I love the way Mariane Angela of the Daily Caller led off this piece about the 7th District congressional race that Matt Van Epps won Tuesday night:
Failed Democratic Tennessee congressional candidate Aftyn Behn conceded the election Tuesday night but didn’t end the race quietly, phoning Republican Tennessee Rep-elect Matt Van Epps to tell him how she thinks he should do his job.
Van Epps won the special election for Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District on Tuesday, defeating Behn and keeping the historically Republican, President Donald Trump-leaning seat in GOP control. Instead of conceding without incident, Behn said she phoned Van Epps to tell him what she believes he must do in Washington, D.C. — specifically, protect Obamacare subsidies.
“I called the Congressman-elect, Matt Van Epps, and I had one question for him. What will define what happens next? Do not let the Affordable Care Act subsidies expire. Do not raise health care costs for working families in Tennessee,” Behn said.
Behn, who fell short in the traditionally red 7th District after a heavily funded race, framed her loss as a symbolic victory.
We should insist on referring to her as “failed Democratic Tennessee congressional candidate Aftyn Behn” from now on. Perhaps even go further and call her “failed Nashville-hating Democratic Tennessee congressional candidate Aftyn Behn.”
Oh, wait — you don’t know what that’s about? Yeah. She hates Nashville. She ran for Congress in the district that covers most of the Nashville suburbs, but she hates Nashville.
I’m not kidding. Here:
Yes, she’s a monster. Kayleigh McEnany had it exactly correct when she said if somebody tells you they want power, it’s best not to give it to them.
And Aftyn Behn absolutely, positively cannot be given any more power over her fellow humans than she already has as a member of the Tennessee state legislature.
That’s going to be an ongoing fight, because people like this will never, ever go away. But at minimum this skirmish has been won.
You’re going to see — probably you’ve already seen — a lot of analysis like this, from Robby Starbuck on X, about Van Epps’ victory:
Some will be mad at me for this but I say it out of love for our country… We won the TN special election by less than we should have.
If you’ve been to this area, you know it should have been a blowout. And this isn’t a knock on Matt Van Epps. He had lower name ID to begin with and did a good job pulling it out. A lesser candidate would have made it a real nail biter.
So why was it close? Many voters are apathetic and have very little enthusiasm on our side. Why? They think our majority in Congress is failing them due to weak leadership, bad priorities & inconsistent messaging.
Before I go further, I don’t say this to punch my own side for fun. I don’t do that. I say this because I want us to dominate for many years to come. Major time was wasted this year that should have been spent IN SESSION solving problems.
We need to right the ship or voters will sink our ship in 2026. Enthusiasm from 2024 is gone. The blind trust is gone. They want action. The people in Congress need to realize that they aren’t Trump and he isn’t there to carry them on the ballot in 2026. They need to deliver now. And even then we likely have to run ’26 like a Presidential election with Trump going around the country.
I see it on the ground. Voters want to know when promises are going to be kept by Congress. They want a Congress that works as much as they do. They want the agenda they voted for in 2024 passed into law. They want the deep state held accountable. They want transparency. They want full focus on domestic issues instead of foreign issues. They want Congress to improve their lives. They want them to stop trading stocks. And they want to know what the hell Congress is actually doing for them. If our GOP majority doesn’t deliver, many of these people won’t vote, no matter how much they hate Democrats.
I’m hearing from people who I’d describe as the Trumpiest people I met from 2016-2024 who straight up won’t vote in 2026 unless Congress changes to a fighting spirit this year and stacks wins on the board. These people have lost faith and feel like everything is rigged by uniparty puppets for special interests.
I don’t disagree with anything Starbuck is saying here, but I’m going to take a different approach. I’m absolutely overjoyed about Tuesday night’s result, in which a very solid but largely unknown Republican — Van Epps is a West Point grad and a decorated veteran helicopter pilot whose most recent job was as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services — took down a woman the Hard Left was celebrating as White-Chick Kamala.
Is a 9-point win in a district Trump won by 22 points an unimpressive performance? Sure. But let me throw a few data points at you.
