Photo: Daniel Meigs





Running for local office begets indignity.

Carol Swain, the conservative former Vanderbilt professor, woke up at the crack of dawn one Friday in late June to speak to the 20 or so white-haired members of the Green Hills Rotary Club, which meets weekly at the Calvary United Methodist Church.

The group’s first order of business was not hearing from the mayoral contender. Instead, they had some club business to attend to: Last year’s president was handing the ceremonial gavel over to this year’s president. In that moment, both wielded more power than Swain, a self-proclaimed outsider who has never held public office. (Though this is her second run for mayor in as many years: Swain finished a distant second to Mayor David Briley in the 2018 special election to fill the remainder of the ousted Megan Barry’s unfinished term.)

Photo: Daniel Meigs

Fewer than 12 hours earlier, Swain had been onstage at the mostly full Cathedral of Praise for a campaign forum dubbed the State of Black Nashville, but this morning gathering of the Green Hills networking club might as well have been called the State of White Nashville.

Another contender in the Aug. 1 mayoral election, for which early voting is already underway, is John Cooper, an at-large member of the Metro Council. He, too, witnessed a changing of the civic guard while waiting his turn to address a small group of South Nashville Civitans gathered in the IHOP at the intersection of Nolensville Pike and Harding Place, where they meet every other Wednesday. It was the eve of the Fourth of July, and after the group pledged their allegiance to a flag tacked up in the middle of the restaurant, one longtime member was installed as secretary in place of her recently departed mother, another longtime club member.

Once Cooper was finally able to rev up his modified stump speech, the group warmly received his harping on fiscal responsibility, which has served as the central theme of his campaign. Speaking over the dull diner soundtrack — clattering dishes, a waitress quietly taking orders from club members and Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” on the stereo — Cooper called some of incumbent Mayor David Briley’s budgetary choices “dodgy,” among other criticisms. A “very conservative” Civitan with “no use for modern Democrats” nodded along: He was deciding between Cooper (a Democrat, but in a nonpartisan race) and Swain, who was scheduled to visit the club at their next meeting.

Photo: Eric England

But most of the questions from the South Nashville Civitans did not remain in the fiscal-policy realm, where Cooper seems most comfortable. One member asked about the “bum on every corner” whom he wanted to “run off.” Another asked Cooper what he would do to eliminate tent cities. The councilmember mostly avoided the questions, reminding the attendees of their less-fortunate neighbors’ constitutional rights, emphasizing the need for better mental health services and pivoting to an answer about diverting tourism industry revenue to other needs.

Cooper’s 7 a.m. IHOP appearance came just hours after he left the Metro Council chambers, where the body’s meeting stretched into the early hours of the morning. He apologized if he seemed sleepy: “I have an excuse.”

But it’s not just crack-of-dawn meetings in fellowship halls and roadside diners. One sunny Sunday in early July, John Ray Clemmons met with voters at a supporter’s brightly lit Cleveland Park home. Speaking to attendees sipping sangria and eating deviled eggs, the Democratic state representative and mayoral candidate echoed many of his typical talking points: His campaign revolves around three key issues (education, housing and traffic) and three key values (equity, opportunity and justice). Briley is putting out fires instead of leading, Clemmons says.

His attacks on the incumbent feel less caustic. Performing on a debate stage, Clemmons issues criticisms that seem angrier. Either way, he’s defining himself in opposition to the mayor.









Photo: Daniel Meigs

That’s the common challenge for Swain, Cooper and Clemmons, the three best-funded and best-known of the nine candidates challenging Briley for the city’s top job. Briley’s 16 months in the office have been disappointing, they argue. His rudderless administration should remain abbreviated, they say.

And that’s part of the problem for the challengers: While everyone clamors to claim the mantle of Not Briley, the mayor gets to keep on going about the business of being the mayor: cutting ribbons at new affordable-housing complexes, welcoming new businesses to town and showing up on the nightly news regularly.

“If you’re in the mayor’s office every single day, like I have been for the last 16 months, you have a pretty good sense of the intensity and quantity of matters we have had to resolve, most of which were initiated by someone else or came out of nowhere,” Briley says.

He points to the new Equal Business Opportunity Program designed to boost Metro’s use of “race- and gender-conscious procurement,” job-creating economic development wins, an affordable housing plan and progress on a pro soccer stadium.

“All these things that have happened in 16 months would not have happened — I don’t believe — except for the fact that I was there to push them through and make improvements on them and get the city progress,” says Briley. “We made it through an unprecedented moment, made a lot of progress as a city, and we’re now to the point where we can move forward even more rapidly.”

Despite an earlier political history as a progressive agitator, Briley has locked down significant support in the city’s business community, including an endorsement from the Nashville Business Coalition. He boasts of his success in helping prevent a property tax increase this summer while simultaneously finding money for a pay increase for Metro employees. But a clash with the Metro Council over the budget in late June was indicative of one of Briley’s greatest governing challenges: an increasingly frosty marriage with the city’s legislative body.

