Welcome back to Beyond the polls.

This week, it's all me.

Yes, it's Henry unplugged as I discourse and dump on everything related to American politics.

Let's dive in.

Well, I know what you probably all want to talk about.

You want to talk about Tennessee 7 that special election that

captivated the political world for oh maybe a week maybe 96 hours of course the

results weren't what a number of people thought slash wanted slash expected the

Republican Matt Van Apps won by nine percentage points, which is a comfortable

win by any stretch of the imagination. That Emerson poll that had him ahead by only two points

was presumably predicated on a much lower turnout. What we had was nearly 180,000 people

vote, about 56% of the 2024 turnout in that district,

and roughly on par with the 2022 midterm turnout. In other words, it was a higher turnout election

than has been the case in most of the other special elections that we've had for Congress

this year. So what should we make of it? Well, on the one hand, it's good news

for the Republican Party. The Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps, won by a

larger than expected margin. He won by nine points, as I mentioned. Many people

were concerned he might lose. Certainly,

the Republican Party and allies spent a couple of million dollars in ads to make sure that

didn't happen, especially in the last week. They poured it on trying to gin up election day turnout.

And that was what saved him, that he trailed in the early vote, which was considerable,

but the fact that instead of merely 120 or 130,000, the fact that it was 180,000, meant that he was

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