Back to Angela’s Daily Caller piece. Here is Behn bragging on that 9-point loss as justification for berating Van Epps about Obamacare subsidies — without admitting that it was her side that broke American private-sector health care on purpose in the first place:
“The Republicans made these districts to be uncompetitive. They wanted us to back down, and we did not back down. We showed up. Our campaign raised $2.8 million, outraising our opponent. And from everyday people, not the Billionaire Boys Club, not Trump’s Billionaire Boys Club, but from nurses and teachers in Clarksville and Dickson and young people who donated $5 or $10 to get us over the finish line,” Behn said. “We knocked on 70,000 doors. We made over 185,000 calls. We had conversations on porches and churches and gas stations. We recruited 1,500 volunteers and ran one of the largest one-day canvases in the entire state that the state has seen in years.”
OK, first of all, $2.8 million for a special election in a House district, in a mid-tier media market like Nashville, is a HUGE amount of money. When it’s spent the way Behn spent it, which is pushing a Hard Left message aimed at turning out Democrat base voters to catch Republicans sleeping in a red district, it’s going to drive a closer race.
We’ve seen this over and over. Democrats spend big on special elections because they’re low-turnout affairs, and if they can get their people to the polls, they can sometimes win those races.
And they’ll more often than not give those seats right back when the main election cycle comes up and the bulk of the voters turn out.
On Tuesday night, turnout in TN-07 was 38.6 percent. That’s actually pretty good for a special election, and it’s a testament to the fact that Behn turned into a little political starlet — the Tennessee AOC — and people started to notice how, errr, passionate she is. Which is a nice way to say that a normally somnambulant electorate for a race like this had the bejesus scared out of them by this woman and made their way to the polls in numbers enough to get rid of her.
Consider that turnout in TN-07 for the 2024 general election was 69 percent and you realize what this was, and why you only had a 9-point race instead of a 22-point race. In the 2022 midterms, it was 41 percent, which is comparable to Tuesday, but outgoing incumbent Mark Green didn’t have much of a challenge and neither did Gov. Bill Lee, who was atop the ballot that year.
So it’s a high-dollar, low-turnout race.
As of the Nov. 12 reporting period, Behn’s campaign had raised $1.2 million, not $2.8 million, and only 51 percent of that was small-dollar donations. We’ll have to wait for the post-election campaign finance report to see how much of that $2.8 million actually materialized, and how much of it was (1) small, and (2) local.
Because the intelligent bet is that it was neither.
That isn’t to say Van Epps’ side didn’t spend a lot of money as well, but the November report that had Behn at $1.2 million had Epps at $993,000. He had more PAC money come in, to be sure; when national groups saw this crazy lady talking on TV about her therapist insisting she write down her dreams and then telling everybody in America that her recurring one is of her loudly proclaiming her preference for power over children, that would tend to get the money flowing.
A poll not long before Tuesday’s election had Van Epps with a 48–46 lead. He ended up winning 54–45.
I’ll take it.
Nothing Robby Starbuck said is wrong. I agree; this Congress has grossly underachieved and it’s well behind schedule delivering on the Trump agenda. I would say, though, that we keep uncovering cool things they managed to do in the Big Beautiful Bill, and while that’s great, it also creates a bit of a conundrum from a messaging standpoint, in that they packed in so many goodies we hardly saw most of them.
Here’s an example: Trump accounts for kids.
Let’s start the day off with some absolutely awesome news.
Michael and Susan Dell are donating $6.25 billion to expand the reach of a new government program that will provide savings accounts for millions of U.S. children.
The donation will go toward savings for roughly 25…
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) December 3, 2025
But politics is a very what-have-you-done-for-me-lately sort of game, and the House and particularly the Senate are going to have to start posting some wins if we want to keep the lunatic Aftyn Behns out of their dreamed-of political power.
We all know that.
But we should celebrate our victories when we have them, and on Tuesday night the people of central Tennessee told this outrageous harpy they hate her as much as she hates them. That, my friends, is a win.
Now let’s build on it.
READ MORE by Scott McKay:
Lane Kiffin to LSU Is a Massive Win for College Football
