TN-07 Aftyn Behn This Was Supposed to be Impossible

A Bernie Sanders Democrat in Trump +22 country. I drove to Nashville to see it.

I’m writing this from Nashville the night before the election. I made the drive so I could watch this one in person. So I could bring you a view from the ground.

I’ll be out all day today talking to voters, volunteers, and staffers. Then I’ll be at the watch party as the results come in. Maybe I’ll get to talk to Aftyn Behn herself.

Win or lose, if she comes close, this changes things.

Aftyn Behn is a 36-year-old progressive Democrat running in a district Donald Trump won by 22 points. She’s from Knoxville. Working class family. Dad grew up on food stamps. She got arrested protesting a sexual predator in the Tennessee statehouse. Followed ICE around Nashville with a camera this year. Her signature legislation? Repeal the sales tax on groceries.

She’s a Bernie Sanders Democrat. Backed by AOC. Called “the AOC of Tennessee.”

And according to the latest Emerson poll, she’s closed the gap to just 2 points. Within the margin of error.

The corporate Democrats say this is impossible. Third Way put out a memo after Zohran Mamdani won in New York explaining why progressive politics can’t win outside deep blue cities. Welcome PAC released a 59-page report arguing Democrats need to “affirmatively moderate.” Their candidates went 1-9 in 2024. And they’re telling us how to win.

The whole moderate thing is absurd. Moderation of a declining nation. Economic hospice care is what gave us Trump, twice.

But here’s the good news. This is an amazing moment. We’ve been here before. And we won. Fast.

By 1929, Republicans had controlled the entire government for a decade. They spent the Roaring Twenties cutting taxes for the rich and deregulating Wall Street until they drove the economy off a cliff. And when the crash came, they had no answers. (sound familiar?)

Four years later, Democrats had the trifecta and a supermajority in the House. Two years after that — 1934 — supermajorities in both chambers. Six years. Three elections. Complete transformation.

And they didn’t do it through bipartisanshit. They delivered. For people. Social Security. Rural electrification. The TVA. The banks got taken on. The monopolies got broken up. Democrats built things that changed lives, and voters rewarded them for it.

They held Congress for most of the next 40 years.

That didn’t happen because Democrats moved to the center. It happened because they fought. Socialists pushed them, communists pushed them, and Democrats moved. FDR took on the rich and powerful. He joined with Democrats in the House and Senate to put America back to work. We built things. Central Valley Project in California. Rural electrification nationwide. National Parks. LaGuardia Airport.

The voters are ready for that again. Gallup shows positive views of capitalism at the lowest ever recorded. Among Democrats, socialism polls at 66%. A PBS/Marist poll from November shows Democrats with a 14-point lead on the generic ballot—the biggest since 2017, a year before we flipped 40 House seats.

The votes are there. We need the vision. We need action.

Look at what Mamdani built in New York. According to CBS News, 15% of Trump voters in Queens flipped to him. What did they care about? Affordability. The cost of living. Results, not ideology.

That’s the coalition waiting to be built everywhere. Tennessee is the proof.

If Behn loses by single digits tonight, that’s a win. If she loses by less than 5, that’s an earthquake. If she wins, every piece of conventional wisdom goes in the trash.

Any of those outcomes should give us the confidence to run louder, prouder, and bolder.

Here’s the choice facing our party.

One path leads through Welcome PAC and Third Way. Through 40 years of declining union membership, rising inequality, and a party that lost working people because it refused to fight for them. That path gave us Kamala’s loss. Biden’s collapse. Trump twice.

The other path leads through Tennessee’s 7th. Through candidates who know the game is rigged and are ready to unrig it.

We can take our party back. Back from Wall Street and the banksters. Back from the corporations we subsidize while they pay poverty wages. Back from the Walmarts we give handouts to in the form of food stamps for their employees. Back from 40 years of politicians who told us we had to accept less while the rich took more.

We can fix our party. And then we can fix our country.

Remember, America went from a Republican trifecta to Roosevelt’s supermajorities in six years. 2026 is next year. Then 2028. If we have the courage to be what and who we are—the party that stands against extraction, against monopolies, against a system designed to bleed working people dry—we can do it again.

Not by moderating. By transforming.

The Democratic Party I grew up hearing stories about, the one my great-granddad talked about, the one my grandfather fought to build through the labor movement, the one my other grandfather fought to build through the civil rights movement—that party can exist again.

We have to trust ourselves and our neighbors. We need to stop listening to the people who’ve been wrong for 40 years and start building something worth believing in.

Tonight Tennessee shows us what’s possible.

Come spend election day with me. I’ll be at polling places all day, then the watch party as returns come in. I’m live-streaming the whole thing here on Substack, YouTube and TikTok—the conversations, the waiting, the moment we find out.

Please, forward this email. If Aftyn wins, don’t let them call it a fluke. If she comes close, don’t let them bury it.

Please join me on the journey by subscribing and sharing, and let me know what you think in the comments.