Republican Home Speaker Mike Johnson confronted questions Wednesday over his social gathering’s disastrous underperformance in Tuesday’s particular election in Tennessee’s seventh Congressional District—one which has members of his social gathering sounding the alarm over Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps’ slender victory.
Republican candidate Matt Van Epps speaks to supporters at a watch social gathering after asserting victory in a particular election for the U.S. seventh Congressional District on Dec. 2 in Nashville, Tennessee.
“We’re excited about the win,” he mentioned, barely pretending to be excited. “A lot of people are not reporting that Cook rates that district as an R-plus-10. It’s not an R-plus-25. President Donald Trump won it by 22 points. It’s actually rated to be a slightly Republican district. So winning it by 9 points is almost exactly on the nose of what we might expect.”
Right here’s the issue: That’s not what R+10 means. In any respect. Prepare dinner’s Partisan Voting Index doesn’t measure how “slight” or “strong” a district is. It measures how a lot better a celebration performs there in comparison with the nationwide presidential vote. An R+10 district isn’t some modest GOP tilt—it means Republicans usually run 10 factors forward of their nationwide quantity in that district.
So if a Republican wins an R+10 seat with 53.9% of the vote, that doesn’t imply “everything is fine.” It means the nationwide atmosphere equal of that efficiency is 43.9%. That’s the entire level of PVI: It allows you to translate a district end result right into a nationwide one.
And a 43.9% nationwide vote share can be a cataclysm for Republicans. It’s the type of quantity that produces wave elections—the type the place Democrats decide up dozens of seats and toss folks like Johnson out of management.
However he stored making an attempt to spin it.
“We have a great record to run on in ’26 and I am very bullish about the midterms,” Johnson mentioned. “I’m convinced we’re going to defy history and grow this majority.”
A frontrunner has to cheerlead for his workforce, positive. He’s not going to face there and say, “Dear god, we’re so screwed.” However he doesn’t have an excellent report to run on.
Associated | GOP in disaster mode after Tennessee particular election
That’s the issue, and it’s why he and Trump have been leaning on Republican legislatures everywhere in the nation, upending custom and legal guidelines to redraw election maps mid-decade.
There’s a clear-headed reply Johnson may’ve given—one thing like, “Yes, history is tough for the party in power, but we’re confident we can turn things around for the American people and get rewarded for it next November.”
Requested whether or not he was involved that the seat was in play to start with, he mentioned, “This doesn’t concern me at all. Democrats put millions of dollars in. They were really trying to set the scenario that there’s some sort of wave going on. There’s not. We just proved that there’s not.”
Democrats didn’t start spending till Republicans dumped tens of millions of their very own, clearly freaked out by how tight the race was.
Then Johnson reached for the worst potential instance.
“This reminded me a lot of Rep. Ron Estes,” he mentioned. “In 2017, Trump won his district by 27 points. Ron won a special election by almost identical circumstances by only 7 points. But then he came back the next year in that midterm and he won it by 20.”
Nice job, Ron. However Home Democrats picked up forty-one seats that midterm and ended up with a 235-199 majority. That’s the 12 months Johnson is invoking to say every little thing is okay.
Nobody cares whether or not Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps wins reelection by 9 or 22 factors in Tennessee’s seventh District. What issues is the ridiculous 13-point Democratic overperformance—precisely the type of factor you see when a blue-wave atmosphere is constructing.
Nobody expects Johnson to confess any of that. His job is to faux the partitions aren’t closing in. However by insisting “this is just like 2018, in this slight Republican district,” he’s mainly telling on himself.
