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Tennessee’s Seventh District was created to be safely Republican, but in recent special elections across the country Democrats have done significantly better than they did in 2024.
Dec. 2, 2025Updated 5:41 p.m. ET
Under normal circumstances, an election in Tennessee’s Seventh District would not draw much attention.
Republicans have dominated the district, which was drawn as part of an effort to splinter Nashville’s liberal voters into three safely red districts. President Trump carried it handily in 2024, winning by 22 percentage points — about the same margin as that of the Republican representative who was running for re-election there at the time.
But special elections, like the one being held on Tuesday to replace the seat vacated by Representative Mark Green, frequently favor Democrats because the Democratic base is likelier to turn out in off years. And this year’s elections have seen consistently large swings toward Democrats that seem to have been driven by a combination of Democrats’ turnout advantage and changes in support among voters who previously cast ballots for Mr. Trump.
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The pattern was most recently seen in November’s races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, two states where Democrats won handily despite relatively narrow wins in 2024. And in special congressional elections earlier this year, Democrats outperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 margins by 16 to 23 points.
