Republicans Panic After Narrow Victory in Tennessee Election

Even though a Republican won in Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee, the GOP is worried that their margin of victory was way too close.

Mark Van Epps won Tennessee’s 7th district congressional seat by about nine percentage points over Democrat Aftyn Behn, a big shift from Donald Trump’s 22-point victory in the 2024 presidential election. That swing could mean major losses for the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections.

As one House Republican told Politico, “Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle.”

“Republicans can survive if we play team and the Trump administration officials play smart. Neither is certain,” the anonymous representative said.

Behn made considerable ground in a deep-red district that hasn’t had a Democratic representative in over 40 years, and millions of dollars were spent for Republicans to hold onto what is normally a safe seat. This was not lost on national Republicans, who remember Democrats’ massive victories last month in New Jersey and Virginia.

“I’m glad we won. But the GOP should not ignore the Virginia, New Jersey, and Tennessee elections,” said Representative Don Bacon, a Republican representing a swing district in Nebraska who is retiring next year. “We must reach swing voters. America wants some normalcy.”

The narrow victory came as House Speaker Mike Johnson paid a visit to the state and President Trump addressed a rally via speakerphone. Even then, “it was too close,” a Republican House leadership aide told Politico.

“It was dangerous. We could have lost this district because the people who showed up, many of them are the ones that are motivated by how much they dislike President Trump,” agreed Senator Ted Cruz on Fox News Tuesday night.

“In a year, it’s going to be a turnout election, and the left will show up. Hate is a powerful motivator.”

Republican Matt Van Epps narrowly beat Democrat Aftyn Behn in a special election Tuesday night to represent Tennessee 7th congressional district.

Van Epps was leading Behn 53.5 percent to 45.5 percent, with 75 percent of votes counted, when NBC News declared Van Epps’s victory.

The district has not had a Democratic representative since 1983, but Van Epps’s win came after polls showed the two neck-and-neck heading into Tuesday. Democrats had hoped to continue their strong electoral fortunes from last month, when they flipped some of the most Republican districts across the country and won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia.

Behn outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 margin in the district, nearly closing the 20-point gap between her and Donald Trump. But the Trump-endorsed Van Epps, a former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services and Army helicopter pilot, ultimately defeated Behn, a Tennessee state representative and former community organizer.

The latest poll from last week showed Van Epps narrowly leading Behn 48 percent to 46 percent, with 2 percent voting elsewhere and 5 percent undecided. Fearful conservatives dropped millions on the race, with right-wing super PACs alone spending $3.3 million against Behn as of last week, a huge expenditure for a normally safe seat in an off year.

The tightness of the race caused alarm among Republicans nationally, with House Speaker Mike Johnson traveling to Tennessee to campaign for Van Epps, even calling President Trump on speakerphone to address a rally.

“We have to win this seat. We’ve gotten you the largest tax cuts in history, and the new bill—the Great Big Beautiful Bill—kicks in, as you know, on January 1. It hasn’t even kicked in yet,” Trump said. “Number one, [Behn] hates Christianity, number two, she hates country music. How the hell can you elect a person like that? … It’s a big vote, and it’s gonna show something. It’s gonna show that the Republican Party is stronger than it’s ever been.”

In the end, Trump’s plea didn’t hurt Van Epps in conservative Tennessee despite the president’s approval rating being underwater. While the GOP has maintained its narrow majority in the House, Van Epps’s close victory will not inspire much confidence for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterm elections.

Sorry, JD Vance—while ridiculing a former vice presidential candidate Tuesday, President Donald Trump seemed to accidentally admit to having an “incompetent” number two.

After barely being able to keep his eyes open during an hours-long Cabinet meeting, Trump appeared to perk up long enough to deliver an incoherent rant about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

“I think the man’s a grossly incompetent man,” Trump said, referring to Walz. “I thought that from the day I watched JD destroy him in a debate. I was saying, ‘Who was more incompetent? That man or my man?’ I had a man, and he had a man—they were both incompetent.”

