Aftyn Behn Overperformed Because She's A Leftist
WelcomePAC celebrates a Republican win, not realizing centrists have done worse.
Last week, Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, which Trump won by 22 points last year, featured a closer-than-expected contest between Republican Mike Van Epps and Democrat Aftyn Behn, a DSA-associated state representative. Elections in dark red Republican districts rarely draw national attention, as the victor is all but guaranteed. But this one was different. At the final tally, Van Epps defeated Behn by just under 9 points. Rarely is that considered a close election, but in a district the Republican congressional candidate won by 21 points last fall, a 12-point swing to the left (and yes, I mean left, not just to the Democrats) is a seismic shift. While the GOP has tried to downplay the results as the consequence of an off-year special election, turnout was identical to the 2022 midterm, in which Republican Mark Green won by 22 points. A single-digit race in deep red Tennessee would be impressive enough on its own. But what elevates the Tennessee 7th race from impressive to outstanding is how hard the Republicans had to work to only win by single digits. With Behn picking up steam in the final weeks (an Emerson poll had her within 2 points), Van Epps called in Speaker Mike Johnson to campaign for him, who (literally) called in Trump.
At the same time, Republican money flooded into Nashville. Van Epps outspent Behn by about $1 million, or about 38% of her total campaign expenditure. Though I typically hate moral victories, the results here are too impressive to ignore. A progressive challenger was so popular with red state voters that the GOP machine had to go all in to save one of their “safest” districts. With the midterms less than a year away, it should have been a celebratory night for anyone who wants Republicans removed from power. But some folks had other priorities.
As soon as the race was called, WelcomePAC’s cofounder,
, published this prewritten article claiming exactly what we expect from a billionaire’s lackey: Behn lost because she’s too far left, elections can’t be won on activating the base alone, and a more centrist candidate would have done better. Needless to say, publishing a complete post-mortem before the votes are counted is pure hackery. If Liam wanted to look like he was trying, he would have published the article the next morning.But to be fair, Kerr is probably under a lot of pressure from his billionaire donors: the four largest WelcomePAC financiers are the Walton family, billionaire and Epstein friend Reid Hoffman, Joe Manchin’s SuperPAC, and members of the conservative media mogul empire, the Murdoch family. The wealthy have poured a lot of money into these knockoff centrist think tanks over the last year, with little to show for it. Only a third of Americans like the centrist Democrats, establishment leadership is facing an internal revolt, and WelcomePAC’s favorite politician is so unpopular that he resigned rather than suffer an embarrassing re-election loss. Things have gotten so bad for Kerr that he’s had to start faking polls to make Medicare for All look unpopular and, as he’s shown us, pre-write electoral “analysis” that confirms his priors and keeps his donors from noticing he’s failing to deliver what they pay him for. As I’ve said before, if you’re confident in your position, you don’t have to lie. The truth will validate you. As we’ll soon see, WelcomePAC and other mouthpieces for capitalist interests try to hide the truth at every opportunity.
The key point Chuck Schumer’s mouthpieces rely on is that the average margin of gain for Democrats in special elections this year put the race within striking distance. As Kerr puts it, “With Democrats in 2025 special elections running an average of more than 20 points ahead of presidential margin, the seat was squarely in play.” That’s a weak argument in favor of centrism, because the Democratic presidential candidate was a centrist. In fact, Kerr wrote a weekly “Kamala Is Moderate” dispatch celebrating Kamala’s glorious moderation during the 2024 election. I’m not sure what’s in the water at WelcomePAC HQ, but Behn outperforming Harris by 13 points is not an argument centrists should be making if they want to curry favor. The centrists are also being conveniently selective. There have only been seven special elections this year, with the average gain inflated by large Democratic margins in Virginia’s 11th and Arizona’s 7th, two safe blue seats were voters sat out in 2024 due to Harris’ underwhelming economic agenda and support for genocide. A more accurate metric to gauge voter’s sentiments is to look at every special election this year. Of the 60 state, congressional, and national elections in 2025, voters have shifted 13 points toward Democrats since 2024 — Behn’s exact over performance of Kamala Harris.
As if we needed more proof Kerr has no interest in finding the best path to Democratic victory, at no point does he address the large discrepancies in campaign spending. Of all the red state special elections this year, Aftyn Behn spent the least (except in Arizona’s 7th district, where both parties held back their cash on a guaranteed blue seat). Unlike her peers in Florida’s 6th and 1st districts, Behn was outspent by a million dollars. Comparatively, in Florida’s 1st district, which saw the largest swing towards Democrats from the 2024 presidential, the Democrats spent $4.2 million and lost by 14 points. In Florida’s 1st, they outspent the Republicans by 300% and still lost by 14 points. Cutting through the nonsense, we can see that Aftyn Behn’s better performance with less money is a model for Democrats to emulate, not one to be dismissed because it threatens Reid Hoffman’s tax rate.
