\n<\/p>\n
In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Tennessee\u2019s Seventh Congressional District by 22 points. Last night, in a special election to represent the district, the Republican Matt Van Epps won by only nine points, defeating State Representative Aftyn Behn, a Democrat.<\/p>\n
Trump celebrated the outcome on Truth Social as a \u201cBIG Congressional WIN,\u201d but the margin of victory in a deep-red district is ominous for Republicans. Van Epps underperformed Trump by 13 percentage points, a sign that the party is vulnerable heading into the 2026 midterms. If Democrats could replicate that shift everywhere next year, they would gain upwards of 40 seats in the House and take back the Senate.<\/p>\n
But last night\u2019s outcome also offers Democrats a cautionary tale. An off-year special election in December is precisely the kind of low-turnout situation in which the party\u2019s highly educated base currently dominates. In such races, Democrats probably need to run up the score by even more than 13 points before they can have a real shot at winning both houses of Congress next year. And if they\u2019d nominated a more moderate candidate, they probably would have.<\/p>\n
Behn, a 36-year-old former community organizer, has the kind of progressive background that might not hurt in a Democratic primary but can become a real liability in a general election\u2014including an extensive trail of quotes that ended up being used against her. She told a Nashville interviewer in 2020, \u201cI\u2019m a very radical person.\u201d In now-deleted tweets from the same year, she advocated for dissolving the Nashville police department and wished a \u201cGood morning, especially to the 54% of Americans that believe burning down a police station is justified.\u201d She said on a podcast that she hated country music, bachelorette parties, and the city of Nashville itself, and suggested on a different episode that \u201cbirthers\u201d\u2014a gender-neutral term for \u201cmen and women who can give birth\u201d\u2014should refuse to procreate as a form of \u201ccollective bargaining.\u201d<\/p>\n
Republican groups seized on those quotes in the final few weeks of the campaign, spending millions of dollars on attack ads to make sure as many voters in the district as possible heard them. This tactic appears to have worked to some degree. A 13-point over-performance sounds huge, but in contemporary political terms, it\u2019s pedestrian. The president is deeply unpopular, and the Democratic coalition has grown ever whiter, older, richer, more highly educated, and more female\u2014a recipe for high turnout in off years. Indeed, compared with other Democrats who ran in special elections for Congress this year, Behn\u2019s performance is below average. Democrats averaged a staggering over-performance of 18 points in races that took place in Florida, Virginia, and Arizona.<\/p>\n
The ambiguity of the Tennessee results\u2014Behn lost, but she over-performed, but she probably under-over-performed\u2014has reignited an interminable intra-party debate. Some members of the Democratic left argue that the key to winning elections is mobilization: nominating inspiring progressive candidates who excite the party\u2019s voters, driving up Democratic turnout. Moderates (and plenty of more pragmatic leftists) counter that this never works, and that winning\u2014especially in Trump districts\u2014requires persuasion: running candidates with enough moderate positions to win over some conservative voters.<\/p>\n
Behn\u2019s candidacy was a test case for the first theory. \u201cThis Tennessee special congressional election is about MOBILIZATION,\u201d the candidate wrote in October. The Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, told The Bulwark last week that the race was \u201cnot about persuading voters; it\u2019s about turning them out.\u201d Following Behn\u2019s loss, some progressives doubled down on that idea, arguing that a moderate candidate wouldn\u2019t have performed better than Behn did, because the base wouldn\u2019t have turned out. They argue that if Behn didn\u2019t do as well as other special-election candidates have, it\u2019s because her race drew much more national attention, including from Trump himself, leading to the barrage of attack ads. Of course, those attack ads might have had less bite if the candidate hadn\u2019t personally provided so much fodder for them.<\/p>\n
One thing that keeps the motivation\u2013persuasion debate going is that, in any specific electoral race, both sides have an unfalsifiable argument. Win or lose, they can argue that the Democratic candidate would have fared better if only they had tried harder to appeal to swing voters or if only they had tried harder to rock the vote.<\/p>\n
The weight of the evidence, however, strongly favors the persuasion theory. There is no real trade-off between persuasion and turnout, because sporadic voters are not hardcore progressives waiting to be activated. In ideological terms, they are, in fact, very similar to swing voters; if anything, sporadic voters are even more moderate and conservative. Because these voters are similar to each other, the same basic tactics tend to work with both groups: focusing on the economy and stressing that you have mainstream rather than far-left views about cultural issues.<\/p>\n
Last night\u2019s special election showed the limits of a turnout-alone strategy. If ever that approach is going to work, it is in an off-year special election. In the midterms, the Democratic turnout advantage is all but guaranteed to shrink. (This will be even truer in the 2028 presidential election.) At some point, the time will come to face the full electorate.<\/p>\n
In the four-way Democratic primary for Tennessee\u2019s Seventh, only 31,000 voters cast a ballot, fewer than half the number that voted for Behn yesterday. Behn won that primary with 28 percent of the vote, beating the businessman Darden Copeland by fewer than 1,000 votes. Copeland had run on lowering the national debt and wrote in a candidate survey that he models himself on Dick Gephardt, the pro-life Democratic congressman who once chaired the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.<\/p>\n
Democrats are in a strong position heading into 2026. One of the only things standing in their way is the likelihood of them nominating more Aftyn Behns, when Darden Copelands are staring them in the face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Tennessee\u2019s Seventh Congressional District by 22 points. Last night, in a special election to represent the district, the Republican Matt Van Epps won by only nine points, defeating State Representative Aftyn Behn, a Democrat. Trump celebrated the outcome on Truth Social as a \u201cBIG Congressional WIN,\u201d but<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35937,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4668,19623,8273,312],"class_list":{"0":"post-35936","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-election","9":"tag-parties","10":"tag-tennessee","11":"tag-warning"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}