The year-long battle royal that’s been the Metro Nashville-Davidson County mayoral election cycle has come down to its final participants – two-term Metro Council member Freddie O’Connell, and business and political strategist Alice Rolli.
The runoff election’s early voting window ends Saturday, and election day is Thursday.
Regardless of who eventually replaces John Cooper, multiple questions face the city and region that the new mayor will have an outsized role in attempting to answer.
• How will they help the city navigate the highly contentious relationship between Nashville and the state legislature?
• Can the new mayor rein in development across the area to benefit not only investors, but also rank-and-file citizens looking for a return on their public dollars as well?
• Speaking of public dollars, how will their first budget reflect the priorities of a rapidly growing metropolitan area?
• What will be the primary issue upon which they will shape their first term?
• What legacy projects will the new mayor embark on, even in the midst of so many other challenges facing the city?
Here’s a quick-hit look at the candidates vying for Nashville’s chief executive job:
Freddie O’Connell
Age: 46
Residence: Salemtown
Higher education: Brown University, Bachelor of Arts, Music/Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
Occupation: Information technology
Family: Partner Whitney Boon, two school-aged daughters.
Metro Council experience: District 19 council member since 2015.
O’Connell was the first person to declare for the 2023 mayoral election, jumping into the race in April 2022. The field would ultimately swell to nearly a dozen candidates after incumbent John Cooper announced in late January that he wouldn’t seek reelection.
O’Connell finished first in the Aug. 3 general election, garnering 27% of the vote, and drawing strong support from the more populated districts in Metro.
O’Connell worked his way up through the ranks of civic organizing and activism, on both neighborhood and city-wide levels, before being elected to Metro Council in 2015. He’s represented District 19, which encompasses the bulk of the downtown corridor, for two terms.
His general election campaign focused on his goals for issues important to local and longtime residents, playing up his resistance to the deal surrounding the new Tennessee Titans stadium and resistance to unfettered development.
His key messages, according to the Candidate Connection questionnaire he provided to Ballotpedia, include tackling cost of living and quality of life issues, revisiting a broader transit system for the area, and further implementing community-based planning that had stalled under previous administrations and circumstances.
Among other endorsements, O’Connell has picked up nods from former mayoral candidates including Matt Wiltshire, Jim Gingrich, State Sens. Matt Yarbro and Heidi Campbell, current Metro Council members Erin Evans (D12), Bob Mendes (at-large), Sean Parker (D5), Kevin Rhoten (D14), Russ Bradford (D13), Dave Rosenberg (D35) and Sandra Sepulveda (D30), and organizations such as the Metro Nashville Public Schools board, Metro Nashville Education Association, Central Labor Council, Moms Demand Action, and Tennessee Advocates for Planned Parenthood.
Alice Rolli
Age: 44
Residence: Edgehill
Higher education: Stanford University; BA, International Relations; University of Virginia - Darden School, Masters of Business Administration
Occupation: Private sector executive; public sector political strategist
Family: Husband Michael Rolli, two school-aged sons.
Metro Council experience: None.
In the six decades of Nashville operating as a metropolitan government, there has never been a Republican occupying the mayor’s office.
And while the mayoral elections are nominally a non-partisan effort, Rolli’s general election finish saw her picking up support in the more conservative enclaves of Davidson County.
The result was hardly a surprise, given her previous work as campaign manager for Sen. Lamar Alexander in 2014 and within the Department of Economic and Community Development under Gov. Bill Haslam.
In the private sector, she has worked for startups in the education sector, including the music education startup QuaverEd and educational travel company Worldstrides, along with a brief stint in public education via the Los Angeles Unified School District’s intern program.
On the community level, the Nashville-native Rolli is a 2019 alumnus of Leadership Nashville, has served on the board of directors for Nashville Public Radio, and in 2017 helped organize a Change.org petition and effort to roll back redevelopment plans for Fort Negley Park.
Her general election messaging sought to cast her as an outsider to the “courthouse crowd,” promising a focus on fiscal responsibility, addressing “unacceptable rates of literacy” among elementary school students, and no new taxes on residents, repeatedly hammering a stat about Davidson County having more debt than the entire state of Tennessee.
Rolli has maintained that her work in and affiliations with Republican efforts would be a primary asset in helping smooth relationships with the Republican supermajority in the Legislature, which put Nashville on notice through a bevy of punitive bills in the most recent session.
But despite picking up 20% of the general election vote to put her in the runoff, Rolli’s campaign has experienced a number of controversies, including parting ways with an out-of-state consultant who’d expressed support for the actions of the far-right Proud Boys organization.
Rolli’s picked up endorsement support from former 2023 mayoral candidates Fran Bush and Stephanie Johnson, 2015 mayoral candidate David Fox, as well as the Community Leaders for America, Davidson County Republican Party and the Nashville Fraternal Order of Police, among others.