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A lot of people have BIG feelings about this race… I’ve heard this race discussed in the nail salon, on podcasts I didn’t even know existed, DUTCH TV???, and Trump even brought me up AGAIN yesterday. [ [link removed] ] (Sir!!! Take the win and keep my name out of your mouth!!!)
I waited a bit before writing this because 1) I’ve been in National Park Service Fall Bear Week hibernation mode… avoiding people, places, and pings (but not pugs!). 2) I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, now that I’m not enduring the most traumatic and stressful experience of my life, reading the comments, including my personal favorite “Aftyn Behn is the Dollar Store AOC”. Honestly, hilarious.
So, as a holiday send-off, here’s my post-mortem of the race that you can print off and head into the holidays with to compare notes with your red-pilled family members who are still coping with the fact that even though we lost, our election night party was one of dancing, singing, and old-school merriment.
Let us dig in.
This outcome was a culminating moment in a long arc of organizing
We are beyond the political era when you can put a few giant yard signs at key intersections and call it a congressional campaign. Anyone who knows Kate, me, and the rest of our team knows that we work our asses off. We are always scheming, elevating, and bringing in experts who provide the guidance we need to succeed. You can’t complain about the result if you didn’t outwork us.
But it’s also important to note that this race’s single-digit margin was years in the making. Back in 2018, I launched weekly canvases in Williamson County with Indivisible TN-7, while Senator Charlane Oliver—our political director—was building what would become the Equity Alliance’s direct voter contact operation. Our coalition of labor, grassroots, and political groups has been laser-focused on building organizing capacity and expanding the electorate, knowing that the breadth of direct voter contact executed in this race didn’t happen overnight. We also had incredible candidates run who continued to move the needle, including Justin Kanew, Odessa Kelly, and Megan Barry.
Our campaign knocked over 70,000 doors in two months, and our friends on the other side of the compliance wall knocked more than 100,000 throughout the entire cycle. Additionally, I would be remiss not to mention the county parties who, over the years, rebuilt their apparatus, recruited volunteers, and helped us achieve those metrics with the sustained, often thankless work that rarely gets recognition.
This jaw-dropping scale doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t happen overnight. We increased Democratic margins in every county in the district by turning out Democratic-leaning voters who don’t always vote and new voters, including droves of young people voting for the first time.
I think my biggest upset in this campaign, besides Fox News saying my mom didn’t raise me right, was that all of us OUT-HUSTLED our opposition, who were cosplaying a field program throughout the entire campaign, and we still lost by 9 points. (My haters will say that’s due to candidate quality, which I rebuke below.)
The good news? Our hard work is showing its muscle. The bad news? We need this level of engagement and voter contact year-round to make any dent in this state for the foreseeable future. The pendulum will swing, but not on its own, nor without grueling work.
The “Moderate vs. Progressive” debate is exasperating
First, on the campaign trail, I heard about the elusive “moderate voter.” Like, what does that even mean?!?! Are they in the room with us?!?!?! I’ve knocked thousands of doors in this state and used to work for a group that perennially polled rural and small-town voters in battleground states. Voters aren’t “moderate”, they are PLURALISTIC. Most voters have complicated feelings about immigration and abortion; most rural voters believe that we need to reduce corruption in Washington, DC, and that there should be gender parity for work.
What distorts this reality isn’t voters themselves, but the billions of dollars spent trying to flatten those complexities into something easier to manipulate. Money pushes and pulls at people’s instincts. Our campaign chose a different approach. We trusted voters with the truth, met them where they were, and talked about what actually shapes their lives—costs and accountability, and whether the system is rigged against them.
