Last night, MVP partners helped Democrats make double-digit gains in a special U.S. House election for Tennessee’s Seventh District — coming within just nine points of victory in a deep-red district the GOP won by twenty-one points in 2024.
Here’s what to know:
What happened?
- TN state rep and community organizer Aftyn Behn (D) came within nine points of defeating Matt Van Epps (R), in this deep-red district held by the GOP since the 1980s.
- With 99% of the vote counted, the Republican won by 8.9% — compared to a 21% win margin by the previous GOP candidate in 2024.
- Notably, all fourteen counties in the district shifted to the left compared to the 2024 presidential election, by between 6.9 and 20%.
How were MVP partners involved?
Several of MVP’s year-round organizing partners worked on the race, including TIRRC Votes, Tennessee Rise, The Equity Alliance Fund, Action TN, and Civic TN (which did strictly nonpartisan election protection and voter education).
Screenshot: The Equity Alliance Fund
Despite a tight timeline and limited resources, partners ran their largest-ever coordinated campaign for a federal race, knocking on 106,000 doors — reportedly thousands more doors than the Democratic candidate campaign itself.
And, they made a clear impact on closing the overall gap in the two counties they primarily targeted: Davidson, a deep-blue county which swung 20% to the left (the largest swing in the district), and Montgomery, a red county with a growing, younger, and large military population, which swung 10% to the left.
MVP is proud to have played a small role in this effort: Thanks to donors’ generosity, we were able to fund two key partners’ work on the race: TIRRC Votes and Tennessee Rise.
Photo: TIRRC Votes, October 2025 immigrant rights rally
Why does this story matter?
1. Flipping the House in 2026
This race caps off a year of dramatic Democratic overperformance relative to 2024 — 13.1% across sixty races. If we can keep up this kind of momentum next year, it would not only overrun the GOP’s fragile 220-214 U.S. House majority and flip the chamber for Democrats — it could net Democrats as many as forty seats.
2. Building the Power to Win Long-Term
Unlike candidate campaigns and TV ads, which all vanish when the election is over, MVP’s Tennessee partner organizations are just getting started.
Groups like TIRRC Votes, The Equity Alliance Fund, and others are on the ground year-round, organizing their communities, pushing for policy progress, and doing the hard work necessary to beat back autocracy and plant seeds for a democracy that can actually deliver for all people.
For our Tennessee partners, this race wasn’t the endgame — it was a practice run, giving them the chance to build muscle, test strategies, strengthen voter engagement, and learn how to run and implement campaigns in competitive parts of the district.
In the long run, Democrats and progressives cannot win durable political power without winning the South — and we can’t win the South unless we invest in year-round organizing from the ground up, not just in big election years but every year.
What now?
Now we get ready to swing for the fences and win everything we can in 2026!
As one anonymous House Republican put it last night, the Tennessee election “is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle.”
MVP would love nothing more than to make this rep’s words a reality — but to do that, we need to scale up year-round organizing everywhere, every year.
And that, in a nutshell, is our plan for 2026: Fund community organizing online and offline in every key state and district, push for policy progress at every level, foil Trump’s autocratic schemes at every turn — and then win the House, Senate, and down-ballot in November.
The key, of course, is early money. If you’d like to help organizers hit the ground running, you can contribute here.
