Breaking Down the Mayoral Race

A version of this story will run in the April 12, 2018, issue of the Scene. After that version went to press, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that the mayoral election must take place in May. The story has been updated to reflect that ruling.

If recent political history — on both the national and local levels — hasn’t convinced us all to stop making predictions, then nothing will. Anyone who continues to do so should have those predictions taken with the finest grain of salt. 

So anyway, here it goes. 

It certainly seems like David Briley is going to win this year’s mayoral election. This week, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that the election must take place in May. If Briley doesn’t win another year in the office, I’d be surprised. 

Maybe the best way to do this is to lay out the case for a Briley victory and see how sturdy it appears. 

To start with, his ascent to the mayor’s office by way of Megan Barry’s downfall and resignation gives him at least a bit of the advantage of incumbency. One of his advantages is the support of a set of movers and shakers from Nashville’s business community who just don’t want the rabble to make a bunch of fuss. When he ran for mayor more than a decade ago, Briley — who was running as a lefty of sorts — wasn’t exactly this crowd’s type. But continuity is their goal, and that means he’s their man now. 

Along with that, Briley has name recognition — you can do a lap around almost the entire city on a road named for his grandfather, late Nashville mayor Beverly Briley — and he reportedly raised $400,000 in three weeks. 

The rest of the field is just about set. As of this writing, candidates who qualified for the race still had time to withdraw their names from the ballot, but a number have confirmed their intention to run. They include At-Large Metro Councilmember Erica Gilmore, Democratic state Rep. Harold Love Jr. and a group of long-shot candidates who will mainly serve as bizarre-quote generators but will also likely draw away at least some votes from more prominent candidates. People like former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, who’s become a darling in certain corners for her anti-Islamic views; and former right-wing radio host Ralph Bristol. Also considering a run as of this writing, but not yet decided either way, is jeff obafemi carr, the minister and community activist who is currently working for NoTax4Tracks in its effort to derail the mass transit plan that will be on the ballot May 1. 

One can group the candidates in a few different ways. There are, broadly speaking, candidates coming from various points to the left of center (Briley, Gilmore, Love) and from the right (Swain, Bristol). Carr describes himself as a “fiscal conservative and political independent.” We ran that experiment in 2015, when Barry, the progressive candidate, faced the conservative David Fox in a runoff. She beat him easily. 

There are white candidates (Briley, Bristol) and African-American candidates (Gilmore, Love, Swain, carr), any of whom would be Nashville’s first black mayor. Barry’s victory in 2015 was due in no small part to support from the city’s African-American communities, and there is no reason to think their votes won’t be an important factor this time around. That is not to say a black candidate will automatically get the support of black voters, but it is to say that where candidates stand on issues that disproportionately affect black Nashvillians will matter. (The mayoral race will coincide, for instance, with a newly launched effort to amend the Metro Charter to create a community oversight board for the Metro Nashville Police Department.) 

Then, of course, there is transit. For Briley, becoming mayor also meant becoming the face of the transit plan, and as of this week, he is the only major candidate in the race who is supporting it. Love, who hasn’t said much of anything about his candidacy yet, came out against the plan on Wednesday. But after entering the race as a supporter, Gilmore flipped on the transit plan, announcing at a press conference Monday that she could no longer back it. At first, this appeared like a transparently political move from Gilmore, a strategic decision aimed at differentiating herself from Briley. But if it is such a move, it could just as easily have the opposite effect. Indeed, the race may end up consisting of one pro-transit candidate and a morass of anti-plan campaigns that split the opposition vote. 

Furthermore, it’s hard to tell how much the candidates’ specific positions on the transit plan will factor into the race, except as a signal to certain groups of voters that a particular candidate is one of them. The mayoral election will take place less than a month after the transit plan has succeeded or failed at the polls. In either case, the mayoral candidates will have to explain to voters how they plan to implement the plan or replace it with a new one. 

Barring a rightward lurch from Nashville voters, the race between the three nominally progressive candidates could be the decisive one. All three are pursuing the family business, as it were. Briley is famously the grandson of Metro’s first mayor, Beverly Briley. Gilmore’s mother, Brenda Gilmore, is a state representative and former Metro Council member, as was Love’s father, Harold Love Sr. 

Voters across the county have recently weighed in on two of those candidates. In 2015, Briley and Gilmore both ran for countywide offices — vice mayor and Metro Council at-large, respectively. A comparison of how they performed doesn’t work out perfectly, but it’s interesting. In the August election, Briley won a two-man vice mayoral race with 47,442 votes. In September, competing in the at-large runoff along with 10 candidates — in which voters are asked to select five — Gilmore received nearly 50,000 votes. That’s more than Fox got in the mayoral runoff. It’s not exactly apples to apples, but it does prove that Gilmore can get votes. 

All that said, a Briley victory is not a fait accompli. It would take a series of unlikely events for Briley to find himself back in the vice mayor’s seat at the end of this year. But then again, it’s just that sort of event that put him in the mayor’s office to begin with.