NASHVILLE, Tenn.—The coattails of Donald Trump in rural America and redistricting four years ago that split the Democratic city of Nashville into thirds gave Republican congressional nominee Matt Van Epps a 54%-45% win over progressive State Rep. Aftyn Behn, D-Nashville, in a special election in Tennessee’s vacant 7th Congressional District.
Behn, whose platform included sharp criticism of the billionaire class and Trump’s tax cut for them, along with championing Medicare For All—though she didn’t use that specific phrase—fell just short of winning the seat in a deep red district Trump carried in the 2024 presidential race by 22 percentage points.
“No corporate PACs. No puppet masters,” Behn’s campaign website declared.
“I’ll ensure those subsidies remain for the ACA,” she told FactPost News. “I’ll restore funding for Medicaid, which is a lifeline for so many rural hospitals in the district. I’ll roll back tariffs, which are bankrupting Tennessee farmers right now. I’m someone who cannot be bought by special interests. If you are upset about the chaos of Washington and the cost of living, then I’m your candidate.”
Trump’s Democratic foe, Vice President Kamala Harris, lost the Nashville/Davidson County portion of the district by 62%-37%. Behn more than flipped those figures, winning it 78%-22%. But it wasn’t enough to carry her to the U.S. House.
All the other counties in the district, all small and all but one (Montgomery) heavily rural, gave Epps large margins, though Behn gained 9%-13% in each compared to Harris’s minuscule numbers in 2024.
Both sides poured late money into the 7th District race since it provided a unique test of the two parties in the last special election of 2025. The GOP was desperate to hold onto the seat, and reverse a slide that saw it lose heavily in California, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Virginia, and New Jersey on November 5.
The Democrats, facing an uphill battle, could be cheered by Behn’s close loss and by the fact that she hugely outperformed Harris even in the rural “red” Republican counties. But they also wanted to cut into the House GOP’s narrow margin in Congress—and couldn’t.
The other factor in Behn’s loss was the 2021 redistricting. The heavily Republican legislature, the most-gerrymandered in the country, split the Music City of Nashville—one of two Democratic bastions in the state—into thirds, then surrounded it with GOP territory. That neutralized the clout of the minority-majority portions of Nashville. Behn carried the Nashville/Davidson County section by 23,800 votes, but lost the race overall by 15,944 votes out of 179,899 cast.
Before that split, Nashville was basically one entire congressional district, and elected moderate Democrat Jim Cooper for more than a decade. He retired in 2022 when the gerrymander gave him an impossible district. State lawmakers didn’t split the other Democratic district, Memphis, but added white suburbs to what was a majority-minority seat. Progressive Rep. Steve Cohen (D) holds it. Including the two senators, he’s the sole Democrat in Congress from Tennessee.
The Behn-Van Epps race was close enough, and the GOP was worried enough about the decline in Trump’s clout—evidenced by national opinion polls which gave him a 36% positive-60% negative rating—that MAGA Inc., Trump’s SuperPAC campaign finance committee, spent more than $1 million on the Van Epps-Behn race. Trump videoed in an appearance for Van Epps in the campaign’s closing days but didn’t campaign personally. Harris, on her book tour, did, in Nashville.
For his part, Van Epps, a former state Commissioner of General Services, pledged to be a down-the-line MAGA Trumpite in Congress. And in Nashville, the country music capital of the world, Van Epps’s supporters charged that Behn hated country music.
Behn, a community organizer and political consultant, got the support of the state AFL-CIO for her backing of fair wages, the right to organize, and reducing sales taxes on groceries, which hit the poor in the district the hardest.
And Tennessee is a right-to-work (for less) state whose GOP governors and lawmakers have helped stop Auto Workers unionization drives at foreign “transplant” car plants by threatening to pull state tax breaks and subsidies if the workers went union.
Health care was also a big issue in the campaign. “If you don’t have health care, it can decimate people,” she told the Progressive Democrats of America on November 23. “We need to have zero premiums, zero deductibles and no longer have the dead weight of the health insurance companies denying our claims.”
She also blasted Trump’s so-called “big beautiful bill,” which gave billionaires a huge tax cut partially paid for by large cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps over the next 10 years. Behn called it “a big BS bill.”
“Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to say immigrants are the reason [the cost of] your groceries is so high,” Behn told the PDA. “The real problem is big corporations and millionaires,” whose monopolies drive up grocery prices.
“We’re standing up to corporate greed, and this Republican machine is falling apart. And we’ve got a coalition together against these millionaires who stiffed the working class.”
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