In Tennessee, another test of the ongoing fragmentation of the Trump coalition is playing out in a December 2 special election for the U.S. House. After bad losses for Republicans across the country over the last month, a seat that Donald Trump won last year by 22 points is at enough risk that conservative groups have thrown $3.3 million at the race in the final stretch.
The seat was vacated in July by Rep. Mark Green, who opted to take a private-sector job. Republican Mark Van Epps, a member of Gov. Bill Lee’s administration, is facing Democratic state Rep. Aftyn Behn. It was designed as a gerrymandered red seat, combining a slice of blue-dot Nashville with a large swath of conservative outlying areas. But the possibility of a monumental upset has brought DNC chair Ken Martin and 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris to the district, earned Behn cable news appearances, and raised a ton of anticipation. When I talked to Behn last Thursday night, she had to briefly excuse herself to take a call from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).
Behn, 35, has a unique story to tell in the race, rooted in her work in the state legislature. Specifically, in the midst of an affordability crisis, her main legislative work product in the last year was a bill that was seemingly written by a scriptwriter to show her interest in lowering prices for everyday families, and opposition Republicans’ rejection of that effort in favor of continued corporate tax breaks. The contrast may just earn Behn a ticket to Washington in what would be a signal that conservative economics are wholly unsuited to the political moment.
TENNESSEE HAS SPENT THE PAST 15 YEARS with Republicans in charge of every level of state government. The GOP paid back their corporate campaign contributors with wholesale tax breaks. Last year, Gov. Lee signed a major reduction in the corporate franchise tax, which included a $1.5 billion “rebate” to corporations, along with an annual $400 million cut. This followed on a separate corporate tax cut the year before. What individual corporations would receive was obscured: Only ranges below and above $10,000 were revealed. (FedEx, a Tennessee company, had 13 subsidiaries that received “over $10,000,” according to a state disclosure that was taken down after 30 days last year.)
This is par for the course in Tennessee, where the extent of the corporate tax giveaways is hidden as much as possible. Corporate incentive deals like tax abatements are hidden, and even when the state Department of Revenue releases data on corporate taxes, it hides the names of the companies involved, by law.
Legislative Democrats made a data request and published some wild statistics in January. From 2019 to 2022, 40 percent of all companies only paid the minimum $100 franchise tax, including 12 percent of companies with income over $1 billion. Over one-quarter of companies with over $1 billion in income paid no corporate income tax, which Tennessee calls the excise tax. Overall, 63 percent of corporations filing paid no excise tax or received a refund.
One of the co-authors of that report was Aftyn Behn. “When I showed up in the Tennessee legislature, people thought, ‘Why is this 5ʹ4ʺ blond talking about tax reform?” Behn said in an interview. “But I come from a family of accountants.”
The result of the pullbacks in the corporate tax is that more than half of state revenues come from its 7 percent sales tax, which falls on a host of products. In fact, Tennessee is one of 11 states that still tax groceries, albeit at a reduced 4 percent rate.
Behn saw a connection between regressive taxes on a basic human necessity and the litany of giveaways to corporate America. She issued a bill that would eliminate the grocery tax and fund it through something called “worldwide combined reporting,” a mechanism to prevent tax avoidance.
“Large multinationals have different subsidiaries, all these different arms of the company,” said Carl Davis with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). “The companies say, ‘We profit a lot, but it’s located in the Cayman Islands or Ireland or the state of Delaware.’” Combined reporting puts together overall profits generated within a particular state and taxes that number, rather than allowing profits to leak out through these subsidiary games.
About half of all states use combined reporting; most of the states that don’t are in the Deep South. If Tennessee adopted worldwide combined reporting—which counts profits attributed to overseas tax havens, not just U.S. subsidiaries—it would recoup $891 million per year, according to an ITEP analysis. That would be more than enough to offset the lost revenue from taxing groceries of $600 million. This would particularly benefit low-income families, which carry a much higher tax burden in Tennessee than the wealthy, while distributing the burden mostly to out-of-state shareholders and executives.
