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Now, here’s Abby…

Washington is back from a long Thanksgiving recess, and all eyes are on central Tennessee, where tomorrow’s special election could predict which party has the upper hand headed into the midterms. The state’s 7th district, encompassing parts of Nashville and stretching west, should be a safe Republican hold—Trump won it by 22 points last year, and its House seat has been in Republican hands since the 1980s. But Democrats massively overperformed 2024 benchmarks in last month’s elections, and the 7th could be in play. One recent poll found Democrat Aftyn Behn and Republican Matt Van Epps in a statistical dead heat, and last week, Inside Elections moved the district into the “Leans Republican” column. Behn doesn’t even have to win—anything narrower than a double-digit loss for the Democrat would justifiably cause Republicans to panic.

The G.O.P. is duly worried about their already tiny House margin. According to Ad Impact, Republicans have spent $3.1 million on advertising in the race—an enormous sum for a supposedly safe district—and no fewer than 43 Republican Senators and House members have donated to support Van Epps, a West Point grad and decorated helicopter pilot. Meanwhile, Democrats have plowed $2.3 million into advertising in TN-7, suggesting that the party believes Behn has a real shot. Both Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi have written checks for her campaign. Perhaps most importantly, Behn has some serious consulting muscle behind her: Ian Russell, a D.C.C.C. fixture, has been working on her campaign since July.

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Of course, Behn is still a long shot, so I called up Russell to discuss the dynamics of tomorrow’s race. His client has faced criticism that she’s too progressive for the district—she’s been called the “A.O.C. of the South” and previously endorsed defunding the police—and as a Millennial, her digital record has come back to bite her. (“I hate [Nashville],” she said in a 2020 podcast. “I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music.”) But Russell argued that this election is about mobilization more than persuasion, and he already sees it as a win for the Democratic Party, regardless of the outcome. As always, this conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Abby Livingston: The political world looked a little different back in July, when you started working for Aftyn Behn. Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill had just passed, and Republicans were taking victory laps. What made you think that a Trump +22 district was worth your time?

Ian Russell: The BBB was going to lead to a backlash because of what was in it, and we needed a candidate who could articulate that and rally voters to turn out in opposition. When Mark Green announced his retirement, he said that he would stick around until the passage of the reconciliation bill, so that gave us the theme of the campaign from the beginning—that at a time when everything was becoming more expensive, Republicans had failed to lower costs. They were then going to turn around and cut taxes for billionaires while cutting healthcare for folks in Tennessee. Aftyn was the perfect candidate for that narrative.

There has been commentary that maybe she wasn’t the best candidate in a general election, that a more moderate candidate in the mold of Mikie Sherrill, Abigail Spanberger, or Elissa Slotkin might have been better.

Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger did great jobs in their races. Marcy Kaptur, Jared Golden, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez did great jobs in their races. This is about finding the candidate who’s best suited for the moment from that community. What Aftyn is able to put together is a coalition of the pissed off—people who are not happy with what they’re getting out of Washington, frustrated with the direction that the country is going, frustrated primarily with what they’re seeing every time they go to the grocery store or look at their health insurance premiums.

You also need somebody with the energy and roots in the community. You can’t just parachute in a candidate that a political consultant built in the lab and expect that person to excite the community where they’re running to get the turnout you need. The path to victory in a special election is far more focused on motivation and mobilization than it is on persuasion, because your biggest obstacle is actually the couch, not necessarily your opponent.

Behn does have the curse of the Millennial who was politically conscious in 2020. She went on a podcast and criticized the city of Nashville. She’s been in favor of Defund the Police. How much is her record impairing the campaign?

I would argue that most folks in Nashville would agree with what she said. Most would agree that while they welcome tourists, and they love the fact that their city is a nationally known place for people to come, that some tourists behave in a way that is hard on the actual residents of the city. So I think even Republicans who live there would tell you privately they probably agree with those sentiments.

At what point in the campaign did you look up and say, this thing’s looking like it’s for real?

We always had this theory of what it would take. We knew that for this to be real, we were going to need the right kind of national attention at the right time. And that didn’t start to come until the last couple of weeks. We were getting swamped on the airwaves, and [now] we’re almost at parity. I would have preferred, obviously, to have parity the entire time.

National Republicans realized early on that they had a problem on their hands and had to scramble money to Van Epps using coordinated spending. You know how significant that is, when the national party is going to use its dollars to prop up a candidate because of his lackluster fundraising. That showed us they saw that it was real, and that helped our base and our national supporters see that the race was real, so it all clicked into place right on time.

Kamala Harris came to the district and campaigned. Does she help nationalize this race? Is that a good thing?

We’re trying to win a special election in a deeply Republican district in a place where Harris lost heavily to Donald Trump last year. The campaign has been grateful for any help to remind voters of the importance of turning out on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when nobody is thinking about voting.

Your campaign has mentioned Jeffrey Epstein in ads. Has that worked for Behn? And do you think we’ll continue to see the Epstein scandal resonate through the midterms?

I don’t know if it’ll be on TV in the midterms—this may be the one and only race that uses the Epstein files on television. We’ll see. The Trump administration is going to drag its feet and obfuscate and do everything they can to fight the full release of the Epstein files, even though Congress has now called for that. So this very well could reach on.

But here’s how the Epstein files played. There were two 80/20 issues in our polling in this district: continuing the A.C.A. subsidies, and releasing the Epstein files. So our challenge was to figure out how to tie these two issues together, but as we sat down and talked about it with Aftyn, the answer was actually quite simple: The Epstein files are an example of the wealthy and powerful getting treated differently than everyday people. The message that it’s sent to everyday Americans is: There is a club and you’re not in it. And whether it’s protecting perpetrators from accountability or providing tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations, [that’s] a legacy of this administration. Aftyn’s been campaigning on behalf of the folks who are not in that club.

How did you know your opponents were getting nervous?

A special election in an R district is, to some degree, a small power trying to bring a larger power into a war. In order for us to get within range of victory, we needed to lay the groundwork to bring greater power into the conflict. That certainly happened. We also awakened the other side. The national Republican organizations came in first. I don’t know what they’re seeing in their data—they haven’t released any polling—but they’re behaving as though they’re seeing the same thing in their polling that we’ve seen in ours.

You have J.D. Vance making a visit to the district, coincidentally to celebrate early Thanksgiving with troops on the base in Clarksville. You’ve got Trump tweeting about this race. You’ve got the right-wing ecosystem going into overdrive. It feels like Aftyn’s face is on Fox News every 10 minutes.

In other words, they are behaving as though this race is what the polling showed it to be, which is very close. And I think that’s already a win for national Democrats as we seek to take back the majority next year. What a damning indictment of this administration’s failures to bring down costs for the American people, to even see a district like this in play.

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