This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 16 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Aftyn Behn, who is a Tennessee state representative. You might know her nationally because she ran for the House seat in the Nashville area, which ... Donald Trump won in the 2024 election by about 22 points, but Aftyn only lost by nine.

So, a big margin there, it was a big over-performance, and a sign both that Trump is unpopular, but also a sign, I think, that Democrats are finding candidates people are connecting with. So welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Aftyn Behn: Excited to be here.

Bacon: So, I guess I’ll start with that—OK, so you had this 22, and then you had nine. So talk about why you think the margin was smaller. That probably has something to do with you, and something to do with the national discourse. So talk about what you think happened there.

Behn: Just some background for your audience: Nashville had a consolidated Democratic district until after our redistricting cycle in 2020, and they cut up Nashville into three Republican districts. And in fact, Representative Mark Green, who represented the district prior to resigning, told the supermajority in Tennessee, “Do not do this. It will backfire.” Well, this election, the backfire happened.

And so it includes some of the highest turnout precincts in Nashville, which are historically Black communities, goes all the way up to the Kentucky border and then down to the Alabama border. And this race was competitive for a confluence of factors.

One, the inability for a Republican trifecta in Washington to deliver for working families in the state. And the fact that the Republican supermajority has not ended our grocery tax, has not made life more affordable, really created this race as a referendum on affordability.

Two, I’m an organizer, and so I’ve been organizing in Kentucky and Tennessee for the past decade. And I have been part of a movement to rebuild the Democratic infrastructure in a lot of these rural areas as well. And so we leveraged that Democratic infrastructure to bolster our numbers.

Three is that I used to work for national Indivisible, and so I understood the inherent nationalization of special elections like this, and I knew that if I was the candidate, the spotlight would be on Tennessee for something good. And that we could leverage the national spotlight for fundraising to localized margins.

Bacon: So let’s talk about why Donald Trump is not as popular ... you mentioned affordability a little bit, but just to drill down, why Tennessee is red ... I live in Louisville, so I know that all these “red states” include plenty of Democrats, plenty of independents, and plenty of thoughtful people who don’t necessarily love to see ICE kill people.

So talk about what specifically you heard from people about why they did not like what’s [been] happening over the last year.

Behn: One anecdote in particular really stands out because it was incredibly jarring. I was standing outside the highest-turnout precinct in Clarksville, Montgomery County—which, for your listeners, Montgomery County is at the foothills of Fort Campbell, a military base. And there was a Republican-looking couple that was walking into the polling precinct on Election Day during the general; she was nine months pregnant. She had a massive cross necklace.

And I was trying to convince them to flip their vote for me and not vote for the Republican. And as I was inquiring what their issue—their choice issue was ... he turned to me and said flatly, “We don’t want our tax dollars going to Israel.” And then I said, “Well, I don’t either, and my [opponent] has taken money from AIPAC.” And so he said, “All right, you’ve got our vote.”

So this election was really striking because ... Israel, the conflict over there, how people felt about it, played a role. Obviously, affordability. And the Epstein files. My first commercial—obviously the arc of that changed dramatically once Trump [was] kind of jockeying for the Epstein files to be released, although not in their entirety. But it did play a central role.

And I think what it really surfaced for Tennessee voters was that there are two systems of justice in this country: one for the wealthy and well-connected, and one for the rest of us. And so the Epstein files was really the container to talk about that.

Bacon: So your race happened during this government shutdown over health care too, so I assume—how did that play out?

Behn: It was heartbreaking. And I think it’s very easy in a consolidated majority district—which is not ... this one was Republican, I was running as a Democrat. But just another........

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