#electoral-trends

#electoral-trends

In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Tennessee's Seventh Congressional District by 22 points. Last night, in a special election to represent the district, the Republican Matt Van Epps won by only nine points, defeating the Democratic State Representative Aftyn Behn. Trump celebrated the outcome on Truth Social as a "BIG Congressional WIN," but the margin of victory in a deep-red district is ominous for Republicans. Van Epps underperformed Trump by 13 percentage points, a sign that the party is vulnerable heading into the 2026 midterms.

Even after decades of mass immigration from the Global South, the red team has remained overwhelmingly white. Trump's voters in 2024 were 84 percent white, according to the comprehensive AP VoteCast survey of 120,000 voters. That's not much more diverse than Mitt Romney's 88 percent in 2012. Romney, you may remember, was hammered in the media for not winning minorities.