Lonnie Spivak: ‘Nashville Really Needs to Work on Rebuilding Its Relationship with the State’

Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Davidson County Republican Party Chair Lonnie Spivak in studio to talk about building up the Republican Party in Nashville.

Leahy:  In studio with us, our very good friend, Lonnie Spivak, the chairman of the Davidson County Republican Party. Lonnie, what do you do as chairman of the Republican Party here in Davidson County to help candidates Republican candidates for the various offices? City council or mayor or I guess those are the big ones right now up, and then of course the state rep special election.

Spivak: One of the things that we’re really doing is we’re taking the Davidson County Republican Party to the digital age. We’ve acquired a lot of data. We have data that’s available to us by the state, from the state, and then we’ve also acquired a third-party data system that we’re making available to all of our candidates that we vetted that will really help them reach the voters in their districts will be starting to ramp up our social media and other events. And we’re gonna be using the data that we gather from all of these, from all of these apparatuses, and using that to hone our message and expand the party.

Leahy: So if you’re a candidate out there running for, let’s say, city council or mayor or whatever, they call you up and say, hey Lonnie, I need some help. What would happen at that meeting?

Spivak: The first thing I would do is I’d like to know the people before I meet them, so I’ll look them up and see what I can find out about them.

Leahy: When you say look them up, what do you look them up in? I’ll look them up on social media. I’ll look them up in the different data sets just so I can know who I’m talking to and where they’re coming from.

I understand that the Republicans in Davidson County are not necessarily as conservative as you and I as a whole are and what I’m looking for really is people who share our values and who could represent the city well on the Metro Council.

Leahy: Are you noticing since you’ve taken over as chairman, an increase of newcomers from other states to participate in the Republican Party?

Spivak: That’s one of the big things that we are working on and one of the reasons why we acquired the data. Finding people who have recently moved here has proven hard for us because if they haven’t voted in the past, we really don’t know much about them.

And that’s where this third-party data comes in. We can look up when they’ve moved here and what their hot-button issues are, and then we can use that to filter down and find people who we feel that our Blue State refugees who really we just need to talk to, to get them involved.

Leahy: Anecdotally what kind of feedback from the blue state refugees, the more recent arrivals here in Nashville, been your experience in talking with those folks and.

Spivak: Most of those people whom I’ve talked to are really excited to be in Tennessee. They didn’t really realize that Nashville was as blue as it was until after they had moved here, and they’re really wanting to get involved to make sure that Nashville and Tennessee as a whole don’t become the same thing they left.

Leahy: So they look at Donald Trump won 65, 35 in 2020, and in 2016 in the state of Tennessee. That’s my kind of folks, right?

Spivak: Yes.

Leahy: And they move into Nashville proper and they look around and say, where are my kind of folks?

Spivak: This doesn’t look too different from what I left.

Leahy: It’s not as bad as Portland.

Spivak: Or San Francisco.

Leahy: Or Los Angeles, but Metro Nashville on the continuum is a lot closer to San Francisco than it is to say, oh, I don’t know. Rutherford County or Maury County.

Spivak: Nashville has really struggled with growth and the political climate over the last 10 years has really. And maybe a little longer than that has really become very divisive. Metro politics, even though they’re nonpartisan, have always been partisan, but the two parties could work together. You look at Democrat senators like Doug Henry from the good old days.

Leahy: The late great Doug Henry, who was a Democrat.

Spivak: But a great statesman.

Leahy: A very common sense kind of person who loved the state of Tennessee, who loved the Tennessee State Constitution, and who loved the Constitution of the United States.

Spivak: And even under the reign of Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, it wasn’t as crazy as it is now.

Leahy: A Democrat who clearly understood the use of power. (Laughter)

Spivak: He did that he did. And he was like Nancy Pelosi of the state of Tennessee, and he ruled with an iron fist.

Leahy: Iron fist. None of the Republican speakers have ruled with that degree of. I don’t even know if authoritarianism is the right description of it, but with that degree of I’m the boss, and you’re going to do what I tell you to.

Spivak: For good or bad that’s the case but even then, the two sides could work together. But now the lines are drawn in the sand so deep.

Leahy: There’s anger and mutual hostility that seems to be increasing. And I think one of your jobs is to build up the Republican Party, so you get a lot of common sense people there that are involved. But it is difficult because when I say left-wing lunatics, there are a number of those. And lunatic is probably a kind description for some of these Democrats.

Spivak: Maybe so. If your starting point is an ask for something that you know is impossible, that can’t happen, and you’re not willing to budge from that mindset, then where do you go?

Leahy: Where do you go? You don’t have our traditional political process of give and take.

Spivak: And then I’m hoping we can get back to that. Nashville really needs to work on rebuilding its relationship with the state. The state needs Nashville’s economic engine and we really need to find a way to play well together.

Leahy: That’s a good aspirational goal. Now let me talk about how people reached you. The best way to become engaged and if some of our listeners wanna be engaged or maybe participate by activity or financial contributions they would go to Gopnashville.org.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Lonnie Spivak” by Lonnie Spivak. Background Photo “Davidson County Courthouse” by euthman. CC BY-SA 2.0.