We Need to Talk About Trump's Neverending Wall of Approval
There should be no rejoicing for Democrats over the Tennessee Special Election
The consensus in the NeverTrump media landscape regarding last night’s special election1 for Tennessee’s 7th District Congressional Seat has been, “We’ve got Trump right where we want him!”
The people of Wayne County, Tennessee, disagree. They voted for the Republican, Matt Van Epps, over the Democrat, State Representative Aftyn Behn, by a 70% margin, 85% to 15%.
They, like many rural voters, seem impervious to every awful thing Trump does, like trashing the economy, grifting his office as his primary income source, murdering innocent people at sea, calling Somalians “trash,” and creating a catalog of scandals thicker than his cankles.
Not even strong evidence implicating the grifter-in-chief in child trafficking moved the needle in Wayne County. This remains true even as the scale of the grifter’s crimes seems to grow exponentially by the minute. For example, on November 24, he was hit with a $310 million lawsuit alleging that he created his own massive child trafficking ring by cloning Epstein's. The lawsuit included allegations against Elon Musk and Bill Gates, among others.2
It’s easy to dismiss such lawsuits, and judges often do, but the good people of Wayne County surely know all about Trump’s Epstein connections by now, and decided that instead of voting for someone who might help impeach him, they said, “Nah, we’re good.”
As evidence from the Epstein Files increasingly implicates Trump in a growing hive of malfeasance, all evidence points to rural voters shrugging their shoulders and eagerly asking, “But, when do we get to see him shoot that guy in the middle of Fifth Avenue? We’ve been waiting a decade now, pertnear.”
Wayne County is not an outlier. Almost every precinct in the Seventh District outside of Nashville turned out for more demonic behavior from this predatory presidency.
These people might as well just ship their kids on a conveyor belt to Mar-a-Lago.
The narrative in NeverTrumpLand is that Democrats snared a bigger percentage of the vote this year in Tennessee’s Seventh than they did in the 2024 election, so all is good and right in the world. Voter impulses have indeed changed some, even in Wayne County, where the margin shifted leftward 6.9%. But that’s barely a scratch on the toxic monolith of destruction maga has hurled our way during the last ten years.
We’re watching the needle shake a little, not move substantially. The wall of Trump approval remains as immovable as ever, which I’ll get to soon. And, most likely, it’s independent voters shaking that needle, not maga voters.
The depravity is in the numbers
Here are the numbers from Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District:3
The third column shows the percentage of votes received by the Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps. The fifth column shows the percentage received by Aftyn Behn. Both were considered by their respective parties to be strong candidates.
Here’s the map showing the swath of destruction in all its red county glory.
News flash: It looks like every election map we’ve seen since 2016.
In fact, it looks like Texas in 2016
You can almost take a snapshot of these county votes and drop them into Texas of 2016. Nothing has changed.
Let’s have a look at 2016 Texas voting patterns:
Armstrong County must be a pleasant place to live, eh? This partial chart is representative of rural counties in Texas and other rural counties across America in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
The numbers are a little stronger for Democrats this year in Tennessee’s Seventh District, but not much. We are still living in a world where we will be watching cable news electoral map analysts during the 2026 midterms try to explain how Democrats might pull off a late-night win through a last-minute pile of urban voters.
Texas is statistically somewhat extreme, but rural Iowans (for example) voted similarly for Trump or Trump candidates, about 65% to 30-something. Similar trends can be found in every white rural county in America in every election since then, including 2020, 2022, and 2024.
In other words, when it comes to the rural white vote, like it or not, Trump has been an uncompromisingly dominant force. He has also captured much of what we used to call the “blue-collar” vote.
If you look at statewide races from 2018, you’ll see a similar pattern, Trump angst notwithstanding. The Blue Wave we hoped for back then dried up in towns of less than 100,000 and still shows no signs of cresting in any meaningful way.
Surely, all the horror coming out of the CaligulusTrumpus throne is changing some minds, no?
No. Not really. Let’s look at recent opinion polls from the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, whom I repeatedly said during the 2024 election was full of crap, and who ended up being right about his numbers. The numbers he cites are an aggregate of all the nation’s major polls.
The good news is that Cohn argues convincingly that voters have established another pattern, one that should impact Trump enough to at least stall out what’s left of his march towards authoritarianism:4
Over the last 20 years, something keeps happening to the party that wins a presidential election.
