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Hi, y’all. Welcome back to The Opposition. Democrats have their eye on a special election in a ruby red Southern state as their next opportunity to demonstrate that they’ve got momentum going into the midterm elections. It’s a long-shot race, but there’s clear evidence that the Republicans are rattled by what they’re seeing on the ground. And since the district is in my backyard, I just had to talk to you about it.
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–Lauren
Why Dems Are Pouring Money Into the Tennessee 7th
Party’s high hopes in special election leave Republicans rattled.
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IT’S BEEN A GOOD MONTH for the Democratic party. Double-digit wins in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, fractures within the Republican coalition over releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files, and polls showing Donald Trump’s approval rating at its lowest since he returned to office. All of it has party leaders feeling like the pendulum is finally swinging in their direction. It has them dreaming of previously unimaginable prospects too—like a takeover of a congressional seat in a deep red enclave.
Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, which runs from Kentucky to Alabama and cuts through Nashville, is holding a special election on December 2 to replace former Republican Rep. Mark Green. Just a few years ago, parts of the 7th district made up the state’s Nashville-based congressional seat represented by Jim Cooper, a moderate Blue Dog Democrat. But following the 2020 census, Tennessee Republicans broke up the safe blue seat into three districts.
The 7th is now reliably Republican; Trump carried it by 22 percentage points in 2024 and Green won his last two races by a similar margin. It includes part of Williamson County—one of the wealthiest counties in the country. The Fort Campbell military base also falls within the district, along with a vast swath of rural farmland. Perhaps most tantalizing for Democrats: a number of MAGA firebrands live in or near the district, like conservative sports radio personality Clay Travis, YouTuber Brett Cooper, and right-wing podcaster Candace Owens. Imagine, as an example, the psychic shock of a Republican emerging victorious in the movie star enclave of Beverly Hills.
In short, TN-7 is not exactly the place where the two political parties tend to fight it out, let alone spend meaningful sums of money. Yet that’s exactly what is happening in this special election.
Millions of dollars have poured into middle Tennessee in an attempt to tip the balance between Democrat Aftyn Behn, a progressive organizer and state representative, and Republican Matt Van Epps, the former Tennessee General Services commissioner.
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been taking the temperature of politicians in the area, as I live just a mile outside the district. And while it’s notable how much more bullish Democrats have gotten about their prospects, most party officials I spoke with (both in Tennessee and at national party organizations) think that Van Epps will ultimately win. It’s simple math. While Democrats tend to overperform in special elections and a Trump backlash is clearly brewing, a 22-point deficit is just a lot to overcome.
In private, Democratic officials tell me that they are hoping to see a single-digit loss. They believe even that would be enough to send a message that the political winds are at their backs, that Trump’s agenda is politically toxic, and that Democrats can seriously compete in red parts of the country that just a few weeks ago felt out of reach.
“We believe that any overperformance is a significant victory in a district like this,” Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin told me. Martin recently visited Nashville to campaign for Behn. “This district is in play for us, and . . . there’s an opportunity for us to do really well.”
But beyond the horse race intrigue, the race may provide real insight into our national politics for another reason. Behn is running a campaign designed to turn out Democrats more than to make crosscurrent appeals to Republicans. That may work in a special election. But officials here think that such an approach would doom her in a regular election cycle, when Republican voters are more clued in and willing to show up. If Democrats want to be anything other than the party of highly educated people who show up in special elections, then they have to figure out how to win over more moderate and conservative voters.
It’s a question Democrats are confronting particularly in the South, where the party is facing two massive challenges: a Supreme Court decision that could dismantle the Voting Rights Act and allow southern states to redistrict as many as nineteen Dems out of office, and a 2030 census that is expected to grant the South a historic number of House seats.
With that region of the country gaining additional importance, and with the composition of congressional seats potentially changing in dramatic ways (with safe Democratic districts broken up and some GOP-held seats becoming slightly more competitive) it is imperative for Democrats to find a formula that works. Behn may benefit from running in a special election—in which her party has routinely overperformed—but her success (or failure) is going to be closely studied for which voters are activated and why.
“Republicans will come to regret this,” said Rachel Campbell, chair of the state Democratic party, speaking about the state GOP’s decision to break the once-safe Democratic seat of Nashville into three districts. “[Behn has] obviously got the GOP scared to death. They’re dumping millions of dollars into this race. And that was unthinkable even just last year, for the Republicans to be putting any money into what they believed was a foregone conclusion for them.”
Democrats in the state insist that a base-turnout strategy could work. In my conversation with Martin, he stated plainly that the race was “not about persuading voters, it’s about turning them out.” And at a canvass launch I attended last week, organizers for the Behn campaign told volunteers that they would be knocking only on the doors of Democratic voters and likely wouldn’t encounter any Republicans.