No Left On Red

Lessons from the loss in Tennessee

Special elections are a chance to try new models, and re-learn old lessons.

That is surely the case in Tennessee’s 7th congressional district, where Democratic Socialist state legislator Aftyn Behn just lost a high-profile race in a district Donald Trump won by 22 points.

Behn focused on affordability, but Republicans focused on her past calls for abolishing the police and video of her stating “I am a radical.” Media amplified her leftist background - and even on the friendly confines of MSNBC Behn did not walk back or condemn her past approval of burning down a police station.

With Democrats in 2025 special elections running an average of more than 20 points ahead of presidential margin, the seat was squarely in play. As recently as 2018, this district was deadlocked in the ticket-topping Senate race, and national Democrats put millions into making sure it was competitive.

Progressive Behn endorsers like AOC¹ and far-left groups like DSA, Justice Democrats, and Our Revolution had never flipped a seat from red-to-blue. Breaking that streak in such a red seat would have demonstrated new possibilities.

As

Lauren Egan

wrote in The Bulwark, “her success (or failure) is going to be closely studied for which voters are activated and why.”

Turn Out For What

Few strategic debates roil the Democratic Party like polarizing an election by appealing to an ideological base. And Egan shows that is explicitly what Democrats are pitching here:

Democrats in the state insist that a base-turnout strategy could work. In my conversation with (DNC Chair Ken) 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.

In the past twenty years, Democrats have flipped four seats of R+15 or more. All of the Democrats who flipped these seats held at least some conservative positions, and explicitly sought to persuade voters instead of just firing up the base.

In 2022, Alaska’s ranked choice voting system shows that 29% of voters whose first choice was Republican Nick Begich ranked Blue Dog Democrat Mary Peltola second over the other GOP candidate.

In 2018, an R+22 seat in Pennsylvania flipped after headlines like this one:

Since then, it has become widely accepted that Democrats have gone from being the party of sporadic voters to the party of high-propensity voters.

Persuasion Matters

Still, our hypothesis is that the “instead of persuading voters just go left to fire up the base” strategy does not work. As noted in Deciding to Win, the effects of changes in how people vote (persuasion) and the effects of changes in which people vote (turnout) tend to point in the same direction—but the effects of persuasion are usually larger.

But hey, we’re always learning. And this live case study holds more lessons than just these basics:

1. reminding us Democrats can’t just “focus on affordability” because elections occur in a dynamic environment where Republicans & media can inject other issues

2. being on tape stating radical positions will end up in TV attack ads from Republicans during every NFL commercial … so if you think that past radical positions aren’t a problem, take it up with whoever does the GOP ad testing

3. affirming persuasion is essential to winning in red districts and, ya know, democracy

One additional lesson to note is considering the negative externalities of campaigns like this. Back to Egan:

Local Democratic officials whom I spoke with last week are increasingly bullish about a good showing in the election. But in typical party fashion, they also said that they worry some of their colleagues in the state will take the wrong lesson from a close race—that the best way to regain power is to amp up their economic populism to overcome their progressive cultural views, rather than running old-school Blue Dog Democrats in the mold of former Rep. Cooper.

“If Aftyn comes within 10 points, I absolutely think most Democrats in Tennessee will see this as ammunition to run further to the left in all races,” said a local elected official.

Like Republicans in Massachusetts, red state Democrats can get pulled into a reinforcing cycle of irrelevance and extremism. When the social media clicks and national dollars move on from Nashville next week, the remnants of a left-wing campaign will remain.

And on that front, learning from these case studies has its limits. We will never really win the argument within the party until we out-organize them.

Don’t Wanna Know

Besides Mary Peltola and Conor Lamb, the only other two Democrats to flip seats at least 15 points Republican-leaning were from 2008. Progressives did a good job looking the other way for Lamb and Peltola’s conservative stances on issues like climate, energy and guns so we are putting the messages from those Democrats behind a paywall to make it easier to look away.