The Tennessee special election.
Tangle
Isaac Saul
4.7 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Tuesday, Matt Van Epps (R) defeated State Rep. Aftyn Behn (D) in a special election to represent Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District (TN-07). Van Epps, a former Army officer endorsed by President Donald Trump, received roughly 54% of the vote for a nine-point victory over Behn, a former social worker and community healthcare organizer. Former Rep. Mark Green’s (R) resignation in July triggered the special election, and the race drew national attention and significant outside spending. Van Epps’s win preserves the 220–213 majority Republicans held prior to Green’s resignation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. |
| 0:12.5 | Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. |
| 0:28.0 | I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the Tennessee special election. |
| 0:34.6 | I'm bringing in Audrey Moorhead today, one of our associate editors. Audrey is from Tennessee |
| 0:40.4 | and she grew up in the town that is just next door to the district where this race happened. |
| 0:46.7 | So, you know, yesterday you guys heard from Will Kayback, who has a bunch of Minnesota roots, |
| 0:52.5 | who I thought had a really interesting take, |
| 0:54.8 | a really good take. |
| 0:55.7 | I mean, I'm not sure I could have written it better myself. |
| 0:58.7 | I had some, if I had any objections, |
| 1:01.3 | maybe I would have gone a little bit further |
| 1:02.8 | than he did in sort of pinning some blame |
| 1:05.8 | on the Somali community, |
| 1:06.9 | which I'm going to talk today about, actually, |
| 1:09.7 | which I know is a little bit of a controversial |
| 1:11.4 | opinion, but I think it's, well, I'm not going to spoil it. I'm going to talk about that |
| 1:16.7 | on suspension of the rules, which is going to come out after this show, and I encourage you |
| 1:21.5 | guys to listen to. But today, again, some news that was just tied to the local background of one of our writers and editors. |
| 1:32.5 | So I tapped Audrey and we brought her in for today's take, which I thought was really good. |
| 1:37.2 | So I'm excited to share that with you guys. |
| 1:39.2 | The next thing that I want to give you a heads up on is that we have a guest writer coming in to publish our Friday |
| 1:46.1 | edition this week. So if you get our newsletter, I encourage you to keep an eye out for that. It's from |
... |
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