Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s Take on the Election Results

BUCK: The governor of Tennessee is with us now, Bill Lee. Governor Lee, appreciate you calling in to Clay and Buck.

GOV. LEE: Hey. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for being in Nashville.

BUCK: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great town. So, you won by a boatload, even more than previous Republican governors have. Clay and I, there’s a lot that we want to get into here about just takeaways from the election nationwide. But first, you know, you have so many people that have moved to Tennessee, Texas and Florida in the last, let’s say, three years. Is that something that you are seeing reflected in the data in your state that contributed to your…? Has anyone ever won more Republican votes in the state of Tennessee?

GOV. LEE: Yeah, you know, I do think people moving here makes a difference. (chuckles) But, honestly, I think the ideas that we have and the messages that we have and actually the way we’ve governed in the last four years has been something that people appreciate. I mean, that… I always have said, you know, in a republic, the people decide what happens by choosing leaders that have ideas that they like the best. And they choose a leader, they watch his ideas, and, you know, they elect him with an even significantly greater margin than I did when I first got in. So I think it’s the ideas that people have. I think you see that in Florida, in Texas, in Ohio, in Georgia, in any number of these states across the country in this election that overwhelmingly reelected their Republican governors, and it’s a very optimistic tone among Republican governors. I’ll say that.

CLAY: Yeah, I want to dive into this. First of all, Governor Lee, I’m glad you’re my governor here in Tennessee, and thanks for all the work that you’ve done. I hope your wife is feeling as well as she can. I know she’s been quite ill. When you look, you have great relationships with Republican governors all over the country and you just hit on it. I mean, DeSantis won by 20 in Florida. It looks like Beto got beat by around 12 by Governor Greg Abbott in Texas. Kevin Stitt won comfortably in Oklahoma. We were just talking about Brian Kemp winning by eight or nine over Stacey Abrams. You won by 30. Ohio, DeWine won by a massive margin. A lot of talk about what exactly came out, the message of this election. Why do you think Republican governors — incumbents in particular — dominated to such an extent on that this past Tuesday?

GOV. LEE: You know, I think people have come to realize in the last couple of years in particular as they watched states play out that governors profoundly impact their life. Like, what happened in states across the country — you know, what happened — mattered a lot. It was dependent a lot on the governors themselves. And governors have the ability to actually get things done. In Washington, they don’t get things done generally. I mean, the general consensus is, you know, Washington’s ineffective, but everybody knows that governors and their general assemblies, they get things done in their state. People like that when they see a governor actually getting things done, and those things are things that impact their lives for good, then they overwhelmingly want to keep that person in office.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Governor Lee of Tennessee. Governor, the data that you could see or that your team has with respect to independents, is there anything now that the votes have been cast in your state that was either really noteworthy or surprising to you, just so we can get a sense whether we can extrapolate that to some of what we’ve seen in other places when it comes to, you know, younger voters coming out one way or the other or voters who were independent swinging one way or the other? Is there anything that you saw that you thought or your team saw that was really noteworthy?

GOV. LEE: Well, I think one of the things that you know for sure, if you win an election, you know, by 35 points or 32 points or whatever the exact number was, you have not just been voted… The only people who voted for you weren’t just your base, right? You attracted Democrats, frankly, and independents, and you attracted folks from all over the spectrum. You know that happened in Florida. You don’t win in a purple state by 20 points if you aren’t attracting a lot of people that would traditionally not be, you know, counted as your base. And that would be true — you know that’s true — in Ohio. It’s in all these states we’ve mentioned, and I think part of it, it’s just regular people are not as enthralled by what’s happening in D.C. politics, but they actually are very interested in what’s happening in their state. And they also know that the governor can sort of execute or carry out their wishes, and they don’t have the sense that that’s going to happen in D.C.

CLAY: How gratifying is it, Governor? Covid was a challenge for everyone out there, but you help to fight to ensure that Tennessee kids were in school. How gratifying is it now as this data comes out to see that you guys were right and that, as a result, hopefully fewer kids suffered than if you had listened to some of the so-called experts and insisted that kids not be in-person in school?

GOV. LEE: Yeah. I think the key word there is “listen,” and listening to experts or listening to parents. Actually, I think, you know, politicians of all political stripes all over this country, if they learned one thing from this last election cycle from Virginia to now, it’s, you know, you pay a steep political price if you don’t listen to parents. And I have a strong belief that parents (chuckles) know best what their kid needs, whether it’s being in school, whether it’s what they learn, what they’re exposed to in the classroom, what they’re taught, what kind of school they ought to be able to go to.

I am a strong believer in parental engagement in a big way, and it’s very gratifying. When your gut tells you, you know, you ought to be listening to parents, even… You talked about covid. When your gut tells you, “You ought not to leave businesses closed, you ought not to have the government shut down businesses. You ought not to do this,” or “you ought not to do that,” and then you turn around and it works. We have the fastest growing economy of any state of the 50 states right now, and part of that is because we kept businesses open and we’re having some good outcomes in our testing, preliminary testing for schools, too, and the learning loss and the mitigation of that efforts that we’ve made. So, yeah, it’s very satisfying.

CLAY: Last question for you. The number one thing I get asked — and I know I’m speaking for a lot of people who already live in red states now. If you live in Florida, you live in Texas, you live in Tennessee, places where people are moving to a lot is, “Are you afraid that the new implants, the new residents, the new transplants are going to bring their left-wing politics with them and destroy what has made the state so desirable in the first place?” I say that the people that I’m meeting are coming here to a large extent because of the politics. Is there any data to reflect that you guys can look at based on 2022, anything that you are experiencing in your mindset? In other words, is Tennessee comfortably red and becoming redder with the new residents, or are you worried a little bit that they’re going to bring their politics from failed states with them?

GOV. LEE: Yeah. You know, we are one of the most move-to states in America, and we’ve had tens of thousands of people moving here. And we (laughs) did just have a profoundly strong election where conservative Republicans were elected through the statehouse. We picked up a congressional seat. I was campaigning in East Tennessee last week. And this fellow came walking up to me and he shook his hand. Shook my hand. He said, “Hey, I just got to tell you, I moved my family here from New York, and when we came, I felt like I’ve moved back to America.”

And that is the sentiment of people around the country who look around and see things they don’t like in the communities they might be living in, but they better keep looking, because they want to be reminded America hadn’t lost its way and they want to find the places that remind them that in fact, that’s true. And they come to a place like Tennessee, and they see it play out. So, I actually think that people come to a place and they see that it is what they want it to be and they don’t want to change it. That’s what I think.

CLAY: That’s a fantastic story.

BUCK: Yeah. Governor Lee, we appreciate you so much for being with us and great job on your state, but you already know that from the vote that just happened. We appreciate you, sir.

GOV. LEE: Thanks again for having me on. Thanks for what you do.