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The White House doesn’t often call White House, Tennessee. But on Monday morning at the Colorado Grill—a burger joint on the two-lane highway cutting through this town about 30 miles north of Nashville—Donald Trump was on the phone.

He was calling Speaker Mike Johnson, who was going through the motions of saying hello to patrons who had shown up for an early lunch. Johnson was there for some last-ditch campaigning ahead of Tuesday’s special election, when voters in Tennessee’s 7th District will send a new representative to the House. And Trump was checking in with Johnson for a status report on how the race was going.

Johnson put the president of the United States on speakerphone in the country restaurant and let Republican nominee Matt Van Epps chime in to profusely thank Trump again for his support. As they reminisced about when Trump had spoken (again via speakerphone) to a rally earlier that morning, the president noted he hadn’t had notes in front of him when he gave his speech. “It’s a good thing you’re a natural, Mr. President,” said the speaker of the House.

Trump reminisced about his line deriding the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn, over the telephone that morning: “She’s anti-Christian and anti–country music.”

Speaking to Johnson and Van Epps, Trump noted, “The anti-Christian thing was good.” Van Epps agreed. “That line really worked, Mr. President.”

(Bob and Doris Ness of White House, who had “just come in for a burger,” were just as impressed. The loyal conservatives never thought that the speaker of the House would be standing 6 inches from their restaurant booth broadcasting a call from Donald Trump.)

A more candid status report for Trump would have gone something like this: Van Epps is the favorite on Tuesday, when he faces off with Behn, a progressive activist turned Democratic state legislator. It’s, after all, a district where Trump trounced Kamala Harris by 22 points in 2024. But all is not well. Polls show the race uncomfortably close for Republicans, and the real shock wasn’t that Trump was calling to come up with attacks on a Democratic congressional candidate—it was that he had to call at all.

This special election for a Nashville-based congressional district will be the definitive barometer of the political environment ahead of the 2026 midterms. Despite the attention paid to recent governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey and a mayor’s race in New York, Tuesday’s race will give the nation the best gauge so far of Democrats’ chances of taking the House next November.

And if Behn does pull off an astonishing upset, it could lead to the collapse of the fragile Republican House majority even sooner. Johnson’s margin is thin already and is set to get more so next month, when Marjorie Taylor Greene is scheduled to resign. Matt Gorman, a top aide to the National Republican Campaign Committee in 2018, contrasted the GOP’s current situation with the one the party faced ahead of the midterms during Trump’s first term: “We just worried about the narrative,” he said. “They have the majority to worry about.”

It’s a lot of attention for a district that typically gets very little. The area is a gerrymandered slice of middle Tennessee that stretches up from Kentucky and down to Alabama, grabbing a hefty chunk of Nashville. No one gave it a second thought until suddenly, this spring, Republican incumbent Mark Green announced his retirement to pursue

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