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Republican Matt Van Epps holds deep-red House district in Tennessee special election

Republican Matt Van Epps holds deep-red House district in Tennessee special election - Lemmy.World

Republican Matt Van Epps has won a hotly contested special election for a deep-red congressional seat in Tennessee, NBC News projects, seeing off a Democratic challenge for the longtime GOP district. Though Donald Trump carried the 7th Congressional District by 22 points in 2024, Republican super PACs poured millions into defending the seat as Van Epps faced off against Aftyn Behn, a Democratic state representative. Democrats spent almost as much trying to capture it, as Trump’s political standing has taken a hit this year and the Democratic Party made gains in November elections in New Jersey, Virginia and other states. But Democrats did significantly cut the GOP margin in the district from just a year ago. With most of the expected vote counted, Van Epps had a 9-point districtwide lead. It continues a pattern of Democrats making big gains in elections this year compared to the 2024 results.

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dcpDarkMatter Dec 3

While most of us here would have loved to see Aftyn win, forcing the Rs to heavily fight for a R +22 district is crazy. Both the Speaker and the President did campaigning for a random, deep-red seat, gerrymandered to be a safe Republican district. That's saying a lot.

This also tracks similarly to the special elections in FL earlier, where while the Democratic candidates didn't win, they over-performed by roughly the same margin (13 - 15 points).

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spongebue Dec 3

Overall I agree with what you said, but…

gerrymandered to be a safe Republican district

That’s not what gerrymandering is/does. People do it to end up with more districts for a party within a state, and they get that by splitting them up such that margins are thinner.

This is just a typical “in the middle of nowhere” district that makes it so Republican

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dcpDarkMatter Dec 3

Nashville was carved up, in order to dilute the democratic voters in the city. It was split between three different congressional districts.

The democrats were gerrymandered out of the safe Dem seat that the Nashville area should have.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/politics/us-redistricting/tennessee-redistricting-map/

Tennessee redistricting 2022: Congressional maps by district

States are redrawing their 2022 congressional maps. Here's how many House districts the state will have following the 2020 census, and how voting power will shift.

CNN

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spongebue

Right, that link illustrates my point: they used to have one blue and two red districts, both very solid. When they split Nashville into pieces, the voter demographics haven’t changed so they ended up with 3 red districts, but less so than before.