As tension grows, Alice Rolli sees Nashville mayor as a bridge between city and state

Editor's note: The Tennessean is profiling each candidate in the runoff to be Nashville's next mayor. Read about Freddie O'Connell here.

A year ago, you probably didn’t know Alice Rolli’s name. She didn’t know that you would.

“If you asked me a year ago, would I be sitting here saying I was going to run for mayor?” Rolli said in mid-August, seated at a plastic folding table in her campaign headquarters, a converted three-bedroom apartment in Edgehill. “No.

“But I do say this very deliberately: I do feel called to serve in this moment.”

Rolli sees herself as fitting a niche she feels Nashville has been missing: a type of leader that she calls “the bridge,” a center-right voice that would bring together and ease the tension between the city and state.

This time last year, she was considering filling that niche in an at-large Metro Council seat. But after Mayor John Cooper announced in late January he wasn’t seeking reelection, she felt she could do something bigger.

“That bridge can be a lot stronger with the mayor’s office,” Rolli said.

She announced her candidacy with an impressive resume: prestigious degrees, a history of growing revenue at several education-focused startups and a background in Republican politics, previously leading the campaign of former Sen. Lamar Alexander and serving as an assistant commissioner in former Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration.

She established herself as the standout Republican candidate in the race, making conservative pitches on taxes and crime while not straying too far from the political center. That won her the endorsement of the Davidson County Republicans and helped her reach the runoff in a crowded field of more progressive candidates. She received 20.2% of the vote on Aug. 3, second to District 19 Council member Freddie O’Connell’s 27.1%.

Now that’s she jumped that hurdle, winning over other candidates’ voters and mobilizing more of the county’s Republicans will be a much more formidable challenge, especially given that O’Connell has secured the endorsement of nearly every other major candidate. She’s also been criticized for failing to engage some of the city’s minority communities.

Longtime Nashville political analyst Pat Nolan hasn't seen the changes he feels are needed to broaden her appeal.

"Her entire campaign was focused on issues that would be of interest to the conservative base in Davidson County,” Nolan said. “I haven't seen her do anything directly that reaches out to people that's outside the base she's already got."

But armed with an optimism she says others have compared to fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso’s — a comparison she has embraced — and continuing to brand herself an outsider to Metro politics, she’s hopeful she can do just that.

"I think this second round is mostly around a decision of if the voters are serious about wanting to have a change in how we run and conduct ourselves as a city,” Rolli said after qualifying for the runoff. “I think it's a fourth time electing somebody straight out of the council to be the mayor, or is it somebody with a really different set of experiences with a little bit of a different approach?”

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‘Caring about your community’: Extending a family tradition

While a win on Sept. 14 would mark Rolli’s first foray in Metro government, it would be far from her first venture into the political world.

After graduating from Stanford University in 2001 and teaching high school for a year in Los Angeles, Sen. Alexander hired Rolli to work on his statewide campaign in 2002. Once Alexander was elected, he brought Rolli to Washington as a special assistant until 2005.

She would later serve as Alexander’s manager for his 2014 reelection campaign, at the time the only woman running a sitting U.S. senator’s campaign. Rolli was also senior adviser for Randy Boyd's unsuccessful 2018 bid for Tennessee governor.

She worked in the public sector from 2012-15 as the assistant commissioner of economic and community development under then-Commissioner Bill Hagerty in Gov. Haslam’s administration.

Rolli now lives in Edgehill with her husband, Michael, and two sons: 7-year-old Lorenzo and 11-year-old Benno. She has been involved at the local level as a former member of the Edgehill Village Neighborhood Association who spearheaded a petition effort to prevent development around Fort Negley in 2017. Her co-workers at Nashville curriculum company QuaverEd noticed how much time she was putting toward the community.

“She would walk into her office in the morning, and she would tell me that she'd been to this organization's meeting and it lasted until, you know, 9 or 10 at night,” said Kirk Maddox, who worked at QuaverEd during Rolli's time at the company from 2017-2021.

“If you don't love it, I don't know why you're doing all that kind of stuff," Maddox said of Rolli.

Her family, which has lived in Nashville for several generations, also has deep ties to public life, which she said instilled in her a respect for public service.

