, have started to struggle mightily in out-of-cycle races. To illustrate this point, one only needs to look at the special elections prior to Trump’s election in 2024.
In 2022, Ohio’s 6th Congressional District reelected Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) with nearly 68% of the vote. Midway through his term, Johnson resigned from Congress, setting up a special election in June 2024. In a comparable swing to Tuesday’s Tennessee election, Rep. Michael Rulli (R-OH) won with only 53% of the vote in an extremely low turnout affair. Five months later, Rulli would win reelection to a full term with nearly 67% of the vote against the exact same opponent he faced in the special election, nearly identical to Johnson’s margin of victory in 2022.
Or take New York’s 3rd Congressional District. In 2022, the infamous Republican George Santos won election to Congress with nearly 54% of the vote. Upon his expulsion, a special election was held, and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) flipped the seat to Democratic control by a nearly identical margin to Santos’s victory in 2022, a 15-point swing. When Suozzi, who had held the seat prior to Santos, won reelection in the November general, his margin of victory was reduced from 8 points to 3, a 5-point swing back to the right that occurred at the same time Trump won the district by 4 points.
In New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District, Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ) won reelection with 77% of the vote in 2022. After he died in the middle of his term, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) won the special election with 81%, swinging the seat 10 points to the Left. In the November general election, her share of the vote slipped to 74%, a 14-point swing to the Right.
DAVID HARSANYI: TENNESSEE SPECIAL ELECTION BRINGS BAD NEWS FOR BOTH PARTIES
It is certainly possible that Van Epps’s underperformance in Tuesday’s election is just the latest canary in a coal mine that portends a bad GOP midterm election. What it definitely does say is that in special elections, the Democratic Party’s voters are far more motivated to turn out to vote than Republicans.
But if recent history is any indication, when the on-cycle election rolls around, each district will mostly revert to its recent partisan lean. And for Republicans, that is relieving news indeed.