The key lessons for both parties from Tennessee: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, a newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, Steve Kornacki has the key takeaways from last night’s special election in Tennessee. Plus, Andrea Mitchell breaks down the latest from the talks to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

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— Adam Wollner

GOP warning signs and lessons for Democrats in Tennessee

By Steve Kornacki

Republican Matt Van Epps held off a challenge from Democrat Aftyn Behn yesterday in the special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, with voters delivering both a result and a broader message.

The result preserves a House seat that the GOP badly needs, given how slim its majority is. But the margin — a 9-point win for Van Epps in a district President Donald Trump carried by 22 points last year — bolsters Democratic optimism heading into next year’s midterms.

The big picture: The final result is in line with all of the other House special elections this year, which featured strong Democratic performances. In the four specials before last night’s, Democrats had posted net improvements of 16 to 22 points compared to the 2024 presidential margin in those districts. Behn’s 9-point loss in Tennessee represents a net 13-point shift in her party’s favor.

Democrats have been faring well in special elections and other low-turnout affairs for a while now. This reflects the intense motivation of their professional-class, anti-Trump base, which has swamped the polls at any and every opportunity.

There’s no doubt this played a role in the Tennessee result. But what is concerning here for Republicans is that turnout was actually quite robust. About 180,000 votes were cast, far more than in any of the previous congressional special elections this year and almost identical to the number for the 2022 midterm election in Tennessee’s 7th District.

Democrats paid a price for their nominee: Yes, holding the GOP to a 9-point margin in a district like this is something Democrats can and will crow about. But it’s likely they could have made it even closer with a different candidate.

Behn, who won a crowded and closely divided Democratic primary with a plurality of the vote, has been a vocal and unapologetic leftist for much of her public life — enough so that members of her own party dubbed her “the AOC of Tennessee.” Strident positions and inflammatory rhetoric from the recent past garnered significant attention and headlined the GOP campaign against her. And it looks like that limited her inroads in some parts of the district.

Notably, Behn notched her biggest gain relative to the 2024 results in Davidson County, where Nashville is. Demographically and politically, this is the outlier corner of the district.

It’s deeply Democratic and contains more than a few voters who share the worldview Behn has articulated in the past. Not coincidentally, Davidson is where she’d already won office as a state legislator. On Tuesday night, it produced large turnout and an 18-point shift in the Democrats’ favor compared to last year.

But look at the two other population hubs sandwiching Davidson County on the chart. Williamson County is the home of Nashville’s fastest-growing upscale suburbs. Like similar suburbs across the Sun Belt, Williamson has been reliably Republican this century, but it took a step away from Trump and the GOP in 2016 and 2020. In other words, it’s home to a chunk of voters who might be open to backing a Democrat now that Trump is back in the White House and racking up a shaky job approval rating.

Behn, however, didn’t move the needle much in Williamson at all — a net shift of just 7 points compared to last year. It’s impossible to look at that number and not wonder if a Democrat without her baggage could have far more meaningful inroads.

The story is similar in Montgomery County, which is centered around the city of Clarksville. While not as upscale as Williamson, Montgomery is the closest thing Tennessee’s 7th District has to a swing county. If Behn was going to have a chance of actually winning the race, she needed a victory in Montgomery, but as in Williamson, she fell far short of her party’s hopes.

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A Ukraine peace deal is still proving elusive for Trump

Analysis by Andrea Mitchell

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long-held hopes of dividing the U.S. from its Western allies may have gained traction with the notable absence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio today from the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels. It was the first time in decades that a U.S. secretary of state had skipped the year-end meetings of the defense alliance.

Rubio’s absence was even more glaring because it came just after White House negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had spent five hours at the Kremlin negotiating with Putin a ceasefire in Ukraine — without any representatives from Ukraine. It also came after a leaked ceasefire plan crafted by the White House envoys and a Kremlin insider heavily favored concessions to Russia, alarming European allies. Plus, there was the leaked phone call transcript showing that Witkoff had coached a Putin adviser on how the Russian leader could flatter President Donald Trump into accepting Russia’s position on Ukraine.

The role of real estate investors Witkoff and Kushner in such high-stakes diplomacy is unusual, but it appears to suit Trump’s belief that they can duplicate their success in securing a ceasefire in Gaza. And it fits with Russia’s argument that the business of peace can come from doing business: lifting Western economic sanctions and welcoming Russia back into the group of seven leading democratic economies — even though Putin’s Russia is hardly democratic.

The plan would also have forced Ukraine to give up territory it had not won militarily. It would have been banned from ever joining NATO. And its promises of U.S. security guarantees were flimsy, at best. Rubio stepped in at the last minute to make the Witkoff-Kushner proposal less lopsided. Not surprisingly, Putin immediately rejected it as “absolutely unacceptable.” Before they arrived, he went on television dressed in military fatigues and lamenting the loss of life, including of Ukrainians, in the nearly four-year war. Ukraine called it “disinformation” to influence the negotiations.

The recent flurry of diplomacy comes against a backdrop of Russian military advances and political troubles for Ukraine. Putin escalated his bombing of civilian targets and claimed his ground forces had gained control of a strategic city. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was also weakened, forced to fire two key cabinet ministers and his powerful chief of staff under suspicion of a multimillion-dollar corruption scandal.

Witkoff and Kushner will be meeting with a top Ukrainian official in Miami tomorrow and Zelenskyy posted on X that the diplomacy must be backed up by “pressure on Russia — the aggressor.”

With a ceasefire in Ukraine still elusive, Trump told his Cabinet yesterday that Ukraine was “not an easy situation” and “a mess.” Still, the president has found a way to declare himself a peacemaker. Today, the building across from the State Department that for decades housed the U.S. Institute of Peace has a new name. Taken over by DOGE last June, what used to be a nongovernment, congressionally authorized think tank dedicated to resolving world conflicts is now the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner.

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