Before he had a polling advantage or an endearing football commercial, before virtually all of the city’s political class lined up behind him, Freddie O’Connell won yards.
“We have Burkley-O’Connell yards,” O’Connell says of yard signs, speaking excitedly outside Dose Coffee on Murphy Road. “We have O’Connell-Pulley yards. We share yards with Angie [Henderson] and Jim [Shulman].”
He had been sharing an early-Monday coffee with Brad Gioia, the outgoing director of Montgomery Bell Academy, the preppy West End academy where O’Connell finished high school. His mom, Beatie, taught French there for three decades.
I’d bumped into O’Connell by coincidence. While we sat outside, I kept track of the interruptions — four in 10 minutes — as passersby stopped to offer a word of encouragement or to tell Freddie they’d already voted for him.
O’Connell staffer Alex Apple estimates that the campaign had planted royal-blue signs in front of 1,600 houses. You can see them on fences, balconies and windows, bold white letters over a yellow outline of Davidson County. O’Connell’s point was that, to him, signs were the tangible proxy for the wide appeal he shared with colleagues and candidates across the Metro universe. While voters split narrowly for Angie Henderson — the West Side councilmember who defeated incumbent Jim Shulman in the race for vice mayor — O’Connell could win both sides. While he’s consistently voted opposite more conservative councilmembers like Russ Pulley and Burkley Allen on wedge issues like license plate readers and the deal for a new Titans stadium, both Allen and Pulley are vying for two of the city’s remaining at-large seats, and they all share yards. Fellow at-large candidate Quin Evans-Segall has forged a strong alliance with O’Connell’s campaign, both anchors of a pro-parks, pro-transit, pro-mobility Metro axis outwardly critical of big subsidies for tourism and corporations.
O’Connell has consolidated support among important city leaders and institutions since taking the most votes into the runoff on Aug. 3. Many of his former opponents have fallen in line, including Heidi Campbell, Jeff Yarbro, Matt Wiltshire and Jim Gingrich. Labor unions and business leaders agree on O’Connell, as do most of his colleagues in the Metro Council, where O’Connell has represented parts of the downtown core, Germantown, Salemtown, Midtown, Napier-Sudekum and North Nashville for eight years. As early voting began last week, the entire Metro school board endorsed O’Connell’s bid — “many believe this is the first time” the board jointly endorsed a mayoral candidate, according to a release from the body.
Drive in Wedgewood-Houston and you can see yards with O’Connell signs and signs opposing the NASCAR track at the fairgrounds, a controversial tourism play that advocates put on ice early in August before it was set to die in council. Approach the four-way stop at Blair Boulevard and Natchez Trace from the west and you’ll see a stately stone bungalow that’s supporting the NASCAR deal and O’Connell.
“We don’t know him personally, but I watched four televised events,” says Joyce Quirk, who lives there with her husband Preston. “Observing the candidates and their responses and presence and intelligence, I settled on Freddie after the second forum and first debate. I appreciate all he’s done in council and serving on the transit board. I actually completely disagree with him about the stadium deal, but I feel like he’ll get over that and make the East Bank development the best it can be. He has experience and knowledge, and I know this race is supposed to be nonpartisan, but I can’t support a Republican candidate. Not in this era, with Republicans at the state and federal levels who refuse to condemn Donald Trump. And the gerrymandering.”
“I’m also a car person,” says Preston, who concurs with Joyce’s political analysis. “I have a race car and I enjoy racing.”
To older voters, O’Connell has proven his experience and smarts. To parents, he’s proven his support for public education, burnished by his own credentials as an Eakin Elementary alum. His formal relationship with Nashville liberals dates back well over a decade to Liberadio(!), a politics show he hosted on Vanderbilt’s WRVU in the 2000s with Mary Mancini, who went on to chair the Tennessee Democratic Party. Long concerned with environmentalism, housing and homelessness, O’Connell has shown up at rallies, protests, memorials and actions over the eight years he’s been in office. For that reason, a huge swath of politicized young people identified with O’Connell and helped furnish a field campaign that knocked on doors and phone-banked — all in the hopes that Mayor O’Connell could move their city further left.
To the business class, he’s proven that a little extra scrutiny won’t stop the city’s economic growth. O’Connell has been the councilmember approving controversial new real estate projects that have made parts of North Nashville whiter and wealthier while also winning the support of Black city leaders and politicians, like state Rep. Brenda Gilmore and Metro Register of Deeds Karen Johnson. Downtown, O’Connell has stamped massive corporate projects like Amazon’s Nashville Yards and AllianceBernstein’s move to Fifth + Broadway. In 2021, he delivered Stand Up Nashville’s “20 Questions about the Oracle deal” — which skewered corporate-centric city priorities — to Mayor John Cooper before voting for the deal, along with every other councilmember, a month later, with many of those questions unanswered.