Her great-grandfather worked with the state to turn Ganier Ridge into a state park. Her grandparents were the chairs of Farmers for Reagan, and her father served on the 1972 campaign of U.S. Rep. Robin Beard.

“I grew up surrounded by people ... caring about your community, caring about where you live, caring about people who wanted to help in politics, and so I've extended that here,” Rolli said.

But she bristles at the characterization of her as a politician.

“Most of my career's been in business,” Rolli said. “Twenty months of my entire 22-year career have I ever received a paycheck from a person running a campaign.”

Business experience

After her time in D.C. and while her husband was overseas in the military, Rolli enrolled in business school at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Since then, she’s amassed a career her former colleagues said proves her business acumen, problem solving and leadership skills.

“She would come in, cup of coffee in hand, already focused on what was happening. You know, there's not wasted time with Alice,” Maddox said.

After graduating from the Darden School in 2007, she was hired at Accent Travel, a Virginia company that created international study programs for business schools, which was later acquired by WorldStrides.

Earl Grossman, the founder of Accent, said that looking back, Rolli could have taken a job anywhere.

“She's an incredibly talented, intuitive person, relentless in her work ethic and just incredibly smart,” Grossman said in an August interview.

She rose to the rank of partner at Accent within months. By the time she left in 2012 to head back to Nashville, “for all intents and purposes, she was the president or CEO of the company,” Grossman said.

Rolli joined QuaverEd after her time in the Department of Economic & Community Development and helped double revenue for the company, Maddox said. She worked at Possip, a software company that provides tools for schools to gather feedback from parents, beginning in 2022.

“What I felt like Alice did really well is she made a team feel like a team,” said Sean Smith, who worked in sales under Rolli at QuaverEd. “And every piece of that team felt important. She's really good at that kind of leadership. I definitely learned that from her — the people who are bringing in $1.5 million contracts are important, but so are all the people in the office supporting all of us.”

Those who knew her as a business leader weren’t surprised when she decided to launch her run for the mayor’s seat.

“From the day I made her my partner at Accent, if we'd stayed in business for another 20 years, I think I always knew that at some point, she was going to say, ‘Well, this has been a great run. But you know, I've got a higher purpose here,'" Grossman said.

A politically polarized but civil race

As candidates, neither Rolli nor O’Connell have been flashy or combative, a far cry from the spirited runoff between Cooper and David Briley in 2019.

While their debates often stay down in the weeds, the two have clearly separated themselves on a few key issues. On Nashville’s relationship with the state, O’Connell’s message remains strongly in favor of restoring and maintaining local authority. He’s said that the next mayor must partner with regional mayors to recalibrate Nashville's relationship with state interests.

Rolli has identified herself as a potential bridge between the two groups, calling for Metro to be more amenable to working with the state to secure much-needed funding. O’Connell criticized Rolli of being "clearly willing to work with state overrides” at a recent debate.

Rolli responded by saying that "if our city runs well, the state will manage itself."

The two also clash on license plate readers. Rolli, who has the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, said she supports them as a means to address crime, which has been a key issue in her campaign — claiming that crime is rising in Nashville though data indicates an overall downward trend. O’Connell, on the other hand, said he wants to hear from more community members before making a decision.

Rolli’s message won her strong support in the areas along the edges of Davidson County, which have historically supported candidates with conservative policy views, while O'Connell dominated in the areas closer to downtown.

"It just struck me how polarized it was. We generally don't see it quite like that, but then again, we don't have races quite like this one,” Nolan said.

Rolli will need to expand her base, but she was likely set back by revelations of a campaign strategist's connection with the Proud Boys, a far-right militia group, after she split with his Las Vegas-based firm in August.

She's also upset some on the right with some of her moderate positions on issues like firearms, expressing support during the Tennessee General Assembly's special session in August for extreme risk protection orders allowing temporary removal of weapons from those deemed mentally ill.

"That means I have infuriated the far right in the last week with my position on the special session, and I probably infuriated enough of the far left now that live on Facebook making stuff up about me. So I think I'm right in the middle,” she said. “And I can build a bridge and not keep going with this nonsense of building a wall around the city."

Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanMealins.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Alice Rolli seeks to be bridge between city, state as Nashville mayor