A new poll of likely Davidson County voters found little support for a political convention of any kind in Music City.
More than 46 percent of respondents said they oppose Nashville hosting a political convention for either major political party, compared to just under 29 percent who said they’d support hosting both.
Only 5 percent of respondents said they support Nashville hosting only a Republican National Convention and more than 19 percent support hosting only a convention by the Democratic Party.
VictoryPhones conducted the poll on behalf of Tennesseans for Student Success (TSS) by polling 500 likely Davidson County voters between May 2 and May 4. The Tennessee Firefly receives funding from Tennesseans for Student Success.
The organization says it chose to conduct the poll independently as a public service to candidates in the Nashville mayor’s race and voters in Davidson County. In addition to polling likely voters’ candidate preferences, the poll also looked at important issues that may impact the race.
The question of whether Nashville should host a political convention became an issue for both city and state government when Metro Council voted last year against a proposed 2024 Republican National Convention. Republicans in the Tennessee General Assembly followed that move this year by passing legislation to cut the size of the Metro government body.
Despite the publicity of that perceived retaliation, state-level politics scored low as a voter concern in the TSS poll.
Affordable housing and homelessness scored the highest with nearly 22 percent naming it the most important issue, followed by public safety and crime with more than 18 percent.
Just 13 percent listed state- level politics as the most important issue and even fewer listed that concern as their next most important issue facing Nashville.
The priority voters are placing on affordable housing played out in Tuesday’s televised Mayoral election forum sponsored by WKRN.
Senator Jeff Yarbro, D-Nashville, talked about the need to require developers to include affordable housing in new developments, especially those on the East Bank.
“Affordable housing is a strategic imperative for this city and it’s not enough to just do some of the public sector investments that we’ve done in recent years. This has to become a community wide effort where we are really drawing in the non-profit, for-profit resources, and bringing new ideas, new dollars, and leveraging the public investment to do even more moving forward,” said Senator Yarbro.
Senator Heidi Campbell, R-Nashville, also referenced increasing the requirement for developers to provide affordable housing and she joined former Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development Assistant Commissioner Alice Rolli in calling for more use of Metro owned properties.
“We need to look at lease agreements as a work around for requiring people to provide affordable housing as a component of their building and we need to look at public land and utilizing public land, because we have a lot of it, to build affordable housing ourselves as a city,” said Senator Campbell.
“We need to continue to look at all of our economic development tools and how we can think about issues like the Barnes Fund and like, our new land that we’ve taken back or other land that has been underutilized, and use that city owned land to increase our housing stock,” said Rolli.
Multiple candidates discussed the need to create more public private partnerships to address the problem.
“Government can not do it alone. We’ve always created affordable housing through public and private partnership,” said Davidson County Property Assessor Vivian Wilhoite. “So, we have to do that even more.”
“We need to ensure that we are being creative with our private development community in terms of creating the right financial incentives so that they build the affordable housing we need,“ said businessman Jim Gingrich.
Affordable housing and economic development leader Matt Wiltshire took a different approach, saying the next mayor needs to target the housing problem differently for each socioeconomic group.
“How do you build housing for someone who has no income is a very different model (from) how do you build housing for someone who’s making the average income for the area, but we need to work on having the appropriate tools for each one of those pieces of the housing infrastructure,” said Wiltshire.
Both Metro Council members in the race discussed the work they’ve already done addressing housing both on the council and in through organizations they’re involved in.
“That is something I do every day as the executive director of Street Works but there (are) some underlying issues that we have to address. We have mental health, we have substance abuse disorders, and we have unemployment, and we have to provide them and link them to those services for them to be able to have the wrap-around-services in order to put them in places that they need,” said council member Sharon Hurt.
“I expect to invest in affordable housing,” said council member Freddie O’Connell. “We know exactly what we can do with the power of capital spending in Metro because we’ve already done it a few times. I’ve worked on two $25 million pieces of capital spending that have resulted in the Randee Rogers Apartments on Rosa L. Parks Boulevard and the permanent support of housing project that’s underway right now downtown.”
WKRN’s forum only briefly touched on the recently passed dome stadium for the Tennessee Titans and candidates were not asked about proposals to bring a Major League Baseball team to Nashville.
Neither proved to be popular with likely voters in the TSS poll.
More than 69 percent of likely voters said they don’t support using public funds to attract a Major League Baseball team to Nashville. That’s more than double the percentage that said they do support it or are unsure if they do, combined.
The recently passed plan to build a domed stadium for the Tennessee Titans was also unpopular with likely voters in the poll. Nearly 57 percent said they didn’t support the plan compared to just over 28 percent who said they do.
Only two of the candidates for mayor voted on the stadium deal. O’Connell voted against it while Hurt voted in favor.