The Nashville Post and Nashville Scene’s Stephen Elliott asked O’Connell in a recent interview about a proposed land swap in District 19. At Church Street Park, O’Connell supported a land swap with a developer — Tony Giarratana, who recently co-hosted a fundraiser for O’Connell — in return for certain community benefits.
“Can you show me where I supported that?” O’Connell responded.
“I actually watched a Parks board meeting this morning from 2018 where you said, ‘I think this is better than the current —’”
“I said, ‘I think anything is better than the status quo,’” O’Connell responded. “And that was true. And if Parks couldn’t do better than the status quo, then I think it’s important to consider all options. But I also feel like we wanted to leave the space if the park could perform better. Which is something I also articulated.”
O’Connell’s circumspection can, at times, saddle him with contradictions that will be more difficult to avoid when he holds enough power to drive the city’s agenda. He has already begun arguing that he won’t drive the city’s agenda, but rather be its shepherd, favoring the careful language of stakeholder-heavy, community-driven priorities that activate and leverage strategic partnerships.
“I think there is a responsible way to implement license plate readers as a technology,” O’Connell tells the Scene via Zoom in August, a few days after he started isolating due to an inconvenient COVID diagnosis. As a councilmember, O’Connell voted against LPR approval and echoed his colleagues’ pleas for caution. “We knew that multiple, long-standing, highly credible organizations that represent a variety of different parts of Nashville’s communities of color expressed profound concerns there. But if we’re going to expand this program, or even make it permanent, the best thing to do from a broad public-trust standpoint would be to involve the voices that express the most concern. That’s exactly what I would hope to do from the mayor’s office.”
While the Titans and Mayor Cooper coordinated a full-throated push for billions in taxpayer money to fund a new domed stadium on the city’s East Bank, O’Connell saw a bad deal and an early plank that aligned his mayoral campaign with pissed-off Nashvillians. O’Connell separated himself from the mayoral field with his vocal opposition to the stadium lease and had the chance to actually vote against the deal, which sailed through the council early this spring.
“Metro legal, Metro finance and the mayor’s office seemed more interested in getting a deal done quickly that revised a lease we knew was bad, but left us with a different set of risks and obligations,” says O’Connell when asked if there was any play left on the $2.1 billion stadium deal. “But I don’t intend to undo any element of the deal. We have a contract now, and I’m not going to say to Metro legal, ‘Let’s sue ourselves or the sports authority,’ or anything like that. What I would say is, I hope to continue working with the Titans as a good-faith partner. It’s important to me to secure favorable terms for Metro in affordable housing commitments or infrastructure commitments to make sure the East Bank succeeds more broadly.”
Throughout 2022, O’Connell built his campaign for mayor on the ambient feeling (backed by polling) that the city has been on the wrong track for years. “I want you to stay,” a message emblazoned on early campaign materials, was a plea to his fellow Nashvillians not to give up on a city that has for many become unrecognizable, alienating and prohibitively expensive. Its bouncier counterpart — “More ’Ville, Less Vegas!” — is emblazoned on the back of O’Connell campaign T-shirts. He took on the billionaires and bachelorettes in another popular campaign ad.
A runoff with conservative Alice Rolli was O’Connell’s dream scenario. He has not had to prove to a moderate city that his opponent sits too far to the right, because Rolli has done it for him. She’s argued that state lawmakers, seen by many Davidson County voters as radical extremists intent on attacking Nashville, will listen to her because she agrees with them. Her “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” an oath against tax hikes offered to elected officials by the D.C.-based activist group Americans for Tax Reform, reads like a stunt from a bygone era. Rolli’s direct connections to MAGA Republicans and her former consulting firm’s affinity for far-right militant organization the Proud Boys were gifts that O’Connell didn’t even ask for.
In the general election, O’Connell beat her across the county. In places like Joelton and Bellevue, where Rolli won a few precincts narrowly, middling Democrats like Matt Wiltshire, Heidi Campbell and Jeff Yarbro split votes that will presumably go to O’Connell in the runoff. Closer to the city, O’Connell will look to improve on already substantial margins.
The race between O’Connell and Rolli enters its final days, while runoff candidates vie for a handful of remaining Metro Council seats
