Mayor Freddie O’Connell sent $5,250 to state lawmakers this month via a new political action committee created in November with leftover campaign cash. Every incumbent state lawmaker in Davidson County — including sole Nashville conservative Sen. Mark Pody — received a check, with two exceptions: Democratic Reps. Vincent Dixie and Justin Jones. O’Connell also sent $1,000 to TIRRC Votes, the political arm of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Center.
In August, O’Connell emerged from a hard-fought general election in pole position facing conservative Alice Rolli in a runoff. He collected oodles of cash during that time and ended September with $559,480. Soon after bringing on outgoing Democratic Rep. Darren Jernigan as a state relations adviser, O’Connell seeded the state-level READY PAC on Nov. 8 with $290,000.
“We’ve directed a few [donations] that are mostly focused on Davidson County,” O’Connell told reporters on Friday. “That is as far as we’ve done any planning.”
City-state relations were a key issue in last year's mayoral race. State lawmakers targeted Nashville in the 2023 legislative session with a variety of creatively crafted bills, several of which were struck down or paused by court order. During and after his election, O’Connell pledged to restore the intergovernmental relationship to a functional equilibrium. He tapped Jernigan — a veteran of the Tennessee General Assembly respected by colleagues on both sides of the aisle — to orchestrate a truce between arch-conservative state lawmakers rankled by Nashville’s liberal streak.
In that context, O’Connell’s $250 check to conservative Sen. Pody, whose Senate district includes Hermitage and Donelson, looks like an overture in line with O’Connell’s central message: What’s good for Nashville is good for Tennessee. Leaving out Rep. Justin Jones, one of the chamber’s most outspoken critics of the GOP but otherwise a popular local incumbent, can likewise be seen as an appeal to conservative leadership.
More than $280,000 remains in READY PAC coffers. Jernigan’s open seat in Old Hickory could be the county’s most purple general election, pending August’s Democratic primary shaping up between gun control advocate Shaundelle Brooks and financial adviser Tim Jester. Money could help tip the scales there or continue to be an expression of goodwill by O’Connell toward his preferred Davidson County electeds.