That choice didn’t just turn out Democrats who always vote. Per our analysis, we also flipped Trump and Mark Green voters. What a time to be ALIVE. This race reminded me that, despite what the WelcomePAC paid pundits say on Twitter, politics isn’t about chasing an imaginary center; it’s about speaking directly to voters’ lived realities, of which we did. Life is unaffordable, and the bad guys are the billionaire boys’ club and greedy CEOs. Unfortunately, MAGA Inc. outspent our side 3:1, and, alas, the remedy is big money out of politics, not appealing to the mythical center. As Jim Hightower once said, “the only thing in the middle of the road is yellow lines and dead armadillos.”
Second, please do not embrace the level of delusion that with the right candidate, thousands of MAGA or Republican voters would *poof* magically convert to Democrats. That is not the state we live in, nor the priority of this race, which was mobilization. It doesn’t matter who the Democratic nominee was, as Holly McCall rightfully pointed out in her recent editorial; [ [link removed] ] those of us in the Legislature have very similar voting records, and the cut-and-paste playbook exploited by the RNC would have been weaponized against any of us. Additionally, each of the Democratic nominees, including myself, had flaws. I highlighted some of these in a pre-primary Substack [ [link removed] ].
I want to say that voters don’t prefer a candidate grown in a petri dish. Still, my opponent beat me by 9 points, so I’m just going to say, if you want normal people running for office who haven’t spent their lives self-censoring and being weird at parties, then we’ll have to accept some pecadillos along the way.
Our theory of change was affirmed again and again
I didn’t expect to be running for Congress this year, but when we pulled the voter universe for the TN-7 primary, a majority of the votes were women. I texted Megan and Odessa and said that if they weren’t going to run, we needed a woman in the race. Coupled with the passage of the Big, Ugly Bill and my friends struggling as our country fell apart, I decided to channel my rage into running for this seat.
From the beginning, our theory of change was as follows:
A candidate with a proven track record of turning out their own voters (I had the highest total turnout of any Democratic state rep last cycle) can excite the base and expand the electorate
Long-term issue ownership—people associate my name with ending the grocery tax because we’ve been organizing around it for the past few years in collaboration with SEIU and Tennessee for All
An understanding of national grassroots dynamics. Having worked for National Indivisible, I knew exactly what would happen if I were the nominee: postcards, phone banks, volunteers pouring in from across the country.
And the results reflected that reality.
This campaign overperformed by thirteen points in a !!!! high-turnout election!!!!!, with millions of dollars spent against us. Achieving that level of participation in a Tuesday-after-Thanksgiving special election is extraordinary, or so our senior advisors have told us. In some places, the gains were incremental; in others, they were seismic, like in Davidson County.
Online personalities say, “A loss is a loss.” I hate to break it to you, buttercups, but we lose more than we win in Tennessee. Our congressional maps are engineered to ensure that not even strong, well-funded, deep community-rooted campaigns can compete on a level playing field. And yet—despite those constraints, despite millions of dollars spent to stop us, despite the full weight of the national Republican apparatus descending like a Cloverfield sequel—we forced a real contest, expanded the electorate, and proved that these districts are only as “safe” as our willingness to challenge them.
HOWEVER, I’m not going to sugarcoat it…losing sucks. People will lose their health insurance. Premiums will skyrocket. Wayne County Hospital will likely close its doors. (And yes, Rep. Kip Capley will probably blame Joe Biden in an op-ed that defies both logic and grammar.)
But, for a brief moment, under the weight of this country’s darkness, Americans felt inspired. They held their breath as our electoral patron saint Steve Kornacki yelled “DAVIDSON COUNTY SAID HOLD MY BEER” and “GOOD GOD MISS MOLLY MONTGOMERY COUNTY EARLY VOTE!!!!”* and knew that Tennessee put up a fight. It’s a moment we should all be proud of because we showed what was possible. We made millions feel possibility in their bones.
And that moment, let’s hold it forever, close to our hearts; let’s cultivate it, nurture it, and plant it, because this is just the beginning.
Rest up,
Aftyn
*This is my theatrical interpretation of Kornacki’s performance on the evening of December 2nd, 2025.

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