Separating Fact from Fiction in the TN-7 Special Election

What a needed GOP victory in the last major election before midterms victory tells us about 2026

Last night, Republican Matt Van Epps prevailed over radical left-wing feminist Aftyn Behn, a Democrat state legislator, in the special election to fill Mark Green’s vacant TN-7 seat in the U.S. House. Fun fact - Van Epps is a veteran of the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade, formerly of Fort Hood, Texas - the same brigade with which I deployed to Afghanistan. We were there at the same time, but served in different battalions.

I did not make a formal prediction for the race, but multiple readers of this newsletter can confirm I privately anticipated a Van Epps victory in the single digits. His margin, still uncertified, sits at +8.9% at the present moment. Unless this seat becomes vacant again and requires a special election under a Republican president, you won’t see a margin this close in the future. Van Epps will represent the district as long as he wants to, and margins will zoom back out well into the double digits beginning next fall. Republicans can count TN-7 in the bag for 2026, although they may need to handle different boundaries if the state redistricts to try and knock off TN-9 (Memphis).

Pro-MAGA Internet circles have expressed a sense of relief, while their Democrat counterparts are coping by talking about how Behn cut 12.6% off Green’s 2024 margin. If you’ve read Captain K’s Corner long enough, you had to know I was going to dive right in. Let’s get the party started with the Top 3 Takeaways from the TN-7 Special Election Win:

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SPECIFICITY MATTERS

I’m going to wind up raising subscription prices so I can afford giant highway billboards spelling it out for everyone:

OFF-YEAR, MIDTERM, AND SPECIAL ELECTIONS SUCK* (for the president’s party)

I am so adamant about driving this point home, especially after the November panic-fest, that I wrote an entire article about the subject that you should read.

Had this election taken place under a President Harris, Van Epps would have won more along the lines of Green’s margin. The performance of candidates in special elections, particularly of the president’s party, isn’t directly related to voters’ opinions on the president’s performance. Reagan’s GOP lost the 1986 midterms when the man himself had a 63% approval rating. In April, while still in the honeymoon phase, Trump’s GOP candidates Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine won by drastically reduced margins from just five months earlier in two special elections for Florida U.S. House seats. This is easily predictable because the party out of power has voters that are much more pissed off, and with lower turnout across the board, the dominant party will be the one lagging because voters are more content and therefore, less motivated to show up and flash a middle finger at the administration expressed by ballot.

With these things considered, Republicans should be happy with last night’s outcome. Van Epps went from being a 2-3 point favorite according to more pundits to winning by almost 9 points in a year the GOP has dropped blowout state house seats in Pennsylvania and Iowa and got smoked in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, to name a few. After last month’s icky results, Democrats were itching to get a huge narrative boost against Trump going into 2026 in a deep red seat, even if they were only going to hold the seat for a year.

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WHY DID TENNESSEE HOLD STRONG?