Jeff Yarbro

Jeff Yarbro
Minority Leader of the Tennessee Senate
In office January 8, 2019 – January 10, 2023
Preceded by	Lee Harris
Succeeded by	Raumesh Akbari
Member of the Tennessee Senate from the 21st district
Incumbent
Assumed office January 13, 2015
Preceded by	Douglas Henry
Personal details
Born	(1977-02-16) February 16, 1977 Dyersburg, Tennessee, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Education	Harvard University (BA) University of Virginia (JD)

Jeff Yarbro (born February 16, 1977) is an American attorney and politician from Tennessee. A member of the Democratic Party, he has represented District 21 in the Tennessee Senate since 2015, and served as Senate Minority Leader between 2019 and 2023. In 2023, Yarbro ran for Mayor of Nashville in the 2023 election, and finished in fourth place.

Early life and education

Jeff Yarbro was born in Dyersburg, Tennessee, his father, Paul Yarbro, a farmer; and his mother, Joetta, a sexual abuse investigator for the state. As a child, he attended public schools. After graduating from high school in 1995, he attended Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. in government with honors. He met his wife on the campaign trail, and after the election they both went on to pursue law degrees at the University of Virginia. While studying law, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Virginia Law Review. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Thomas Marshall Miller Prize.

Career

Yarbro clerked for Judge Gilbert Merritt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He began practicing law at the firm Bass, Berry & Sims in Nashville. He assisted in implementing the firm's formal pro bono program. Yarbo's work defending an inmate on death row helped gain recognition for his firm by the bar for outstanding service to the indigent. Yarbro primarily focuses on civil and appellate litigation, consumer financial services, constitutional law, and public contracts.

Political activity

Yarbro worked on the New Hampshire Primary on the Advance Staff, and was the assistant to the chief political strategist for Democratic candidate Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000. He was also the GOTV director for Harold Ford Jr.'s 2006 run for the United States Senate. Recently, Yarbro served as an education policy adviser to Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, and received the PENCIL Foundation Archived July 1, 2014, at the Wayback Machine's Volunteer of the Year award for 2010-11 for his work with public education. In his first campaign for public office in 2010, Yarbro came within seventeen votes of defeating forty-year incumbent Senator Douglas Henry, who retained his seat as the state senator for Tennessee's twenty-first district. He beat Mary Mancini in the 2014 Democratic primary in the 21st district of Tennessee to go on and win the general election to join the 109th General Assembly.

Yarbro is a co-chair of Superintendent Jesse Register's Transformational Leadership Group for high schools in Nashville. He is also one of the founding board members of East End Prep, co-founder of Nashville's Kitchen Cabinet, serves as co-chair for the Conexion Americas capital campaign for the Casa Azafran community center, and the chair of the Metropolitan Transit Authority board in Nashville.

He rain for Metropolitan Mayor of Nashville in summer 2023 and was disqualified after coming in fourth place with 12.19 percent of the vote with 12,356 votes in total.