Representative-elect Matt Van Epps (R-Tenn.) was no doubt surprised this past week to read that his “narrow” victory in a special election to replace retiring Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) portended “ominous” obliteration for his party in next year’s midterm election. That Van Epps won election to Congress by a comfortable nine points did not trouble mainstream pundits eager to write Republican chances an early obituary.

The mainstream media pronouncements of doom did not contain themselves to snide adjectives littering otherwise straightforward reports. A New York Times op-ed by former conservative David French bears the title, “This Is What It Looks Like When Your Coalition Is Coming Apart at the Seams” (apparently changed from “What Do Republicans Have to Fear? Ask Tennessee”).

“If ever there was a ‘bad win’ in politics, it was Republicans’ victory in last Tuesday’s special House election in Tennessee’s 7th district,” claimed two pollsters, Douglas E. Schoen and Carly Cooperman, writing in The Hill. What does that even mean? In politics, as in football, a win is a win, as any Indiana Hoosiers fan will tell you, and a loss is a loss — no matter how small the margin of victory or defeat. On the battlefield, costly victories that result in later defeats might be labelled pyrrhic, but a single special election 12 months before a midterm is too small a contest to warrant such a dramatic label.

When Schoen and Cooperman attempted to explain this incoherence, they only managed to mislead. “That a candidate such as [far-left Democrat Aftyn] Behn came within single digits in this dark red district should set off alarm bells for the GOP,” they insisted.

The Cook Political Report rates Tennessee’s seventh district as R+10, meaning that, on average, its electoral results are about 10 points more Republican than the nation as a whole. According to Cook’s PVI ranking system, there are 122 districts in the country more Republican-leaning than Tennessee’s seventh district.

Thus, Van Epps’s nine-point victory is the largest possible example of a “single-digit” win. And the authors omit to mention that the seat they describe as “dark red” only rates as an R+10 district. When a Republican wins by nine points in a district where Republicans perform about 10 points better than the national average, should that “set off alarm bells for the GOP” in an election 11 months away?

“Everybody’s heard the media narrative that this is some sort of negative sign for us, but it’s exactly the opposite,” protested House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “We had an extraordinary candidate there, Matt Van Epps, who’s a combat veteran, a Christian husband and father, just a great selfless public servant, a patriot. And he won a decisive election there in a district that we should win.”

The media’s negative prognostications rely largely on comparing Van Epps’s special election win in 2025 with President Trump’s victory in November 2024, where the president was up 22 points in Tennessee’s seventh district (Rep. Green also won by 21 points in the 2024 election).

But that comparison is not necessarily a predictor of future election results. First, President Trump outperformed Republican expectations everywhere, setting a nationwide high-water mark as the best Republican presidential performance in at least two decades.

Second, Rep. Green’s 21-point victory was achieved through the power of incumbency, plus Trump’s sizable coattails. For Van Epps to notch nearly half the margin of victory, without the power of incumbency, is still a reasonable achievement.

Third, according to Cook’s rating system, Van Epps also outperformed expectations. According to the current Real Clear Politics average in the generic congressional vote, voters nationwide prefer Democrats over Republicans by 4.9%. If Tennessee’s seventh district is 10 points more Republican than the nation as a whole, we would expect to see a Van Epps victory of only five points.

Fourth, especially since the onset of the Trump era, Democrats tend to overperform in off-year and special elections because their voter base is both highly motivated to oppose President Trump and is now demographically more likely to vote than Trump’s new Republican coalition. Off-year and special elections tend to have much lower turnout than general elections.

Yet the special election in Tennessee’s seventh district had “a large turnout,” Johnson said. “Almost 180,000 voters came out on a special election, in the middle of a holiday, when most people didn’t even know there was a race on the ballot.” For Ken Blackwell, former Ohio Secretary of State and senior fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at Family Research Council, Van Epps’s high-turnout victory was a sign that “the Republicans actually have a lot of momentum. There’s a lot of enthusiasm. And turnout is what’s going to determine these elections.”

The media spin over the Tennessee special election is especially preposterous because Republicans will already be playing defense in the 2026 midterm, with no room for error.

According to The Cook Political Report, the country’s median district (the 218th-most Republican and 218th-most Democratic) is California’s 22nd district, represented by Rep. David Valadao (R), with a PVI rating of R+1. Thus, conventional wisdom holds that Democrats must lead in the generic congressional ballot by two or more points to take control of the House of Representatives. If their current lead of five points holds until Election Day (which is by no means certain), Democrats would likely take back control.

“This is the challenge: the Republicans have a slim majority right now. Historically, the party that’s in the White House has a challenge in the off-year election. That means that the burden is going to be on Speaker Johnson and the Republicans to hold the line,” Blackwell explained on “Washington Watch.” “We are, again, swimming against the normal situation in history where people use the off-year election as a way to hold … the party that controls the White House in check.”

However, Blackwell held out hope that this midterm cycle would see “a lean towards the Republicans,” partly due to an economic rebound in 2026 and partly due to the state-level redistricting wars. “When it’s all said and done … there might be an uptick of two- or three-seat advantage in the redrawn lines. But, the fact of the matter is that Republicans are still swimming upstream.”

Johnson was even more optimistic about Republican prospects in redistricting. “There [are] a number of states in various stages of doing the same thing — some red states, some blue states. We’ll see how it all shakes out at the end,” he observed. “We are going to grow the House majority. … The media hates what we’ve done. They hate that we’ve had one of the most productive congresses in the history of the institution. … So, they try every day to divide and create these false narratives, and it’s not going to work.”

Just based on historical trends, Republicans will have their work cut out for them to hold control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. Their minuscule majority and voters’ tradition of siding against incumbents both work against them. But media efforts to turn the Tennessee special election into the ultimate oracle of doom blow the facts out of all proportion. They say more about the media’s bias than about politics in its current state.