'You have to show up'

Allie Phillips ran for office in Tennessee and lost, but she doesn’t regret it

When Allie Phillips, a Democrat, ran for the Tennessee House of Representatives to represent District 75, the hardest part wasn’t the pushback from Republicans in deep-red Tennessee. It was the Democratic party.

“The Republicans played a part for sure, but that came at the end, you know, when they started hitting with hate mail and the attack ads and stuff,” Phillips said. “But … as far as which party gave me the most difficult time, it was my own party.”

Phillips didn’t start out wanting to be a politician. The Tennessee native, now 29, was a single mother to her daughter Adalie and worked three jobs to support her daughter and put herself through college. She’s since gotten married; she and her husband share a car and live paycheck-to-paycheck. There isn’t a lot of disposable income to run for office.

In 2023, Phillips was excited to learn she was pregnant with a little girl she named Miley Rose. At her 19-week scan, Phillips learned that Miley wasn’t developing — the amniotic fluid around the fetus had drained and her heart, lungs, brain and other organs had stopped growing.

Allie Phillips in her 2024 campaign video

Continuing the pregnancy put Phillips at risk for sepsis. And she already had Adalie, then 5, to care for. But Phillips lives in Tennessee, one of the 19 states with near-total abortion bans.

In order to save her own life, Phillips had to raise money via GoFundMe, send Adalie to her parents, temporarily close the in-home daycare she ran, and book a trip to New York to get an abortion.

She documented her journey on TikTok and her story went viral.

@.allie.phillipsReplying to @roseygirl1989 i cant thank everyone enough for the love and support. Unfortunately its out of our hands now. Miley Rose will now be watching over me instead of me watching over her… #greenscreen #pregnancy #highriskpregnancy #trisomy13 #AXERatioChallenge #nonviablepregnancy #holoprosencephaly #birthdefects #braindefect #rarebirthdefect #heartdefect #kindeydefect #fetaldevelopment #ultrasound #sadnews #pregnancytermination #pregnancyloss #pregnancylosssupport

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Despite the fact that one in four American women has an abortion in her lifetime, abortion remains shrouded in shame and secrecy — and, in states like Tennessee, fear.

Phillips told the Washington Post last year, “I was documenting the journey of what I was having to go through as a woman in an abortion-banned state.” Sharing her story was “raw and real” and necessary.

Three months after her abortion, Phillips met with her state representative, Jeff Burkhart, to tell him about her experience. She recalled that he didn’t even know women could have miscarriages after the first trimester and that he barely met her eyes.

After the meeting, Phillips decided she would run for his seat. She didn’t think she could win — not really. Burkhart is a local real estate developer, someone with the kind of money and years of influence Phillips lacked. But she wanted to tell people her story. She wanted to talk about the real and devastating impact of abortion bans, and she wanted to give people in her district a choice on the ballot.

A New York Times investigation last year revealed that while America is almost evenly divided between Republican and Democrats, Democrats by and large fail to contest seats at a local level.

While Republicans have gerrymandered rural districts, Democrats have abandoned them — ceding the territory and giving voters no other options. This also translates to a lack of knowledge in the party about those districts and little party infrastructure.

The New York Times story notes, “In Missouri, despite big Democratic population centers in St. Louis and Kansas City, [a] 2022 survey found that seven in 10 partisan offices in the state went uncontested — and Democrats were absent eight times more often than Republicans.”

When Phillips ran, she didn’t know what she was doing. She laughed when she told me how naïve she was. She had no idea how to run for anything. All she had was her story and a belief that voters needed a choice.

From the start, leaders of the state Democratic party said they didn’t want her to run. When she said she wanted to anyway, someone asked her how she was going to knock on doors when she had a kid at home. “They wouldn’t have asked that if I was a man,” she told me, still frustrated.

Later, after she won the primary, party leaders told her not to run on abortion or that she should focus on other issues, like immigration. Phillips was frustrated; abortion was why she was running, and one that affects the voters in her district and her state. She decided to run her own campaign.