It starts losing.
While it might seem unimaginable in the wake of a triumphant victory, the winning party in the last five presidential elections has gone on to lose each of the next five midterms — and four of the next five presidential elections.
If current numbers hold, it ought to be enough to flip both houses of Congress, but just barely, and not enough to do what needs to be done: removing Trump from office.
So, yes, we are seeing a slight shift. Recent special elections have demonstrated this. So did the Tennessee special election. But it’s not a major shift.
Trump still has a grotesquely absurd 41% approval rating.5 The mainstream media calls that number historically low. I call it appallingly high.
This 40% wall, give or take a few percentage points depending on the day or the poll, has held steady since he first stunned the world with his win over Hillary.
No matter how we’ve tried to understand over the years why that election’s results turned out the way they did, most of the people reading this post will agree that his approval rating should never be more than 5%, assuming there are that many people who approve of child trafficking.
Or, do we simply assume that the real number of people who approve of Trump’s clear tendencies toward underage girls is 41%? Is it not fair to ask these voters that question?
In his article about recent voting patterns, Nate Cohn says that, “on average, the prior five presidential winners were at 42 percent at this point in their terms.”
In other words, Trump is only taking a one percent hit over traditional presidents who don’t barge into the dressing rooms of teenage beauty contestants or become adjudicated rapists in civil suits hammering them with millions of dollars in penalties.
Statistically speaking, that one percent is nothing. It means that his behavior during the past ten years has had zero impact on the attitude of nearly half of the voting public.
We can shout it out all we want: “Those are low information voters! They don’t follow the news as much as we do! They’re busy with TikTok! They’re hiking!”
I call bullshit on that. Every human being in America knows who and what Donald Trump is, yet there it is: That impermeable wall of 40% or so. This wall of approval has never changed since he first glided down the escalator all those years ago and began barfing out his mendacity.
Why? How is this possible?
Nobody knows.
Democrats still don’t know how to talk to rural voters.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this. Much of rural America has collapsed into a systemic cult of depravity that nobody has figured out how to address. It can’t be the economy they’re voting on now. The economy is in the toilet, which they know better than many of us, as farms collapse from the weight of tariffs and attacks on immigrants, rural hospitals close, prices on everything soar, and data centers suck the water out of their homes, to name just a few maladies they’re trying to cope with.
So, no. That’s not it. The good people of the Seventh District in Tennessee did not vote with their wallets. Not this time. They voted for depravity. They like what they see from Donald Trump, and they voted to keep his congressional wall of protection intact.
They scanned, ever so briefly, the mounds of salacious emails between Trump and his one friend ever in life, they looked at the smallest tremor imaginable coming out of Congress over those same emails, they pondered whether they should support removing a president for the most foul of crimes any of us can imagine, and they said, “Not under my watch.”
2,411 people marched into the voting booth in Wayne County, Tennessee, and proclaimed to the world that their children mean nothing more to them than a lode of blackeyed peas.
There are many wonderful people in the hinterlands of America. But making the argument, “I’m a nice person. I didn’t vote for Trump,” is no different than me saying, “But I’m a nice guy, I don’t hassle or berate women.” We all have a responsibility to do what we can to establish zero tolerance towards rotten behavior among our peers, and you can’t get much more rotten than voting for Trump after all we know about him.
There are hundreds of arguments about why rural voters choose him over normal politicians. The explanations range from the dominance of right-wing media in rural counties to Democrats simply ignoring the needs of the people who live there. But I’m striking that last one off the list.
American voters of all stripes have developed a pattern almost as prominent as the Trump vote in rural counties: They hate whoever is in charge.
The reason they do has been captured by the one word that Democrats have finally discovered: “Affordability.”
It’s the same thing James Carville discovered for Bill Clinton when he came up with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
But it’s simpler. That one word removes the graphs and the analysis and speaks directly to the voter who can’t afford anything but rent, and sometimes not even that. It speaks to spiraling healthcare costs without the need to dive into numbers, because we all feel the crush of the numbers every day. We don’t need specifics from wonky Democrats. We feel it as we limp around the grocery store in the cast we can’t afford.
