BOCA RATON, Fla. — Bill Haslam is no Chris Christie.

The soft-spoken Tennessee governor doesn’t go out of his way to pick fights. He describes himself as a problem-solver rather than a partisan. A relative moderate, Haslam hasn’t used his office to antagonize the White House. In fact, President Barack Obama praised the Republican for his education policies at a gathering of governors last year.


All of which makes the wealthy former Knoxville mayor an unconventional choice to lead the Republican Governors Association, the powerfully funded, intensely partisan committee that helped the GOP seize 31 governorships in the 2014 election. He was officially elected to the post at the group’s annual meeting Thursday, after a number of higher-profile governors — including Indiana’s Mike Pence and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley — passed on the job.

Haslam’s ascent is not merely a matter of winning by default, however: National Republican leaders attribute his emergence as a dark-horse candidate for the chairmanship as an unintended consequence of the earnest, no-drama approach that makes him such a surprising selection for the job.

A genial technocrat who hails from one of Tennessee’s wealthiest families (his harder-charging, at times controversial brother, Jimmy, owns the Cleveland Browns), Haslam is one of the workhorses of the gubernatorial community, Republicans say. He is among the first to call other governors to solicit their help or guidance on policy issues, an ambitious man whose self-effacing manner has probably cost him opportunities in national politics even as it has made him well-liked among his colleagues — and enormously popular in Tennessee.

And with the RGA post — a job held in recent years by past and future presidential candidates including Christie, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney — Haslam may finally get a larger platform for his distinctive brand of Republican politics.

Jindal, the sitting Louisiana governor and likely 2016 candidate, hailed Haslam at this week’s RGA retreat here as a “policy-minded” and “serious” governor. With the caveat that he didn’t want to jump the gun on Thursday’s leadership election, Jindal strongly praised the Tennesseean.

“Bill would be a great leader,” Jindal said. “He’s a thoughtful policy guy, and that’s good for the organization.”

Strategists who have advised Haslam’s campaigns describe him as a calming presence, authentically averse to confrontation and self-promotion — so much so that he resisted running negative ads against his opponents, or even saying “please vote for me” in his own campaign spots. Whit Ayres, the national GOP pollster who advises Haslam, called the governor an “inspired” choice for the RGA, allowing that he’d represent a significant stylistic shift from his more pugilistic predecessors.

“He is the most modest major political figure I’ve ever worked with in my life,” Ayres said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a governor anywhere in the country who is more popular than Bill Haslam. I mean, who has job approval ratings in the 70s these days, in this cynical age?”

Haslam will be tasked with leading the committee through the 2015 off-year elections. Three states will vote on their governorships next year: Louisiana and Kentucky, where open-seat races are already underway; and Mississippi, where Republican Gov. Phil Bryant will seek a second term.

All are states where a Tennessee governor should be able to campaign comfortably, at least if geography is any guide.

Yet Haslam, more than most governors, will have to embrace a dramatically altered role for himself in the RGA job. In Tennessee, he has often been a restraining influence on his fellow Republicans, checking the most flamboyant instincts of an archconservative legislature while pushing his own, business- and education-oriented agenda. His fiscal conservative credentials are strong, but Haslam’s signature accomplishments aren’t in the field of slashing government: He accepted federal “Race to the Top” funds for education reform and signed legislation this year guaranteeing two free years of community college tuition for Tennessee’s high school graduates.

In an interview with POLITICO last year, Haslam said his personal instinct was to avoid ideological crusades and “focus on the bigger issues that people really care about.” He described then-simmering legislative debates over evolution and climate science as “frustrating and a distraction” from more important objectives.

“I think [voters] are tired of just, this kind of continuous conflict. They want to see principled problem-solving,” Haslam said at the time.

Political conflict, of course, is the very purpose of the RGA.

So, on the other hand, is fundraising. On that count, Haslam is a no-brainer: an heir to the Pilot Corp. fortune, Haslam is a former Saks executive who remains deeply embedded in the moneyed upper crust of his state. Sen. Bob Corker, himself a former Tennessee mayor viewed as a dealmaker in Washington, is a personal friend who helped recruit Haslam into politics. The governor keeps a tight circle of heavyweight advisers around him, including Ayres, Republican ad maker Fred Davis and Tom Ingram, the veteran Tennessee power broker who served as Sen. Lamar Alexander’s chief of staff.

He is exceptionally close with his wife, Crissy, whom multiple Republican strategists described as one-half of a “partnership” when it comes to the governor’s major decisions.

“He’s a class act and a total statesman,” said Ward Baker, the top National Republican Senatorial Committee strategist who has worked with Haslam’s team in Tennessee politics. “He brings a business-type leadership and is really a workhorse. He keeps his head down and tries to get things done. He doesn’t care who gets the credit.”

Davis, the inventive Republican media strategist, said Haslam has largely charted his own course even within the world of Tennessee’s political and financial elite. The California-based consultant said Haslam has “always kind of struck out from the family” and described him in contrast to his football-exec brother.

“Jim [Haslam] is more outgoing. He’s bigger, physically. He’s the kind of guy who you look at and you say: There’s the governor of Tennessee,” Davis said. “And then there’s Bill, who is more introspective and who is — I have to be careful because I represent more than one governor — but I think he’s one of the best governors in the country, that we’ve ever seen.”