A professional storyteller and small business owner with corporate career experience is running as a Republican for Washington County’s Seventh District state representative seat.
Rebecca Alexander formally launched her campaign from the historic Keefauver farmhouse where she grew up via Facebook Live last Monday morning.
“Let me just say for the record, I’m not a politician,” Alexander said, “I am only a girl who grew up in Washington County, and I feel called to serve my community and help it prosper.”
After graduating Milligan College and briefly teaching in a public high school, Alexander quickly worked her way up to the position of National Sales Manager for Magnavox, a job that allowed her to open 120 stores, set national sales records, and travel around the world negotiating with both manufacturers and big box retailers. Since then, Alexander has raised two daughters, earned a master’s degree from East Tennessee State University, and helped her husband run their family’s small business, Dillow-Taylor Funeral Home.
“I will rely on my deep roots in the county and everything I’ve learned in my career outside of politics, to focus on real problems and real solutions,” Alexander said.
“This is a very conservative county, and have no doubt,” she continued, “I will be a very conservative State Representative in Nashville. I am 100 percent pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment, and opposed to a state income tax in Tennessee.”
If elected, Alexander’s legislative priorities would focus on education, agriculture, and small business. The former teacher said educators should be paid more and that she would like to “look into lowering property taxes for teachers to lower their cost of living and find ways to encourage them to continue teaching Tennessee’s children.”
Alexander blames agriculture woes on “big government” that she says has been “slowly killing our small farms for decades.”
“When I was a girl, we had more than 400 dairy farms in Washington County,” she said. “Today we are down to 11. I don’t believe in the government picking winners and losers. We’ve got to stop the corporate welfare to multinational corporate farming and stop crushing our small farms with excessive regulations. Our legislature can do more to stand up for Tennessee’s farmers.”
Alexander is active in the Jonesborough Storytellers Guild, the Jonesborough Food Pantry, the board of advisors for Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan, and various ministries at Boones Creek Christian Church.
The Republican primary is scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 6.