Not only did Aftyn Behn do extremely well given her circumstances, but had a centrist run in her place, they would have done worse. This would have been extremely obvious to Kerr if he studied the circumstances and wrote the post-election analysis after the election. Instead, he wrote it beforehand, exposing himself to some embarrassing argumentative flaws.
I’m always hesitant to compare different elections in different states during different political environments because of all the…well, differences. I believe running compelling, earnest candidates that fit a district’s vibe to be a better strategy than meticulous poll testing and consultant-brained election mapping (which are more often than not extremely flawed and biased) until you find the statically optimal equation and order a ready-to-run cardboard candidate from McKinsey. That said, if the Abundocrats insist on using this method, then in the words of Luthen Rael:
To make his argument, Kerr travels all the way back to 2018. He claims Tennessee’s 7th district was “deadlocked” in a Senate race, and points out that’s the year centrist Democrat Conor Lamb flipped a R+22 Pennsylvania seat in 2018. Now, Tennessee’s 7th was redistricted in 2022. But if Kerr believes past elections in Pennsylvania and TN7’s ancestral form is a proper analogy to use in 2025, then I will oblige him. I’m unsure if he knows it, but Liam Kerr got his wish for Tennessee’s 7th in 2018, when Democrat Justin Kanew ran against Republican Mark Green on the exact message WelcomePAC promotes.
“What I’m trying to get across is yes, I’m running as a Democrat, but that the “D” stands for decency more than anything else, and that we can find common ground with moderates on both sides.” - Justin Kanew, October 17th, 2017
So, how did this moderate campaign perform? Did the message that Liam Kerr is paid a high salary to promote overpower the far-right message of Mark Green? As you can probably tell from never having heard the name “Justin Kanew” in your life, it was an embarrassing failure. Kanew lost by 35 points in the same year Kerr described the district as “deadlocked.” As a reminder, DSA-linked Aftyn Behn came within 9 points of victory. In 2020, Kerr’s moderate philosophy got another chance. Kiran Sreepada ran against Green, looking to court “independents and moderate Republicans.” He lost by 43 points, an 8-point underperformance compared to Joe Biden. Once Tennessee Democrats started nominating progressives, they did much better. In 2022, a Working Families Party-endorsed labor activist closed the gap but still lost by 22. I don’t put too much stock in the 2024 election, as the Democrat was the former Nashville mayor who resigned after pleading guilty to a felony as result of her sex scandal. The Republican also had his own sex scandal, which led him to withdraw from the race, then re-enter it once Trump asked him to. Take that as you will.
While Kerr and other paid-activists try to compare apples to oranges to make their point (and still fail to), I find it’s better to compare apples to apples. In all three congressional elections held since Tennessee's 7th was slightly redrawn in 2022, the Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index marked it a R+10 district. To date, the only candidate to outperform that metric was
, the furthest left candidate the district has been offered.
WelcomePAC’s deceitfulness and complete lack of ethics will be no surprise to frequent readers of JoeWrote. Since the 2024 presidential election, we’ve debunked this tired “centrism will win this time” argument over and over from groups and pundits with financial and egotistical interests in preventing the Democratic Party from returning to its New Deal character, never mind becoming a 21st-century workers’ party. Liam Kerr’s latest entry into the dog-shit argument contest shows why the Murdochs are more likely to replace him with ChatGPT than he is to convince anyone who isn’t already paying him. While the content is crusty, I find his article word vomit to hold a valuable lesson for those of us who seek a less-fascist United States. There is no length the centrist establishment and their billionaire funders won’t go to ensure progressive politics, never mind socialism, never gets a foothold in the U.S., never mind actual power. A few weeks before the election, Kamala Harris visited Tennessee’s 7th district. She encouraged the crowd to “vote,” but never named nor endorsed Aftyn Behn. The same night of the election in Tennessee, DSA-endorsed candidate James Solomon defeated former Democratic governor Jim McGreevey in a landslide for mayor of Jersey City, 68%-32%. In a runoff election for a city council seat, another DSA candidate, Jake Ephros, defeated moderate Catherine Healy, 61%-39%. The left is re-surging in America, and it’s scaring Liam Kerr’s donors — as it should. To stop us, they will throw anything and everything in our way: shoddy blog articles, intra-party sabotage, collaboration with the Republicans (see how many of WelcomePAC’s donors also give to the GOP), and, inevitably, force.
The left is still very far from power, and we shouldn’t mistake electoral politics as the end-all solution to reshaping this country with progressive values. But we’re making progress. And with progress comes counter-progress: the forces of capital and hierarchy like their unearned privileges and will counterattack at every opportunity. What we’re witnessing is the early stages of a corporate backlash to rising leftism, fought with paid-shills and barely-legible blogs. It’s cheeky now. But as our movement grows, so will the institutional opposition. Stay ready. As we get better, they’ll get worse.
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In Solidarity — Joe