The Short List: The Incumbent Underdog

Nashville voters have a complicated relationship with David Briley.

He was the top vote-getter in two straight countywide Metro Council at-large runoffs — 1999 and 2003. But in 2007, ostensibly running as a representative of the city’s progressive left, he received just 10 percent of the vote in the mayoral race, finishing a distant fifth. Then, in 2015, he won the countywide race for vice mayor, which put him in position for the bizarre series of events to follow. 

When he became mayor more than a decade after first seeking the job, it wasn’t because the voters chose him. On March 6, 2018, Briley ascended from his position as elected vice mayor after Mayor Megan Barry resigned in the wake of scandal. Briley went on to win a special election two months later, keeping him in the mayor’s office for the rest of Barry’s term, a little more than a year. 

This year voters had a chance to decide whether to give the mayor a full four-year term of his own, after a short audition period. During that 14-month period, Briley seemed to veer from one political ditch to another, and he found himself on the losing end of two citywide referendums. Earlier this month, the overwhelming majority of voters picked candidates other than Briley. At-Large Councilmember John Cooper, who led the candidates with 35 percent of the vote — besting Briley by 10 points — was ready to frame the results heading into the runoff.  

“More than 70 percent of this county said it’s time for a new direction,” Cooper told the enthusiastic crowd at his election night watch party.  

But the mayor, at least outwardly, is unimpressed with that spin on the results. 

“The flipside of that is 65 percent of the people voted against him,” Briley tells the Scene days before the early voting in the runoff begins. “So I guess they don’t want him.”

In any case, the incumbent is now an underdog. Never in Metro history has a second-place general-election finisher come back to win the runoff. The mayor has seen several of his major financial backers jump ship. Briley’s plan to make history has so far relied heavily on getting more aggressive with his opponent and at least trying to bring some energy to what has thus far been a decidedly decaf campaign. He’s also making appeals to progressive voters who may be disappointed with his performance so far, but could be even more turned off by Cooper’s more conservative approach and fan base. 

A week after his anemic showing in the general election, Briley stood on a bench at East Nashville Beer Works before a gathering of Young Progressives and appeared to put to rest rumors that he might just concede the runoff. 

“I’m a patient person,” said Briley. “I’m measured. I’m boring perhaps. But tonight is a night for me to call bullshit.”

He went on to say that “this is an election where you can pick somebody who has demonstrated over the last 22 years in this city that I give a shit.”

In an interview with the Scene in April explaining his decision to run for mayor, Cooper described his constituency as “people who are focused on financial management and stewardship.” That’s just how Briley seeks to frame him: in blunt terms, as a man “totally obsessed” with the numbers, regardless of how people are affected. 

“[Cooper] may certainly have the city’s fastest calculator, but isn’t particularly interested in any issue that needs to be addressed,” says Briley. “You can look at his policy proposal and have a hard time finding anything about race or equity or diversity at all in anything he ever talks about. And those are fundamentally the issues that the city needs to address.”

Still, Briley’s handling of “the numbers” has been under scrutiny. When he proposed his budget for the current fiscal year, critics — chief among them At-Large Councilmember Bob Mendes — sounded the alarm about the budget’s reliance on nonrecurring revenues from two controversial deals the administration was pushing. An alternative budget proposal that included a property tax hike — this one aimed at boosting teacher pay as well as Metro employee salaries and preserving transit funding — failed by just one vote at the council, even as Briley threatened to veto it if it passed. One of the aforementioned deals, a proposal to privatize the management and enforcement of on-street parking, has since been delayed. But now, The Tennessean reports, the city is facing an inquiry from the state comptroller’s office about its finances.   

Briley agrees that the property tax rate was set at the wrong level after the 2017 countywide reappraisal, resulting in the lowest property tax rate in Metro history. But his first chance to change that came just six weeks after he unexpectedly became mayor — hiking taxes at that moment wouldn’t have helped restore confidence in Metro, he says. A year later, he says, he was resistant to a property tax increase because the administration was able to find money for raises for Metro employees and teachers. But Briley also says a property tax increase in an election year would have turned district council races into “a swearing contest about taxes, and I don’t think that’s good for the city in the long run.”

Briley’s relatively colorful brewery speech notwithstanding, the mayoral runoff doesn’t look set to become a “swearing contest.” But Briley is not mincing words when it comes to his fundamental argument that Cooper’s approach to governance is not good for the city in the long run. 

“He does tout his experience as a developer,” Briley says. “I’ve been around enough development as a lawyer and as mayor to know that developers assess projects in a way that’s different than a mayor assesses projects. A developer looks at one thing: numbers. A mayor looks at numbers and people. So to the extent we’re going to hire somebody who only looks at numbers to run the city, people are going to get left behind. That is the real risk associated with electing John Cooper.”

Whereas he argues that the mayor’s office represents some sort of “personal fulfillment” for Cooper, Briley says he sees it as the only job in the current political landscape that offers the opportunity to “go to work every single day and actually have the capacity to do something for people who need help.”

Both men carry famous political names in Nashville; neither is an outsider. And although Briley began his political career as a thorn in the side of chamber-of-commerce types, he has spent recent years on friendly terms with them. But with a wealthy developer opposing him on the ballot, and deep-pocketed donors abandoning his campaign, the mayor is pitching himself as the people’s underdog. 

On Sept. 12, the numbers won’t lie.

Update: This story has been updated to clarify that Briley was the top vote-getter in the 1999 and 2003 Metro Council at-large runoffs, not the general elections.