Vanderbilt University has released its 2024 poll about Nashville — with an increase in respondents indicating they believe the city is on the right track for the first time in four years.
In 2020, 63 percent of Nashvillians said they believed the city was headed in the right direction, a figure that decreased to 44 percent by 2023. Now, 53 percent of respondents said they see things moving along the right path. Also, 78 percent of those polled said they either liked or loved living in Nashville.
“The poll shows a lot of bipartisan consensus around priorities for local officials and where the city should be going,” says Vanderbilt Poll co-director Josh Clinton in a release. “We get a picture of a relatively unified city that stands in contrast to what is going on with politics and divisions we see across the rest of the country.”
The poll asked respondents what they felt is the best way to handle the recent disagreements between the Democratic-leaning elected officials in the city and the Republican-supermajority state legislature. Just under half (47 percent) of those polled said that Nashville’s elected officials should challenge the state legislature and governor’s actions that affect the city. The majority said that Nashville’s elected officials should try to work with the state legislature and governor on issues that affect the city.
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The respondents had favorable opinions of Mayor Freddie O’Connell (71 percent) and the Metro Council (60 percent). That uptick tracks with trends from previous polls after elections. Former Mayor John Cooper’s approval rating was 80 percent right after his election in 2020, and the Metro Council’s was 70 percent at that same time. Both were an increase from 2019 responses.
As for the economy, 68 percent said the conditions in the city are stable, which is not much of a change from the past four years. But continued growth still has people concerned, with nearly half of the respondents saying it is making their day-to-day life worse. That’s in line with another recent study from Imagine Nashville in which a majority of the 10,000 people surveyed said growth is making things worse.
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While to some the East Bank has seemed like the biggest story of the year, about 32 percent of respondents said they know nothing about the city’s plans for the project. It may be worth noting that 33 percent of respondents also said they did not follow news about the city too closely or at all. Even more respondents (48 percent) said they had not been following discussions about The Fairgrounds Nashville. Still, 49 percent said the city should develop a plan that both preserves racing and creates affordable housing at the fairgrounds, while 31 percent said the city should enter into a partnership with Bristol Motor Speedway to bring NASCAR to the fairgrounds.
Respondents indicated support (84 percent) for transportation efforts by city officials — including for a November 2024 referendum to create a dedicated local funding source for public transit.
The poll gathered slightly more than 1,000 respondents. The Nashville-Davidson metropolitan area has a population of more than 683,000 according to the 2020 Census.
This article was first published by our sister publication, the Nashville Post.