“This is the most commonsense thing in the world,” Davis said. “The only reason it hasn’t happened is corporations have a lot of sway in the political system.”
Behn’s grocery tax bill, which received a lot of attention in the state, forced Republicans to issue their own alternative, which had no funding source attached. They scotched Behn’s bill in favor of the alternative, and then quietly failed to pass that. “It’s the culmination of the late conservative project, they haven’t embraced the populism of the moment,” Behn said.
THE GROCERY TAX HAS BEEN A BIG TOPIC in canvassing, campaign aides said. It represents something that could bring immediate relief at a time when people are struggling and there’s a pervasive sense that corporations don’t pay their fair share, as Gallup polling shows. Behn’s campaign ads in the election play off this. “Politicians make it easy for their rich donors … while hardworking Tennesseans get a rough ride,” she says in one ad, as images of ordinary people getting thrown off a mechanical bull play in the background.
Republican ads are trying to paint Behn as a radical, going back to the well of anti-trans and other attacks. But it cuts against her core messaging and demonstrated actions on affordability. “The reason the RNC is having a hard time pinning me down is I’ve been organizing around corporate taxes for three years,” Behn noted.
Meanwhile, Van Epps, an Army veteran who mostly did operations and procurement work in Gov. Lee’s administration, tried to sound like an economic populist in his initial ad. “I’m on a new mission, to bring down prices, create good-paying jobs, and lower health care costs for working families,” he says. Behn wrote this off as Van Epps “only saying the talking points provided by polling” with “no substance.” But that does show that the election is being fought on terrain where Democrats want it, and where Trump and the Republicans are rapidly losing credibility.
Behn got her start in politics as a health care organizer. She mentioned a regional hospital in the district that will “absolutely close” if cuts to Medicaid from the Big Beautiful Bill are not reversed. Tennessee leads the nation in hospital closures. Seventy-two percent of Tennessee counties have no access to maternity care, according to a 2023 report. Behn is highlighting the loss of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, and the anxiety that is triggering, in her campaign, as well as other health care cuts.
“I have a close friend who lives in public housing in Nashville, she was denied a lifesaving medication from TennCare [the state Medicaid program] and got a message that her disability payments could be cut,” Behn said. “We’re dealing with a crisis that the federal administration has not fixed.”
In addition, I was surprised to find Behn prominently using the Jeffrey Epstein case in her campaign. One ad cites how her opponent resisted the release of the files until the roof caved in last week. “The Epstein files are locked away, Matt Van Epps will keep ’em that way,” the narrator states.
Invoking the Epstein files had a policy dimension to it: She was using it as a proxy for elite impunity, for an oligarchy that is unconstrained by the laws. “People don’t like feeling that there’s a different set of rules for some people,” she said. “I’ve used this race to disentangle the nexus of corporate rule, that these are well-connected people making life harder for you.”
THE RACE REMAINS A LONG SHOT. In the October primary, Republicans saw turnout of 36,854 on their side, versus 31,002 for the Democrats. This is closer than normal but still an advantage for the GOP. Early-voting patterns show higher turnout in the areas where Behn is expected to do well. Polling shows Van Epps ahead in the high single digits, in line with the swing compared to 2024.
A low-turnout race where Behn mobilizes more voters gives her a narrow path. Organizers on the ground told the Prospect that they’re seeing a huge “enthusiasm gap,” as well as something not seen from Democrats in hard-right districts in a while: hope.
The way national Republicans are acting suggests some nervousness. Van Epps has been begging for a Trump rally in the district; Trump only agreed to a tele-rally. Conservative outside group spending on the race has escalated in a hurry. And in 2018, Phil Bredesen, a former governor who was making an attempted comeback for U.S. Senate, lost the race but tied in this district. Internal polling shows likely voters in this range, at around a tie.
Behn told me about a canvass in the district last week that a volunteer drove two hours to attend. “She said to me that I was inspiring this country,” Behn said. “We don’t have opportunities like these in the South, we’ve been written off and disinvested in. But we’re getting this done.”