Liberals, right-wing conservatives see in Lee what they want
Lee’s policies across the board prove he is more conservative than his GOP predecessor Bill Haslam. But in many ways, the 50th governor is whatever kind of Republican a voter wants him to be, a man who won his first bid for public office with the support of both the state party’s activist and donor classes.
In Lee, the 2018 voters gunning for undocumented immigrants to be rounded up and Confederate monuments to be preserved in perpetuity saw their governor.
So did establishment voters pleased by his background as a volunteer with refugees and felons, and as a business executive active in local nonprofit circles. From news reports ahead of the election, they knew in years past Lee had donated to Nashville Democratic politicians, part of what his campaign called “business decisions.”
The area of the state with the highest percentage of the vote going to Lee in the four-way Republican primary that year — 52.5% in his home of Williamson County — was the only county in Tennessee that Donald Trump didn’t win in the 2016 primary two years earlier, the former president coming in second to Marco Rubio at the time.
The state’s liberals view Lee as a heartless,
reckless executive unfazed by the pandemic deaths of more than 13,000 Tennesseans, a stubborn far-right ideologue seeking to jeopardize the lives of schoolchildren by failing to require masks in classrooms. They point to the executive order Lee signed last month allowing parents to opt their children out of school mask mandates.
In the minds of a vocal right-wing faction of Tennessee Republicans, Lee is a tyrant, as evidenced by his executive orders temporarily restricting businesses and gatherings in 2020 and allowing local authorities to decide whether to implement their own mask mandates. They point to Lee’s failure to call the legislature back for a special session to outright ban school mask requirements — and now the governor says he isn’t planning to take action against districts that don’t comply with his order on mask opt-outs.
In his first floor Capitol office, a primary political objective has overshadowed many of the policy discussions in recent months: Keep the right flank placated just enough.
“They are intensely determined not to have anybody on the ballot against him,” said one Republican strategist familiar with the Lee team’s approach, noting the administration’s embrace of a policy allowing Tennesseans to go armed without permits, despite the law being unpopular in the state, or the more recent executive order to neuter school districts’ authority to impose mask mandates.
That opt-out order was seen as an effort by Lee to quell a growing chorus of complaints from anti-mask parents, while avoiding calls from some of Tennessee’s most conservative activists for the legislature to return for a special session to more forcefully erode public health rules.
Lee remains popular with the silent majority
In reality, the majority of Tennesseans approve of Lee, public polling shows.
And while his 65% approval rating in May hovers around where Haslam’s was at the same point in his tenure as governor, a larger share of Lee’s support comes from Republicans, rather than a more bipartisan coalition that backed Haslam, according to the Vanderbilt University Poll.
“Bill Lee’s popularity is at the same level as Haslam’s,” said John Geer, director of the poll. “Lee’s support is more polarized.”
Chris Walker, a Republican consultant who led Lee’s communications team during the 2018 campaign and in his first year in office, said the governor doesn’t have an appetite for making headlines through inflammatory statements.
That approach has “never been his style.”
“There’s something to be said for just quiet, steady leadership,” Walker said. “Of course he’s conservative. He worked to pass one of the most conservative abortion bills in the country.”
Lee signed into law in 2020 a law banning abortions as early as six weeks. A federal judge quickly halted implementation of the bill, and the issue remains pending in court.
Lee more recently, however, showed no interest in following Texas in pushing legislation that allows private individuals to sue abortion clinics or others who aid a woman in receiving an abortion, an approach that would sanction a form of vigilante justice.
Empathetic, but with its limits
On a Sunday afternoon in August, the day after an unprecedented flood devastated Humphreys County, killing 20 people, Lee flew in a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter to tour the damage.
He saw the destruction from a front passenger seat in a caravan of other officials — the houses swept from their foundations onto neighbors’ properties, homeowners carrying their soaked possessions into their front yards, their furniture and belongings on display in the grass as they tried to figure out what to salvage.
Lee asked the county employee driving him if, after touring a flooded elementary school as scheduled, he could come back through and meet some of the residents.
Was it possible for the rest of the entourage to stay back while he did so? He didn’t want to make more of a scene than he already was, Lee said.
When Lee approached Shirley Foster in a patio chair on her lawn, she wept as he crouched down to speak to her.
“I just found out my friend’s dead,” she said through tears outside the destroyed home she and her husband had spent the last three years renovating.
Foster turned to lay her head on the shoulder of the governor.
Lee, of course, didn’t speak of his own grief, the tragedy of losing his first wife and the mother of his four children in a horseback riding accident. That loss has defined much of the last two decades of his life, and his experience of finding hope in unbearable sorrow is one he pivots to frequently as governor.
It has given him, a white upper-class businessman who ascended to the state’s highest office, a shot at being able to connect with people he encounters in difficult moments.
