Another special election, another strong Democratic showing, another warning for the fragile House Republican majority that a historical pattern is about to repeat itself.
Republican Matt Van Epps won Tuesday’s special Tennessee election, but the results marked the fifth time in 2025 special congressional contests that the Democrats far outperformed their 2024 showings.
It was the latest sign that the GOP’s narrow House majority is in significant danger next November.
It’s the same pattern — Democratic over-performance and a decline in the Republican vote — evident last month in New Jersey and Virginia.
A similar trend foreshadowed past mid-term congressional takeovers by the party that had lost the prior presidential election — the Democrats in 2005-06, the Republicans in 2009-10, and the Democrats in 2017-18.
It won’t take much to flip the House, since the GOP majority is a bare three seats. And as was the case before, health care is one of the principal concerns motivating voters.
Members of the embattled majority are increasingly recognizing their perilous political plight. Some are even expressing it publicly.
In explaining her decision to leave the House in January, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she did not want her district “to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the president we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms.”
At the same time, Jake Sherman’s Punchbowl posted an anonymous statement from a “senior House Republican” who said, “Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.”
The pattern occurred after George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, and Barack Obama and Donald Trump were first elected in 2008 and 2016.
Even when the White House party held seats in ensuing special elections, it did so with reduced margins, foreshadowing its subsequent loss of the House.
In 2005 to 2006, following Bush’s re-election, Republicans held all three districts where their members had resigned. But all three showed a sharp decline in GOP support.
In 2006, the Republicans lost control of the House for the first time in 12 years.
Four years later, the Democrats showed reduced majorities in special elections for seats they had won in 2008.
In 2010, a massive GOP wave impelled largely by opposition to Obama’s Affordable Care Act enabled Republicans to regain the House.
In 2016, Trump was narrowly elected. But the next two years saw increasing antagonism towards his policies, especially his failed attempt to repeal Obama’s health care law.
Once again, in 2018, that trend led to a Democratic House takeover. Over the next two years, the new majority voted twice to impeach Trump, once for trying to pressure Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation of rival Joe Biden, the second over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
A similar pattern has taken place this year, leading up to Tuesday’s race.
In Florida, two special elections were held in April to replace Republicans who had resigned to join the Trump administration, Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz.
The Republicans held both seats, but by reduced margins. When special elections were held in Virginia and Arizona for the seats of Democratic members who had died, the victorious Democratic candidates increased their party’s margins.
Tuesday’s Tennessee election was for the seat of former Rep. Mark Green, who resigned to take a non-governmental job. In 2024, he captured the seat by 21 percentage points, while Trump was carrying the district by 22 points.
On Tuesday, GOP candidate Van Epps won by nine points, suffering from reduced turnouts in the district’s conservative, rural counties.
He probably benefited from several impolitic statements by his progressive Democratic rival about the Nashville-based district, including saying on a 2020 podcast that she hated Nashville, country music and “all of the things that make Nashville apparently an ‘it’ city to the rest of the country.”
But that’s small solace to Republicans seeing an unhappy 2026 on the horizon.