Photo: Eric England

The council fell just one vote short of passing a Briley-opposed budget that would have raised property tax rates to fund further pay increases. (Briley warned members he would veto their budget if it passed.) When Briley announced in June that he wanted to temporarily ban scooters, some headlines and public perception granted him a victory. But his effort required council approval, and they ultimately didn’t give it, instead opting for a reduction in the number of scooters on city streets with an option for an outright ban down the road.

The adversarial relationship is one of Briley’s biggest regrets from his time in office, he says.

“I don’t know what I would have done differently, but I do wish that the relationship between the mayor’s office and the council was more cooperative.”

Still, in his latest television ad, the mayor glories in “standing up” to “powerful groups” like the council. (Some would argue that Briley, when he served as vice mayor, helped strengthen the council to its current position.)

How can he deliver on his campaign promises to move the city forward during a full mayoral term with that kind of futile rapport with the body responsible for making law?

“Well, we’ll have a new council in September,” he says. “I am confident that it will be more aligned with the direction of the city that I see. … In the next council, as they listen to their constituents and hear what I’m hearing, [I think] that we’ll be pretty closely aligned in terms of the direction of the city.”









Each of Briley’s three main challengers has a unique if flawed case for electoral legitimacy.

Swain, with her ties to prominent local and national Republicans, can lay claim to a dedicated chunk of conservative Nashville voters. But in left-leaning Davidson County, it’s a constituency with a hard ceiling. In 2018, it was enough for her to finish in second, but not enough to force a runoff against Briley. And this year, Cooper has sought to make inroads with some of the fiscally conservative voters who otherwise would have supported Swain, so her ceiling could fall even lower.

Cooper has the money and name recognition that contributed to his first-place finish in the wide-open 2015 campaign for five at-large seats on the Metro Council, his first run for public office. He gets the money in part from a business career that included stints on Wall Street and in real estate development in Williamson County; Briley describes the latter derisively, while Cooper says both would help him better run the city.

He gets the name recognition from his brother Jim Cooper, the Nashville congressman, and his father Prentice, who served as governor of Tennessee during World War II, plus John’s own four years representing the entire county as an at-large member of the Metro Council. (Briley comes from a political family, too: His grandfather Beverly Briley, for whom the parkway is named, was the first mayor of the consolidated Metro government.)

The combination of John Cooper’s message and money may have spooked David Briley, who has repeatedly criticized Cooper during debates and in other public forums, sometimes unprompted. Cooper jokes that Briley’s charges tell him the challenger doesn’t need to pay for a poll — because the mayor must have one showing Cooper doing well.

But Cooper hasn’t spent the past four years trying to make friends: His frequent and sometimes lonely denunciations of Metro Council legislation and mayor’s office plans have at times left him on the fringes, though he never seemed to mind. As Briley frequently points out, Cooper served (at Briley’s request) as the council’s Budget and Finance Committee chair from 2016 to 2017, when he theoretically could have addressed some of the changes for which he now loudly advocates. (Cooper counters that those sorts of changes require executive buy-in, which is why he’s running for mayor.)

Clemmons has spent five years in the state House’s lonely Democratic minority, winning the admiration of some liberals by loudly opposing, usually unsuccessfully, what he finds to be the most toxic Republican priorities. As a backbencher (literally — he sits in the 99th seat in the 99-member chamber), the Lebanon native has sought the path of squeaky-wheel resistance rather than quiet negotiation.

But at least he looks the part. Case in point: During the state legislative session earlier this year, Clemmons was walking with a reporter near the lawmakers’ cafeteria. A young girl from a class visiting the Capitol stopped him and asked, “Are you John F. Kennedy?”

He blushed and shook his head. Later, he promised the reporter that the girl wasn’t a plant.









The mayor’s race can be reduced to a study in “onlys.” Clemmons is the only one of the four top candidates with kids in Metro schools. Briley is the only one of them born and raised in Nashville. Swain — the lone Republican in the nonpartisan race — is the only one never to have held elected office, and Cooper is the only candidate with significant private-sector success.

The group of leading contenders might suggest different policy-focused onlys. Swain was the first to say she would remove Metro Police Chief Steve Anderson if elected. Clemmons, who has since suggested that he too would remove Anderson, was the only one to back the council’s budget, which included a property tax increase and raises for Metro employees. Cooper might point to his often-solo stands against various city development deals, while Briley might point out that he’s the only one to have ever run a behemoth organization like Metro Nashville and, well, the sky hasn’t exactly fallen down.

But with most observers expecting lower-than-normal turnout — and with voters fatigued or confused by a rapid succession of elections in the past 18 months, and unreached by paltry advertising spending — the question remains: Is anyone paying attention?