Last Night's Election Should Cause Republicans to Panic about 2026

The backlash to Trump is happening even in the most pro-Trump districts

Before tonight, Republicans were already pretty worried about holding onto their razor-thin majority. After a narrow win in a special election in Tennessee, they should be terrified.

Democrat Aftyn Behn didn’t pull off the upset, but the fact that this race was even close is very bad news for the GOP. This contest should never have been competitive. Yet Republicans dumped millions of dollars into what had been a safely red seat and sent heavyweight surrogates to campaign for Matt Van Epps.

If Behn had won, it would have been the special election heard around the world—instantly shrinking the GOP’s already precarious majority and likely prompting even more Republicans to follow Marjorie Taylor Greene into retirement.

But the political significance of a narrow loss shouldn’t be ignored. The fact that Behn only lost by about nine points is a very big deal.

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A Damning Indictment of Trump

One year ago, Trump won this district by 22 points. Yet he was entirely absent from the GOP campaign. Republicans never used him in ads. He didn’t campaign for Van Epps. His role was limited to some tweets and then a phone call to Speaker Mike Johnson while Johnson was at a rally. Johnson put the president on speakerphone, but both he and the audience seemed, at best, ambivalent about Trump’s involvement.

There’s no question Van Epps’s strategists were banging their heads against the wall, since their entire strategy had been to pretend Trump didn’t exist. But, of course, Trump can never resist making it about himself.