Tennessee vote a GOP warning — damning the left isn’t enough

Tuesday is a big day for Tennessee, and for the closely divided US House of Representatives. 

Democrats have been vowing to turn red states blue, and last month’s elections gave them some hopeful signs, thanks largely to revved-up urban voters.

This week a special election in Tennessee’s 7th District, pitting GOP military veteran Matt Van Epps against far-left candidate Aftyn Behn, will show them just how far their base can take them. 

Going by conventional wisdom, this should be a walkover for Van Epps: The district leans Republican by 10 percentage points, and Van Epps’ policy positions echo those of the previous incumbent, former Rep. Mark Green, who resigned in July to launch a new business.

But redistricting in 2020 made the 7th somewhat less rural than it had been, as statehouse Republicans tried to boost the party’s chances elsewhere.

Now it’s anchored by Democrat-dominated Nashville and its suburbs, as well as the wealthy bedroom community of Franklin, one of the richest cities in America — and some recent polling shows Behn within striking distance.

That makes the race a “canary in the coal mine” for our national politics, says columnist Mark Pulliam.

It shouldn’t be. 

Behn is a former organizer for the George Soros-funded leftist “resistance” group Indivisible, and she has a propensity for saying, and doing, crazy things. 

She has, for example, expressed contempt for Nashville, which she seeks to represent. 

“I hate this city,”  Behn said in a recently resurfaced video. 

“I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music,” she railed. “I hate all the things that make Nashville apparently an ‘It city’ to the rest of the country.”

You’d think “I hate country music” would be the kiss of death all by itself. (Here in Tennessee, our views on bachelorettes and pedal taverns are more mixed.) 

But that’s just the start of Behn’s bizarre ranting.  

She’s publicly discussed her therapy sessions, and her “recurring dream” of “standing up in a cafeteria full of women . . . and saying ‘I don’t want children. I want power!’ And just screaming it at the top of my lungs.”

Well, you can see why she won the Democratic primary. 

She’s said that women who have children are supporting the “patriarchy,” and has encouraged “self-managed, at-home abortions” in states that ban the procedure. 

And a 2019 video showed her screaming and sobbing while state troopers dragged her out of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s office after she dashed in without authorization.

With views and behavior like this in a district that voted for President Donald Trump by 22 percentage points, she should be dead in the water. 

But she’s polling better than she has any right to.  And she just might win.

The reason is that Republican voters in Tennessee, as in many other comfortably red states, are complacent. 

They turn out in big numbers for presidential elections, but in special elections and local elections, they don’t bother. 

Democrats, on the other hand, are insanely angry and motivated, desperate for any kind of a win.   

Demographers like to say the future belongs to those who show up.  Elections do too.

Votes must be cast to get counted, and listless voters just stay home. 

In low-turnout elections — which special elections usually are — the side demonstrating greater emotional intensity has a better chance of winning. 

That’s definitely Democrats this time around.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee GOP apparatus has appeared as limp as its voters.

The party has done little to build a turnout operation — something Democrats here have been working very hard at — and seems to think that slamming Behn for her past outrageousness is all it will take to beat her.

This should sound familiar to New Yorkers. 

Zohran Mamdani’s socialist, antisemitic statements gave his opponents plenty of ammunition to use against him.

None of it dampened leftist voter intensity.

Not long ago it would have been unimaginable for New York City to elect a far-left Muslim mayor with open sympathy for terrorist groups after 2,976 people were killed, and thousands more injured, in Islamic terror attacks on the World Trade Center. 

But New Yorkers — at least those who turned out to vote — did just that last month.

Likewise, Tennessee might soon have a congresswoman who will make AOC look like a dignified stateswoman.  

Well, we’ll see.  Another truism about special elections is that pundits tend to treat them as more significant than they really are. 

But if Democrats do pull off a win this week, it will be a deadly warning to Republicans about the dangers of complacency.  

Either way, the scare should be a lesson ahead of next year’s midterms: Play hungry, if you want to win.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.