Jim Gingrich
Nashville’s mayors aren’t always from Nashville.
Phil Bredesen was born in New Jersey and grew up in New York before moving to Nashville as an adult. Karl Dean grew up in Massachusetts. Megan Barry is from the Kansas City area, and even John Cooper was raised in Shelbyville.
Enter Jim Gingrich.
As chief operating officer of Wall Street firm AllianceBernstein, Gingrich was part of the team who moved the company’s headquarters to Nashville in 2018. He retired from AB in 2020. Now, he’s launching a bid for mayor of his adopted hometown.
Gingrich, like Barry, is from the Kansas City area. He lived in Chicago, Brazil and New York City before moving to Nashville. Gingrich joined AllianceBernstein as a research analyst in 1999 and rose through the ranks before being named COO in 2011.
In his run for mayor, Gingrich is pitching himself as a Metro outsider with operational experience, focused on managing the city’s growth and celebrating the reasons people like him, and companies like AllianceBernstein, continue to move here.
“In Nashville today, we have this unplanned, unrestrained and in some ways chaotic growth, and it’s something we’ve all been experiencing for some time,” Gingrich says in an interview. “We've become a big city overnight with big-city challenges. … I started thinking we needed leadership that had the courage to act decisively on the challenges we have today but also has the vision to say, ‘What do we need to be doing now to deal with what growth’s going to bring in five and 10 years’ time?’”
Though he is relatively new to town, Gingrich quickly got involved, serving on the boards of both the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.
After moving from New York, his firm tussled — to little avail — with the state legislature over anti-LGBTQ legislation. Now he says the frayed relationship between the city and the state, a primary concern for whomever is elected mayor, can be improved.
In the mayor’s race, he will face at least three candidates with significant ties to the community and previous government experience: Metro At-Large Councilmember Sharon Hurt, who has twice been elected countywide and has connections to power bases in North Nashville and Bellevue; District 19 Metro Councilmember Freddie O’Connell, who represents buzzy areas like downtown and Germantown and is well known among the younger, online set; and Matt Wiltshire, a successful former businessman and longtime Metro official with family connections in the city and a proven ability to raise money.
Incumbent Mayor John Cooper shook up the field last week when he announced he would not seek reelection, a decision that Gingrich said had no bearing on his own. With Cooper out, several additional candidates are publicly weighing campaigns, including former Mayor Megan Barry, Metro At-Large Councilmember Bob Mendes and state Rep. Bob Freeman.
“This isn't about any one candidate,” Gingrich says. “I just think we have a big need. I think I bring something unique to the challenges we face. I’m not a career politician. I’m not part of the Metro government establishment or institution. I don’t think we can have politics as usual. We need to act urgently, we need to act creatively, we need to bring fresh ideas and fresh perspectives, and I feel I have a track record of doing that.”
Gingrich did not get specific about policy plans should he be elected mayor, though he focused in an interview on managing the city’s growth and being proactive.
“When I was doing chores and the chore was mowing the lawn, you didn’t get paid when you first studied how long the grass was, you didn’t get paid for setting up a commission to study how long the grass is,” he said. “You got paid when you mowed the grass, and I think people want to see things getting done. We're not going to be able to stop growth. Growth happens. People move here, or companies move here, because we have an exceptional quality of life. The challenge is how do we be proactive and visionary in terms of the things we need to be doing so that what makes us a great city, what makes us a great place to live and raise a family, doesn't get upended in the course of what’s happening from a growth standpoint. … We have to be anticipatory in terms of what that means. We can't wake up one day and say we don't have the requisite infrastructure to deal with where we are; that is something that we need to be acting on now.”
