A “senior House Republican” fretting Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee’s 7th tells Politico’s Meredith Lee Hill that “If our victory margin is single digits, the conference may come unhinged.”

Ummm… Well it sure would be interesting to see what “unhinged” looks like to this House GOP leader since “unhinged” was already an understatement about 14 years ago. More to the point of the anticipated outcome however, the likeliest and best case scenario for the GOP is indeed a single digit win, itself obviously a spectrum of panic inducement from a 1-2 percent squeaker to something more like a current status quo of unease in the 8-9 percent range. So yay for MAGA if it’s +8?

The only real poll that’s been conducted in the district is the one from Emerson last week that put Republican Matt Van Epps up 49 to 47 percent over Democrat Aftyn Behn. Even without the pollster’s very checkered record – all of it favoring the GOP – that’s still within the margin of error, so if anyone wants a reason to be bullish on Behn then they could do a lot worse than that finding.

On a related note and in an echo of the February 13, 2024 New York 3rd special to replace deranged assclown George Santos, the most recent actually contested House special election: The weather’s pretty rough in Tennessee right now and will stay so for the rest of the day. Though earlier forecasts for snow have since been revised to rain, it still sucks for MAGA people that live out in the sticks. Looking forward to that being the GOP’s excuse for an underperformance/loss in TN-7.