Republican candidate Matt Van Epps speaks at a watch party to declare victory in a special election for the U.S. seventh congressional district Tuesday in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/John Amis)

Republicans held onto a reliably conservative U.S. House district in Tennessee’s special election, but only after a late burst of national spending and high-profile campaigning helped them secure a margin less than half of last year’s race.

Even with that victory, the outcome contributed to a gloomy outlook for the party going into the 2026 midterms that will determine control of Congress. Republicans will need to defend much more vulnerable seats if they have any hope of keeping their House majority, while Democrats are capitalizing on President Donald Trump’s unpopularity and the public’s persistent frustration with the economy.

“The danger signs are there, and we shouldn’t have had to spend that kind of money to hold that kind of seat,” said Jason Roe, a national Republican strategist working on battleground races next year.

He said that “Democratic enthusiasm is dramatically higher than Republican enthusiasm.”

Republican Matt Van Epps, a military veteran and former state general services commissioner, defeated Democratic state Rep. Aftyn Behn by 9 percentage points on Tuesday for the seat vacated by Republican Mark Green, who retired over the summer. Green had won reelection in 2024 by 21 percentage points.

Special elections provide a limited window into the mood of voters and take place under far different conditions than regular campaign cycles. But some Republicans are acknowledging the warning signs, especially after Democrats had convincing victories in New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere last month.

Tennessee was the fifth House special election this year, and Democratic candidates have outperformed Kamala Harris’ margins in the 2024 presidential race by an average of 16 percentage points in the same districts.

“We could have lost this district,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Fox News after The Associated Press called the race for Van Epps. Cruz said his party must “set out the alarm bells” because next year is “going to be a turnout election and the left will show up.”

Although inflation has dropped since Democratic President Joe Biden was in office, Behn focused her campaign on the lingering concerns about prices.

Trump has played down the affordability issue, saying during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday that it was “a con job” by his political opponents.

“There’s this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about, affordability,” he said. “They just say the word. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody, they just say it.”

Roe viewed things differently. He said the Tennessee race had “better be a wake-up call that we’ve got to address the affordability problem, and the president denying that affordability is a political issue is not helpful.”

Maintaining House control is crucial for Trump, who fears a repeat of his first term, when Democrats flipped the House and launched an impeachment inquiry. The Republican president has been leaning on GOP-led states to redraw congressional maps to improve the party’s chances.