Based solely on the structure of Trump’s statement, the president appeared to assert that “that man” and “his man” were “both incompetent.” But surely Trump would go on to clarify what he meant, right? Wrong.

“I had a man and a woman, I thought she was very incompetent too. But now she’s leading the field and I think she’s leading the field in the nomination,” Trump continued.

If reading loathing in Trump’s confused comment feels like a stretch, just take a look at the president’s glowering face when it was finally Vance’s turn to speak. For most of his Cabinet members, Trump merely kept his eyes shut.

Setting Trump’s apparent slight aside, his garbled response is not exactly a promising sign for the commander in chief, who appeared to be struggling to stay awake during the meeting. Trump’s comments were incoherent. Who was “he,” and who was “she”? Was the president even actually conscious while he was speaking?

Earlier in the meeting, Trump joked that “generally speaking,” his Cabinet had many “high IQ” members. “A couple of them I’m a little concerned about,” he said, looking around the table.

Donald Trump’s presidential powers are practically supernatural—at least, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who thanked Trump during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday for his apparent ability to ward off hurricanes over the last year.

“Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane,” Noem said to laughter from the room. “You kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that.”

While Noem’s comment may have been a joke, the reality is much less funny. Trump has spent months trying to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which provides disaster relief for areas severely impacted by natural disasters.

Since he was on the campaign trail, Trump and his allies have spread unfounded conspiracies that the lead emergency response agency had run out of money and that the Biden administration had diverted funds from FEMA to help undocumented immigrants enter the country. (FEMA administrators fervently and repeatedly denied this.) Republicans, at the time, claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political” and even conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes were a government manipulation.

Days after his inauguration, Trump pitched that it would be better to do away with FEMA altogether in favor of handing the money directly to the states, though that plan has not yet come to fruition.

Still, Trump has managed to transform disaster relief into a political issue. In October, the president approved aid for several states that voted for him in the last election, including Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota, but denied it to others that did not: Vermont, Illinois, and Maryland.

Meanwhile, FEMA funds have gone to projects that have absolutely nothing to do with disaster relief. In October—days before the longest government shutdown in U.S. history—the Homeland Security Department issued a $608 million FEMA check to Florida to cover costs related to Alligator Alcatraz, the notoriously abusive immigrant detention center that has been roundly torched as a modern-day concentration camp tucked away in the Everglades.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth absolutely lost it Tuesday as he scrambled to shirk responsibility for reportedly murdering the survivors of a September 2 drone strike on an alleged drug trafficking vessel in the Caribbean. 

Sitting beside a drowsy Donald Trump during a lengthy Cabinet meeting, Hegseth claimed that while he had been perfectly happy to take responsibility for the dozen extrajudicial executions of people who the government couldn’t prove were drug traffickers, he wouldn’t dare claim credit for that one Pentagon decision.

Instead, the war chief continued to redirect responsibility for the strike onto Commander Frank “Mitch” Bradley, and even the president himself. 

“I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine at the Department of War we got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting,” Hegseth said.

“A couple of hours later I learned that that commander had made the—which he had the complete authority to do—and by the way Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.”

Despite his blatant efforts to throw Bradley under the bus, Hegseth insisted Bradley had made “the right call, we have his back.”

Hegseth claimed he was not aware there were survivors after the first strike, adding that the “fog of war” would’ve made it difficult to determine if anyone had survived. He also noted that he’d written about this in his book last year, in which he complained at length about rules and regulations governing warfare in the U.S. military. In fact, two people were reportedly clinging to the side of the burning vessel after that September 2 strike and were killed in the second strike.

Hegseth then railed against the press and claimed that The Washington Post’s report that he’d instructed his underlings to “kill everybody” was “not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.”

But Hegseth wasn’t done covering his own tracks—and even implicated Trump directly.  

“President Trump has empowered commanders, commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people,” Hegseth ranted. “We support them, and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.”

Pressed on how long there had been between the first and second strike, Hegseth said: “I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of time.”