Republicans are in a full-on panic following Tuesday's special election in Tennessee's 7th District, after the GOP candidate underperformed Donald Trump by a whopping 13-point margin.

And it's easy to see why.

Republicans had to spend $3.5 million to defend this seat. Given that there are roughly 102 GOP-held House seats that voted for Trump by smaller margins than Tennessee's 7th, according to data from The Downballot, that would mean Republicans would need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in areas that were not expected to be competitive.

Even worse for the GOP is that if every House race in the 2026 midterms swung toward Democrats as much as it did in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, Democrats would knock off a whopping 44 Republican seats, according to Downballot data

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