Aftyn Behn, a Tennessee state representative, is bucking conventional wisdom by closing the distance between herself and her Republican opponent in a deep-red district as a strident progressive.
In 2024, Rep. Mark Green, who resigned from Congress earlier this year, won the district by 22 points. As of this morning, Behn is within 2 points of Matt Van Epps, the Republican nominee for the seat, according to a survey from Wednesday.
Behn’s run also pushes back against what has become conventional wisdom in many Democratic circles: that Democrats need to chase centrist voters even harder by running more conservative candidates, in the mold of the former senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, who switched from a Democrat to an independent at the end of his career.
Behn’s success in the district, which encompasses much of Nashville and a large swath of central Tennessee, has been built on a progressive platform focused on improving the material conditions of the working class while refusing corporate PAC and special interest donations.
She’s also up against the heft of the national Republican political machine.
As of the week before the election, on Dec. 2, Republican PACs had committed $2.3 million to attacking Behn and supporting Van Epps. In the same period, the national Democratic apparatus, believing they have a shot to further shrink the GOP’s dwindling House majority, have committed $1.8 million to the race.
“It is a matter of life and death for my neighbors who live on TennCare in the aftermath of the big, ugly bill.”
Behn described the situation as having the “Republican eye of Sauron breathing down my neck” in an interview with Salon. However, she said that all the attacks from national Republicans haven’t been able to distract from the fact that, for the people of the district, the current Republican majority has been a disaster for Tennesseans.
“It is a matter of life and death for my neighbors who live on TennCare in the aftermath of the big, ugly bill,” Behn said, referring to Trump’s budget passed earlier this year. She added that she would be a vote to restore the Medicaid funding that Republicans cut in that legislation. “That would save lives in my district, and I would absolutely join the coalitions of legislators who want to extend [Affordable Care Act] subsidies.”
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Behn also said that, in her experience, the best way to connect with the elusive moderate Republican doesn’t involve following any think tank playbook; instead, people need to be politically authentic and understand that “voters aren’t moderate — they are pluralistic.”
“After having knocked thousands of doors across the state, talking about really combative issues, it’s clear that people have a plurality of opinions and thoughts,” Behn said. “Especially folks that live in rural towns, they have more populist opinions. And so when you’re running on rooting out corruption and making multinational corporations pay what they owe in taxes, as a working mom buying baby formula, it really resonates.”
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Behn, who first entered politics as a community organizer around health care in Tennessee, said that she hoped her campaign could be an inflection point for working-class organizing in Tennessee, indicating that state-level issues like Tennessee’s grocery tax have been common complaints from people in the district.
This type of organizing, Behn said, would be necessary, not only to potentially win in special elections like the one on Dec. 2, but also to build towards making districts like Tennessee’s Seventh more competitive during higher turnout election seasons.
But, Behn said, she believed winning the districts like the Seventh would be possible if the party and its candidates were willing to adopt the popular “pro-worker and anti-corporate” slant of Democrats like herself.
“This is the choice in front of us: Do we want to be a party that is bankrolled by the same corporations that are selling us out?” Behn asked. “Or do we want to be a party that is leading the vanguard to protect workers and to fight for working families?”
