House Speaker Mike Johnson
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson faced questions Wednesday over his party’s disastrous underperformance in Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District—one that has members of his party sounding the alarm over Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps’ narrow victory.
Given his responses, either his heart wasn’t in it, or he is really, really bad at spinning bad news.
Republican candidate Matt Van Epps speaks to supporters at a watch party after announcing victory in a special election for the U.S. 7th Congressional District on Dec. 2 in Nashville, Tennessee.
“We’re excited about the win,” he said, 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.”
Here’s the problem: That’s not what R+10 means. At all. Cook’s Partisan Voting Index doesn’t measure how “slight” or “strong” a district is. It measures how much better a party performs there compared to the national presidential vote. An R+10 district isn’t some modest GOP tilt—it means Republicans typically run 10 points ahead of their national number in that district.
So if a Republican wins an R+10 seat with 53.9% of the vote, that doesn’t mean “everything is fine.” It means the national environment equivalent of that performance is 43.9%. That’s the whole point of PVI: It lets you translate a district result into a national one.
And a 43.9% national vote share would be a cataclysm for Republicans. It’s the kind of number that produces wave elections—the kind where Democrats pick up dozens of seats and toss people like Johnson out of leadership.
But he kept trying to spin it.
“We have a great record to run on in ’26 and I am very bullish about the midterms,” Johnson said. “I’m convinced we’re going to defy history and grow this majority.”
A leader has to cheerlead for his team, sure. He’s not going to stand there and say, “Dear god, we’re so screwed.” But he doesn’t have a great record to run on.
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That’s the problem, and it’s why he and Trump have been leaning on Republican legislatures all over the country, upending tradition and laws to redraw election maps mid-decade.
There’s a clear-headed answer Johnson could’ve given—something 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.”
Instead, he’s pretending that Tuesday’s special election was good news for his party and projecting that fantasy straight into the midterms.
Asked whether he was concerned that the seat was in play to begin with, he said, “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 begin spending until Republicans dumped millions of their own, clearly freaked out by how tight the race was.
Then Johnson reached for the worst possible example.
“This reminded me a lot of Rep. Ron Estes,” he said. “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.”
Great job, Ron. But House Democrats picked up forty-one seats that midterm and ended up with a 235-199 majority. That’s the year Johnson is invoking to say everything is fine.
No one cares whether Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps wins reelection by 9 or 22 points in Tennessee’s 7th District. What matters is the ridiculous 13-point Democratic overperformance—exactly the kind of thing you see when a blue-wave environment is building.
No one expects Johnson to admit any of that. His job is to pretend the walls aren’t closing in. But by insisting “this is just like 2018, in this slight Republican district,” he’s basically telling on himself.