But voters in Tennessee’s Seventh District stated loudly that they’re not as concerned about affordability as we were assuming. Worse, they seem to be cheering on the outlandish behavior of their cult leader. They see and experience the empty harvests and say, “I can absorb the higher cost of lettuce if it means fewer brown people in my town.”
It’s a sign that it may take a complete economic collapse for rural voters to disengage from this bizarre, strange, demonic cult hero they’ve adopted.
All of this begs a larger question. What if Trump wasn’t an idiot? What if the economy were doing better under his regime? Would independent voters help build that wall of protection during the 2026 midterms?
Would independent voters reward a career criminal who has reached into the darkest corners of the planet for his personal pleasure if their housing costs dropped?
If that’s the case, what does that say about us as a nation? Money before children?
If so, start the conveyor belt. Or would it be more appropriate for me to say, “Ramp it up to a higher speed?”
Notes
1) I usually strike an optimistic note in my political thought process. Democrats have fared well in other special elections since the 2024 election. This was not one of those successes. This was a setback, and a pretty serious one. A little blue nudge in percentages doesn’t mean that much when considering the midterms, especially with so many gerrymandered districts, of which the Tennessee Seventh is one.
Winning the midterms is not enough. The only acceptable outcome is a rout. Not a blue tsunami, but a rout that introduces enough new congress critters into the mix to launch an effective, regime-ending impeachment effort.
2) According to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), both campaigns in Tennessee were aided by a glut of money. As of November 12, 2025, Behn had a slight edge in campaign money available (both candidates had about a million dollars to work with).6 News reports indicated a last-minute push by Republicans and Trump’s PAC, but numbers aren’t yet available to confirm the actual dollars involved. Did that give Van Epp a couple of extra points? Who cares?
3) It’s reasonable to theorize that some rural voters don’t give much weight to the Epstein matter because they assume both parties will be caught up in the scandal when the truth begins to filter (or flood) out. This is probably true. Democrats will be caught up in it, too. I’ve read that the Epstein operation was a billion-dollar enterprise. That is a lot of criminals. There is a zero percent chance that only Republicans are involved. But this is a twisted kind of “both sides” argument. When the man at the top of your party is involved, it means he’s one of the heads of the hydra. Biden was not involved (nobody can even imagine it). Obama was not involved (nobody can even imagine it). If Clinton was involved, hopefully, he’ll also feel the full weight of the consequences. But he’s not the president now.
Thanks for reading!
Image source note: Images not credited for source are licensed from Adobe Stock.
Footnotes
Dateline Tuesday, December 2, 2025 for those of you reading more than a day after this was posted
“Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bill Gates Slammed with $310m Trafficking Law Suit.” 2025. Wion. 2025. https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-musk-gates-310-million-trafficking-lawsuit-1764757340261.
Contributors. 2025. “2025 Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District Special Election.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. June 9, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Tennessee%27s_7th_congressional_district_special_election.
Cohn, Nate. 2025. “The G.O.P. Continues to Slip.” The New York Times, December 3, 2025. Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/upshot/election-tennessee-republicans-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.508.lGbO.YRkd43Pf1C0p&smid=url-share. 🎁
Daniel, Annie, Jon Huang, Ruth Igielnik, Jasmine C Lee, Alex Lemonides, Jonah Smith, Albert Sun, and Rumsey Taylor. 2025. “President Trump Approval Rating: Latest Polls.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. March 17, 2025.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls.html?unlocked_article_code=1.508.-Db0.65-hbt2B51l1&smid=url-share 🎁
“2026 Election United States House - Tennessee - District 07 - FEC.gov.” 2024. FEC.gov. 2024. https://www.fec.gov/data/elections/house/TN/07/2026/.
This is so sobering. I haven't taken a deep plunge into the results yet, but from bits and pieces of headlines I thought Democrats had made outstanding progress, just short of victory. What a shocker this well-reported story is. Now what?
While we fail to muster up power for the good, overshoot makes everything else irrelevant. Best thought I have, for the reality and the danger of now, is something I've posted around Substack with no responses:
"How about a coup to install a presidential team? Let's say Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, Anne Applebaum, and Marianne Williamson. Just picture such warm, smart, human-loving human beings leading our way. If they state that they are taking charge, so many millions would be on the streets in Washington that we couldn’t be thwarted."
What do you think?
Throw the bums out is all the analysis needed.