Phillips used her social media platform and viral story to reach voters and donors. She got attention from national media, which helped her hire a campaign staff and outside consultants.

She ran a close race and received 9,174 votes. Burkhart won with 11,117.

She accepts that reality, but doesn’t feel defeated by it.

When I spoke with her in February, she was pregnant again, in her third trimester. And she said she didn’t regret running for office.

Phillips told me the district she ran in was a new district, recently redrawn, and there wasn’t much voter data for Democrats. Now there is, because she ran. “You can’t just run when you are guaranteed to win,” Phillips said. “You have to build a coalition.” She talks about creating data, email lists, donor lists; about registering people to vote.

“When Democrats don't run, Democratic voters don't show up and vote.”

Tennessee ranks dead last in the nation for voter turnout. Phillips’ county, Montgomery County, ranks the worst in the state for turnout, and her district is worst in the county.

“So having Democrats run — regardless of if they're going to win or not — that gives people hope. It encourages them to get back out and exercise the right that they have to vote,” Phillips said.

“It’s also to show them like, ‘Hey, there's somebody out here fighting,’ because so many people are like, ‘Oh, I'm just a little blue dot in this red county.’ You have to show people they aren’t alone, that there is someone else out here who cares.”

Allie Phillips in her 2024 campaign video.

Many pundits and voters right now are lamenting the lack of leadership in the Democratic party; there’s an almost operatic wail of who will fight and who will lead us? But there are leaders out here. There are already people — like Phillips and like Christina Bohannan, who ran against Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa's closely contested 1st Congressional District — who do the thankless work of running for in places where no one wants to run, building the party infrastructure little by little. And there are representatives in Congress such as Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who say the things others in the party won’t and take the decisive stands that many party leaders would rather moderate.

But so often, when people do step up for the hard work, the worst resistance comes from within. This resistance doesn’t just come for people just stepping up like Phillips, it’s a leveling force that censures Al Green for speaking up, that chides Maxine Waters for taking a stand.

The impulse to censure and moderate the radical voices and to fit them into a bland mold of toothless politicians limits all we can be and all we need to do to rise to this moment.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. If Democrats are going to win in places such as Iowa and Tennessee, it’s going to take all of our voices. The ones we agree with and the ones we don’t. As Rebecca Traister wrote in her newsletter this week, the voices we need “will come from left-wing agitators, some will come from centrist defenders of norms; presumably they will reach different audiences and resonate for different sensibilities; some attempts will succeed in channeling public dismay and slowing the harm, others will surely fall flat.”

The only truly unforgivable sin of this moment is not showing up.

When I asked Phillips whether she would run again, she couldn’t say. She’s having a baby soon and she needs a break. And she says on her worst days, she wonders why she should continue to stand up for her community, when they didn’t show up for her. But then she reminds herself she was a virtual unknown, in a district with low turnout, running against an incumbent with deep community and financial ties. She knows that when you are so used to no one showing up for you, it’s hard to notice when someone finally does — and she reminds herself that almost 10,000 people did show up for her. And if she runs again, next time there will be more.

“So I got to quit looking at the negative over half that didn't show up, figure out why they didn't show up, and then still recruit the ones that did to help me get those ones to show up next time.”

And that’s what she’s telling people now. Show up. Just put your name on the ballot. Maybe you don’t even knock on doors. But give people a choice. Don’t accept defeat before you even try.

Progress can’t happen, Phillips tells me, until we learn to show up.

I was able to go to Austin, Texas last month and meet Allie Phillips at the Abortion in America conference because of paying subscribers to this newsletter, who support me, and all the other subscribers who open this newsletter every week.

Media is fracturing and there are fewer places and outlets doing this kind of work. So thank you so much for letting me do it here.

This year, I am going to travel more and tell more stories about the places our personhood and politics meet in red state America. It’s an ambitious project, but I can’t do it without you. Thank you.