Oops, Dems Did it Again
Overperformances by Democrats in 2025 suggest a Big Blue Wave is Building
If you only looked at the final result in Tennesseeâs 7th Congressional District last night, you might think: âOkay, Republicans held a deep-red seat. Shrug.â But if thatâs all you see, youâre missing the real story â because what actually happened in TN-07 is one of the most encouraging electoral signals Democrats have gotten all cycle.
Letâs be very clear right out of the gate: this was never about winning. If Democrats had won this district â an R+10 on the Cook PVI that voted +22 for Republicans in 2022 and 2024 â it would have been the equivalent of the 2004 tsunami, the kind of political earthquake that ends up in history books. That was not the assignment here. The assignment was: How much of a 22-point Republican advantage can we erase in a race we were structurally supposed to lose?
And the answer, as it turns out, is: a lot.
The Democrat in the race â who was not recruited, not tailored to the district, and in fact was significantly more progressive than the median TN-07 voter â closed that gap to around 9 points. Thatâs roughly a 13-point improvement over Bidenâs 2024 deficit and an even bigger improvement over the districtâs House results. In other words, she over-performed the districtâs partisan baseline by a mile even without the matched, well-funded, district-appropriate candidate youâd normally need to engineer that kind of swing.
Thatâs why this race matters.
Because even though the scoreboard still says âRepublican win,â the underlying data screams something different: Democrats are running far ahead of where they were when they were the governing party â and the out-party fundamental has kicked firmly into place.
And we can actually quantify that.
A 20-Point Democratic Over-Performance â Across Multiple States
The table created by twitter account Politics 101538 shows the comparison that actually matters: the difference between how Democrats performed in 2025 special elections versus how they performed in the same seats in 2022 and 2024. The average Democratic improvement across these specials is:
+20.1 points
That is a gigantic number.
And it tracks perfectly with what weâd expect to see in a political environment where:
Democrats are now the out-party,
Republicans are the governing party under Trump, and
voters are responding to Republican governance exactly the way political science predicts: with backlash, with discontent, and with shifts toward the out-party.
This is the same dynamic I laid out in September, when I told people that Democrats would not just perform well in the Virginia legislative elections â they would win by double digits in key House of Delegates seats that had been tight during the Biden presidency. And thatâs exactly what happened. Because fundamentals matter. They have always mattered. And when the structural winds are at your back, you can do extraordinary things â even in hostile territory.
TN-07 Fits the Pattern Perfectly
TN-07 is not a purple district.
It is not a suburban swing seat.
It is not trending Democratic.
It is not rich with college-educated voters running away from MAGA.
It is a deep-red, structurally Republican district where Democrats traditionally lose by 20+ points without breaking a sweat. Republicans donât campaign there. They donât spend money there. They donât worry about it.
Until this year.
Because what these specials are showing is that the floor has risen for Democrats â dramatically â and Republicans are being forced to defend ground they have never defended before.
In TN-07:
Republicans had to spend money they never planned to spend.
Democrats fielded a candidate far outside the ideological alignment of the district â and she still closed the gap by double digits.
Turnout was unusually high for a special, which generally benefits the out-party.
The margin shrank from 22 points to single digits in one cycle.
That is textbook out-party fundamental behavior.
Why It Matters for 2026
Every special election is a data point, not a prophecy. But when all the data points are lining up in the same direction, you have a pattern â and the pattern is loud:
Democrats are outperforming the partisan baseline by ~20 points across multiple states, demographics, and district types.
Thatâs not noise.
Thatâs not candidate quality.
Thatâs not luck.
That is the electorate reacting to Trumpâs second-term governance the same way the electorate reacted to Trumpâs first term, and Bushâs second term, and Obamaâs second midterm: voters punish the party in power.
The districts themselves tell the story:
FL-01: R+30
FL-06: R+15
VA-11: D+20 (a blowout that still shifted further D)
AZ-07: D+24
TX-18: D+38
TN-07: R+22
These are wildly different places.
But Democrats over-performed in all of them.
And the average over-performance is +20.1.
Which is why TN-07 isnât a disappointing loss.
It is a confirming data point â a clean, crisp structural indicator that the national environment is behaving exactly the way the out-party advantage says it should.
This is why Republicans are panicking quietly behind the scenes.
This is why they keep throwing money into defensive races.
This is why they are terrified of the healthcare premium spike coming in January.
And this is why Democrats have a real, structural opportunity to flip the House in 2026.
The Bottom Line
TN-07 wasnât about winning.
It was about measuring the size of the blue wave that will hit in 2026.
And what we saw last night is that the wave is real, itâs growing, and itâs hitting red districts hard enough that Republicans are being forced to play defense in places they used to ignore.
If Democrats keep posting +20 point over-performances in House specials â and all the data suggests they will â then 2026 isnât going to look anything like 2022.
Itâs going to look a lot more like 2006.
Or maybe even like 2018.
And TN-07 just told us that story in bright red letters.
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