TN-7
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One sign of an impending election disaster for a governing party is that extremely safe district special elections have to rescued by massive outside funding. That’s what is happening in TN-7, which as you can see above, should be a very safe Republican district. This draws in some Nashville and then a ton of rural Tennessee, the kind of district drawn to make sure that Nashville can’t actually elect anyone. But the thing about gerrymandering is that you can draw it so that in a bad election, you can lose a lot of seats. This is a Republican +10 seat according to Cook. And Republicans are in real trouble here:
Republicans once again find themselves launching a last-minute rescue mission ahead of a special election that they should never have had to sweat in the first place.
Third-party groups are about to deploy serious sums to boost Republican Matt Van Epps against Democrat Aftyn Behn ahead of the Dec. 2 election for Tennessee’s dark-red 7th District, Axios reports—a showdown the publication says is “scaring” the GOP.
To assuage those worries, Alex Isenstadt writes that a group called Conservatives for American Excellence will spend $600,000 on commercials for the remaining two weeks of the race, while the hardline Club for Growth will also launch a “six-figure” ad buy.
The news came the same day that Behn’s allies launched a $300,000 campaign arguing that putting Van Epps in Congress would prevent the public from ever knowing the truth about convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“The Epstein files are locked away, Matt Van Epps will keep ‘em that way,” a country singer croons in a new commercial for an organization called Your Community PAC. “Just a hedge fund puppet for the billionaire elite.”
An animation of Van Epps held on strings accompanies those lyrics as an unseen puppeteer makes him throw away the key to the safe containing the files. The song continues, “Bankrolled by their Wall Street cash, he’ll give ‘em tax cuts in a flash. Supports a plan that would cut our social security.”
It’s rare that the challenger wins a race like this. On the other hand, in a wave year, a +10 district can flip. So this has gotten real interesting. Not to mention that given just how narrow the Republican majority is in the House, one district really does matter on issues like this, since there’s the Thomas Massies and Majorie Taylor Greenes out there who will buck the leadership on certain issues.