By Carl P. Leubsdorf / The Dallas Morning News
Another special congressional 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 but 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 — that was evident in last month’s gubernatorial elections 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.
Under current circumstances, it won’t take much for the Democrats to flip the House, since the GOP majority is a bare three seats. And as was the case before, concern about health care is one of the principal reasons motivating voters.
The Tennessee result came at a time members of the embattled GOP House 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, whose Punchbowl website specializes in congressional reporting, posted an anonymous statement on social media from a “senior House Republican” who said, “Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.”
The anonymous member even predicted a possible House turnover before next November, if enough other members bail before the end of their terms; and Democrats win their districts’ special elections.
While that’s unlikely, there is something of a precedent. In the 1930 mid-term election, conducted amid a deepening economic depression, Republicans lost 52 House seats but narrowly kept their majority.
But by the time the new House convened in December 1931 — the congressional calendar was different then — Democrats had won enough special elections to become the majority.
A more likely pattern occurred after George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, and Barack Obama and Donald Trump were first elected in 2008 and 2016.
In all three instances, 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 2005-06, following Bush’s re-election, Republicans held all three districts where Republican 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, and Democrat Nancy Pelosi became the first woman speaker.
Four years later, a reverse situation occurred with the Democrats showing reduced majorities in special elections for seats they had won in 2008. Though they broke the usual pattern by gaining a Republican seat in upstate New York, they also lost one in Hawaii.
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 toward his policies, especially his failed attempt to repeal Obama’s health care law.
A series of special elections in which Republican support was down to the low single digits was followed by a highly publicized race in a GOP district near Pittsburgh, which was won by a Democrat, Conor Lamb.
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, Capitol insurrection.
A similar pattern has taken place this year, leading up to Tuesday’s race in Tennessee.
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 latter became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but the nomination of Gaetz to be attorney general was never made official amid substantial opposition.
The Republicans held both seats, but by reduced margins. By contrast, 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 9 points, a margin that suffered from reduced turnouts in the district’s conservative, rural counties.
At the same time, he probably benefited from several impolitic statements by his progressive Democratic rival about the Nashville-based district, including one from 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.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com. ©2025 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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