Alice Rolli used to tweet. Like, a lot. About Fort Negley, about then-Mayor Megan Barry, about WPLN. Dozens and dozens of replies to reporters and politicians. Praise for her now-opponent Freddie O’Connell. A declaration that Republicans eat seafood soup from Whole Foods, too. A poster, through and through.
Rolli launched her account eight years ago with a plea for people to vote for David Fox, who is now her campaign treasurer, for mayor. These days, @AliceRolli1 is mostly quiet — just the occasional picture from some local business or meeting hall she has visited on the campaign trail. She says she left Twitter recently, in part because of “all these things I’m learning about myself” — presumably untrue.
In an unusually quiet runoff, Rolli is trying to move from the commentariat to the mayor’s office while facing several hurdles: She doesn’t have a lot of money and isn’t running a very robust campaign on the airwaves (or, anecdotally at least, in the streets); she is an unabashed Republican in a county that voted against Trump by more than 30 points; and she is facing an opponent in O’Connell who has consolidated support from many of the city’s top elected officials, labor unions, pro-business groups and left-leaning interest groups, not to mention the third-, fourth- and fifth-place finishers in the first round of voting for mayor.
Obvious comparisons to the 2015 election have been made. Rolli, like her treasurer Fox, emerged from a crowded first round of voting in part thanks to a high floor of conservative support and left-leaning votes divided among a half-dozen serious candidates. Now she, like Fox, faces a liberal member of the Metro Council. But Fox had a track record in public office, having served on the Metro school board. And Fox was running before Trump’s election as president and an overall shift in national politics that seems to have soured some of the centrist and independent voters who make up the bulk of the Nashville electorate toward the GOP brand. And Fox lost by more than 10,000 votes.
But Rolli isn’t deterred.
“Eight years ago, the majority of voters believed we were going in the right direction — David was presenting a change from that direction,” says Rolli, a Nashville native who worked on Republican campaigns and in the administration of GOP Gov. Bill Haslam. “ … A majority of Nashville voters didn’t want a change. What’s different today is that the overwhelming majority believe the city is going in the wrong direction. If we do what we did eight years ago, which is elect a city councilperson who’s served as part of where we’ve gotten, and we move them over to the mayor’s office, I think there are a lot of parallels. I think the voters today say we’ve got to reset how we’re doing things here. Nashville voters are saying to us, ‘We need to bring a different approach to how we manage the city.’”
In order to beat the long odds, Rolli would need to run a more-or-less mistake-free campaign. She has not.
One of her first stops after making the runoff was at a Wilson County meeting of the Tennessee Republican Party Executive Committee, a group of party leaders who were in the midst of chastising Gov. Bill Lee for calling a special legislative session in response to the Covenant School shooting. Then she cut ties with her top campaign consultant after she learned of his past statements in support of the far-right Proud Boys and an insurrection. (The consultant says Rolli knew all along, and that he quit of his own accord.)
Asked by the Nashville Banner about both instances, she responded more or less the same: “Probably should have thought about it a little bit more.”
Those types of ties to the right are the kind that can motivate sleepy Nashville voters in exactly the wrong way, generating enthusiasm for O’Connell and turning the nonpartisan election into a referendum on the modern Republican Party. But Rolli is also touting her ties to Republicans as a benefit in the race. She says she will have an easier time working with the GOP-dominated state legislature because she is one of them.
Rolli even thinks she can get the state legislature, in recent years at war with Nashville, to redistribute state revenues more evenly, benefiting Metro and, in some cases, hurting their districts. She also thinks she can work with GOP Rutherford County Mayor Joe Carr (who ran against, and nearly beat, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander in the 2014 Republican primary when Rolli was Alexander’s campaign manager) to get the state legislature to allow the two counties to institute development impact fees.
“How to have that conversation with the state is to come at it from a conservative position that says, ‘I want when you are here in Nashville to make sure that our police call times are not as long as they are right now,’” she says. “We need this to be a safe city. Part of that is saying we will prioritize the funding of our police force and letting our police officers do their job.”
She does indeed have ties to Republicans in the legislature. Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, the Williamson County Republican who led the charge against Metro this year, donated to her campaign. So did Republican state Sens. Mark Pody, Ken Yager, Richard Briggs, Shane Reeves and Frank Niceley, and Rep. Sam Whitson. Franklin Mayor Ken Moore and Williamson County Mayor Rogers Anderson gave money too, as did retired Republican leaders Bill Frist and Don Sundquist.
But Republican support for Rolli isn’t universal, or particularly energetic.
Victor Ashe, the former mayor of Knoxville and an ambassador in the Bush administration who maintains strong ties among the Tennessee GOP elite, says Rolli asked him for help identifying potential financial supporters in Knoxville, but he declined.
“I was surprised and disagreed with her failure to be outspoken in opposition to the state takeover of the airport,” Ashe says. “I expressed that to her.”
Ashe says he would have used every legislative connection he had to fight a takeover of the Knoxville airport when he was mayor. Rolli, instead, wants to meet the state in the middle on most of their ongoing fights.
“In the case for the airport authority, there is probably a place for the state to have a seat there,” she says.
Rolli’s pitch as she runs for mayor is that the city is heading in the wrong direction, its finances are shit and crime is out of control. She makes two main promises as she campaigns: She will not raise taxes, and she will hire more police officers. That means money has to come from somewhere (presuming Rolli is unable to get the state to simply redistribute tax revenues in a manner more favorable to Nashville) — as prices rise, Metro employees are promised pay increases, and continued growth puts additional stress on the city’s infrastructure.
In an interview in June, Rolli proposed that cuts to the Metro Department of Parks and Recreation could be a solution. In a more recent conversation, she expanded on the idea, arguing that she meant the city was spending too much on middle managers across the board.
“What I think people feel broadly in the city — and it’s not just in Parks, but it’s also in our teaching positions and in our police force — is that the frontline is less staffed than it needs to be, and there may be too many layers,” she says.
Rolli also notes that continued growth in the city, and resultant increases in property tax revenue, could help offset the need for further tax increases.
Like Mayor John Cooper, with whom she worked to protect the old Greer Stadium site from development, Rolli got her start in politics advocating for her neighborhood. (They both had politically involved fathers, too.) She tweeted and showed up to Metro boards to testify about issues in and around her Edgehill neighborhood: about Belmont’s use of Rose Park, about an increase in short-term rentals, about a disruptive apartment proposal and most of all about Fort Negley and Greer Stadium.
And though she has built a campaign describing the things that are wrong in Nashville, and she frequently laments the string of Metro councilmembers who have been elected mayor, including her old ally Cooper, she did not get into the race until after he got out of it. Rolli acknowledges that the past four years — with a pandemic, a tornado and a bombing — have been tough, and moves made by Cooper (including, unmentioned, a major tax hike in 2020) have improved the city’s finances.
“Frankly, I wouldn’t have seen a path that said how are we going to bring this city together if it was fighting against the person who had tried to hold the city together through that period of time,” she says.
Perhaps she should have heeded @AliceRolli1’s 2018 advice: “Friends don’t let Friends run for office!”
The race between O’Connell and Rolli enters its final days, while runoff candidates vie for a handful of remaining Metro Council seats
