By Erik Schelzig | TNJ
Our friends at the Almanac of American Politics are bringing out their latest reference book, a 2,200-page compendium that includes chapters about Gov. Bill Lee and the political landscape in Tennessee.
Senior author Louis Jacobson wrote the volume’s 100 state and gubernatorial profiles, and we have been given the green light to publish the Volunteer State material on the TNJ: On the Hill blog. We also have been given the discount code of TNJournal15 for anyone interested in getting 15% off the print version here.
Here is the Almanac’s profile of the governor (we ran the chapter about Tennessee last week):
Businessman Bill Lee easily won the governorship of Tennessee in 2018, becoming the first Tennessee Republican to succeed a Republican governor since 1869. After pursuing a conservative agenda, Lee was reelected by an even wider margin in 2022.
Lee, a seventh-generation Tennessean from Williamson County south of Nashville, earned a mechanical engineering degree at Auburn University, then returned home to join the Lee Co., a business founded by his grandfather in 1944 that specializes in HVAC, electrical work, and plumbing. Starting in 1992, Lee served as president and CEO; by the time of his gubernatorial run, the company was employing 1,200 people and earning annual revenue of more than $220 million. The company collected $13.8 million from state contracts between 2012 and 2018, but it stopped signing new state contracts during his campaign, and Lee put his holdings into a blind trust. Separately, Lee helped operate the Triple L Ranch, a 1,000-acre farm founded by his grandparents with 300 head of Hereford cattle. Carol Ann, Lee’s wife and the mother of their four children, died in a horse-riding accident in 2000. Lee eventually became close to a third-grade teacher of one of his children, and in 2008, they married. Bill and Maria Lee attend a conservative, charismatic church, and Lee serves as a board member of the Men of Valor prison ministry.
Lee was one of several Republicans to enter the race to succeed two-term Gov. Bill Haslam. A major business figure in the state and a former mayor of Knoxville, Haslam fit with the East Tennessee tradition of pragmatic Republicanism, often sparring with the more conservative members of his own party. In addition to Lee, the Republican primary field included Rep. Diane Black, state House Speaker Beth Harwell and Knoxville businessman Randy Boyd. Black came into the race as something of a frontrunner, while Boyd, who spent $21 million on his candidacy, began the race following Haslam’s more pragmatic approach before veering in response to demands from GOP primary voters. As Boyd and Black beat up on each other, Lee framed himself as an outsider, campaigning from an RV and a tractor and refraining from negativity. He finished first with 37 percent, followed by Boyd at 24 percent, Black at 23 percent, and Harwell at 15 percent. In November, he faced former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean. Dean proved unable to woo large numbers of Republican moderates, and Lee won, 60%-39%.
His win shattered a longstanding pattern in Tennessee: Since the 1960s, partisan control of the governor’s office had changed with every new governor. This electoral habit finally came to an end as Tennessee became one of the most Republican states in the union.
After taking office, Lee signed executive orders to increase ethics and transparency within state government. Over several months, he grappled with a running controversy over memorializing the state’s Confederate history. Lee attracted national attention when he signed a proclamation declaring July 13 as Nathan Bedford Forrest Day, honoring the Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader. Lee said he had no choice but to sign it, given longstanding state law. (Complicating matters, USA Today had earlier discovered a 1980 photograph from Lee’s Auburn days in which he had posed in a Confederate uniform.) In 2020, after racial justice protests flared nationally, Lee signed a law that eliminated the requirement that the governor denote the commemoration, though the law disappointed critics who noted that the measure did not eliminate Nathan Bedford Forrest Day altogether. Meanwhile, the State Capitol Commission approved removal of Forrest’s bust from the capitol, reversing the panel’s vote in 2017 to keep the bust where it was.
In 2020, Lee, like other Republican governors in red states, began opening Tennessee’s economy during the coronavirus pandemic relatively early and resisted calls for a statewide mask mandate, though he did allow local officials some latitude in imposing stricter rules. Even beyond the coronavirus, 2020 was a challenging year for the state, with a cluster of large tornadoes hitting Nashville and a Christmas Day bombing in the city’s downtown. Lee took heat from some in his own party for continuing to accept refugees, but he did please conservatives by signing several bills in 2020.
One protected adoption and foster care agencies with religious objections to same-sex adoptive parents; another banned abortions after detection of a fetal heartbeat unless the mother’s life was in danger. Lee outraged liberals by signing a bill targeting protesters who camped out on state property; the measure upped potential charges to felonies, meaning defendants could be stripped of their voting rights if they were convicted.
During the two years leading up to his reelection, Lee signed a number of bills urged by social conservatives. One required that transgender students compete in sports according to their sex at birth; another opened public schools and districts to the risk of lawsuits if they let transgender students use locker rooms or restrooms that didn’t align with their birth sex; a third banned “critical race theory” in schools. He also signed a measure that allowed most adults to carry a handgun without a permit (though not a long gun, to the disappointment of pro-gun activists).
On the eve of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Lee signed a bill stiffening penalties for the distribution of abortion medication by telehealth or through the mail, and when Roe was overturned, an abortion ban he had signed in 2019 went into effect, without exceptions for rape and incest. Lee sought and ultimately enacted an overhaul of K-12 education funding, adding $1 billion to the pot but changing the formula for distributing it. He notched a win at the state supreme court in 2022 when the justices narrowly upheld a school voucher program targeted to families in Davidson County (Nashville) and Shelby County (Memphis). When faced with a “truth in sentencing” bill that required people convicted of the most serious crimes to serve 100 percent of their sentences and others to serve 85 percent of their sentences, Lee refused to sign it but allowed it to become law without his signature; he argued that it would not reduce crime and would cause prison overcrowding and higher costs to taxpayers. In one of his few actions that aligned with liberals, Lee paused executions to allow for an independent review of the state’s process for lethal injections that focused on whether the drugs might cause undue pain and suffering.
Lee had little to worry about in his reelection bid. He easily defeated the Democratic nominee, physician Jason Martin, 65%-33%; Lee’s winning margin was 11 points wider than his 2018 victory, as well as an improvement on the margin by which President Donald Trump won the state in 2020. Lee fared better compared to 2018 in most of the state’s big counties, enlarging his winning margin by 5 points in Knox County (Knoxville) and 8 points in Hamilton County (Chattanooga) and cutting his deficit in Shelby County (Memphis) by 12 points. Lee’s losing margin in Davidson County (Nashville) remained roughly the same. In 2023, Lee signed an anti-drag-show bill. When critics brought up a school yearbook picture in which he had dressed in drag, he called the comparison “ridiculous.”
After a mass shooting at a Nashville school in April 2023, Lee issued an executive order seeking to bolster the state’s gun background checks and also proposed a stronger “red flag” law that would allow courts to remove weapons from persons deemed a risk for gun violence.