His empathy, though, is somewhat strained when it comes to policy.
Lee is uninterested in expanding Medicaid or raising the state’s minimum wage as a means to help Tennessee’s working poor, though Lee has bucked his conservative legislative partners on issues like continuing to accept refugees or trying, unsuccessfully, to extend paid family leave to state employees.
In both of the latter cases, the governor
cited his Christian faith and profamily convictions in the face of opposition from some in his party.
Right-wing voices chide Lee for not going far enough
In recent weeks, hundreds of attendees have packed a series of ultra-conservative events around the state, affairs that draw a crowd of activists animated by several issues: Opposition to masks and vaccines, the belief that children are being indoctrinated by leftists in Tennessee schools and the state’s Republican governor who has let them down.
Liberals and far-right conservatives are united in their dissatisfaction with Lee, agreeing from vastly different perspectives that the governor has relied on a series of “half-measures,” as conservative activist Gary Humble puts it.
Humble, a Texas transplant who gained prominence in local conservative social media circles over the past year, sued the governor through his organization Tennessee Stands in an effort to oppose Lee’s executive orders during the pandemic.
“I really don’t think the governor is a far departure from what I would generally consider someone who is a member of the GOP these days, if I just look at the GOP nationally,” Humble said. “But the way the governor is leading, I’m starting to be hard-pressed to be able to call him a conservative.”
The clash with Lee from both sides isn’t just over his COVID-19 approach.
The governor championed a proposal in the legislature this year to allow nearly any adult to carry a handgun with no permit or training, a policy that law enforcement leaders joined Democrats in decrying, cautioning it would lead to dire public safety ramifications. To celebrate its passing, Lee held a ceremonial bill signing with legislators at the Beretta U.S.A. gun factory in Gallatin.
Yet he didn’t go far enough, some conservatives and Second Amendment groups said, blasting the governor for not having the law apply to carrying rifles or to 18- to 20-year-olds who aren’t in the military. The law faces a legal challenge from a group of pro-gun activists because of the age requirements.
He endorsed an attack on the transgender community, Democrats said, signing a bill this spring that requires businesses to post signs if they allow patrons of any sex to use the bathroom of their choosing, a measure the Nashville district attorney said “dehumanizes transgender people.”
But Lee didn’t effectively ban anyone from using the restroom of their choosing, a fact one of his most vocal conservative critics, Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles, has repeatedly noted during recent speaking events as Ogles seeks to raise his own profile while teasing a challenge to Lee.
And Lee and the legislature didn’t actually prohibit businesses from requiring “vaccine passports” as some of their Republican counterparts did in other states, Ogles has reminded those gathered at small local county GOP meetings and at large functions alike.
At those events — such as a Marshall County Republican Party meeting in May, or a “Freedom Matters” tour stop in Mt. Juliet in August — Ogles received cheers and standing ovations as he criticized the sitting governor, energizing the crowd while declaring 2022 is the year for Tennesseans to demand more conservative leadership.
“Ogles challenges Gov Lee,” the Maury County mayor wrote on his Facebook page Aug. 11, accompanied by a link to a local television news station’s story on Ogles’ self-released “proclamation” urging the Tennessee General Assembly to put a stop to Lee’s “continued abuses of power.”
Two days later, former President Donald Trump endorsed Lee in his reelection bid.
It was an endorsement that had been in the works for some time, according to Lee advisers, and amounts to a bucket of cold water on any serious efforts to try to challenge the governor from the right.
The Maury County mayor has since become relatively quiet on his Facebook page, the title of which he had changed to “Mayor Andy Ogles 2022” earlier in the year.
Field remains clear for Lee
So far, Curtis Carney is the sole Republican to report opening a campaign fundraising account to challenge Lee in the August 2022 primary. Multiple Democrats have announced their own intentions to run for governor.
Carney, the owner of Off the Wagon Tours, a company that hauls dancing tourists around Nashville’s Lower Broadway in a tractor-pulled open-top trailer, has loaned himself $75,000. He said he was busy with events and unable to be interviewed for a story until later this month.
State party board members are currently in talks about changing their bylaws to allow the Tennessee GOP to support the governor in the event of a contested primary, Golden said.
Lee’s campaign, meanwhile, has $2.3 million in the bank, including $683,000 raised the first half of 2021, largely from a list of donors who contributed the maximum of $8,600.
Lee, who has cumulatively loaned his campaign $4.5 million, continues to employee Tennessee’s top political fundraiser Kim Kaegi, most recently paying Kaegi Resources $193,390 in March for fundraising, consulting and administrative work.
“I don’t know of anyone on the horizon who would be able to beat him,” Geer said. “You never know. Maybe he hands them an issue that gives them an opportunity. But he looks in very strong shape.”
Reach Natalie Allison at nallison @tennessean.com.