US Republicans escape upset in Tennessee nail-biter as Trump’s grip is tested

US President Donald Trump celebrated Republican success in a Tennessee election. Photo / Pete Marovich, AFP

United States Republicans narrowly avoided an embarrassing scare today, holding a district in deeply conservative Tennessee with a sharply reduced majority that underscored voter unease in one of President Donald Trump’s safest bastions.

Retired special-operations pilot Matt Van Epps defeated Democrat Aftyn Behn by an eight-point margin, according to projections from the New York Times and CNN.

That’s a steep drop from Trump’s 22-point romp in 2024.

The race had unexpectedly tightened into a referendum on the US President’s standing.

The result in the race for Tennessee’s 7th District House seat spared Republicans a political shockwave, but the trimmed margin set off alarms in a party already fretting over its threadbare House majority and the risk of further erosion in 2026.

The Republican winning margin has been between 22 and 47 points in the last seven elections for that seat.

Trump was quick to celebrate Van Epps’s victory in multiple posts to his Truth Social platform.

“Congratulations to Matt Van Epps on his BIG Congressional WIN in the Great State of Tennessee. The Radical Left Democrats threw everything at him, including Millions of Dollars,” Trump wrote.

The Republican win comes amid a run of Democratic momentum. Just weeks ago, Democrats swept major races in Virginia and New Jersey and won the New York mayoralty, a string of victories widely interpreted as a rebuke to Trump’s return to power.

The party has noticed - and so has Trump.

The President held a tele-rally yesterday alongside Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who campaigned throughout the day with the Republican candidate.

“HE WILL BE A GREAT CONGRESSMAN and, unlike his Opponent, he cherishes Christianity and Country Music,” Trump posted soon after polls opened.

Van Epps, a West Point graduate and retired special-operations helicopter pilot, is running as an unwavering Trump loyalist focused on law-and-order, border security and low taxes.

Steep drop

He faced Democratic state representative Behn, a former social worker who has pushed progressive legislation on grocery-tax relief, rural healthcare, abortion access and marijuana reform.

During the campaign, Republicans zeroed in on Behn’s social media posts from the 2020 racial justice protests, in which she amplified “defund the police” slogans and shared a message appearing to justify burning down a police station.

Tennessee’s 7th District - stretching from Nashville’s Music Row through affluent suburbs and down to conservative rural counties - normally delivers Republicans around 60% of the vote.

The last Emerson College/The Hill poll before the election showed Van Epps at 48% to Behn’s 46%, well within the margin of error. Early polls in October had Van Epps up by as many as eight points but also flagged elevated Democratic enthusiasm.

Republican insiders predicted a five-point Van Epps win - a steep drop from former congressman Mark Green’s 2024 landslide - and conceded that anything tighter would be alarming.

A loss, however unlikely, would have electrified Democrats and forced Republican strategists to rethink their entire 2026 defence map.

Both parties flooded the district with cash and operatives, with Van Epps and his outside backers spending US$3.5 million on ads, according to Punchbowl News, while Democratic groups invested US$2.4m.

-Agence France-Presse