Rhode Island’s current campaign season is slowly starting to stir. Your tips and comments are welcome. You can follow me through the week on the twitters.
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STORY OF THE WEEK: With slightly more than four months until Rhode Island’s September 13 primary, some key themes are already established in the race in the 2nd Congressional District. As Allan Fung made clear during his formal campaign launch this week, Republicans want to blame Democrats for high gas prices and inflation while pledging to do better. “We’ve gone so far, so far, off the right path, it’s not even funny,” Fung said. “DC needs to stop spinning its wheels and help, help all of us, help all of us in the 2nd Congressional District, help all of us in Rhode Island, help us all of us.” Democrats responded by renewing their effort to link Fung with former President Donald Trump and GOP stances in Congress. (Seth Magaziner’s campaign unveiled an anti-Fung site as the candidate was speaking, and the DCC, the campaign arm for House Democrats has fired off a few statements.) How these competing arguments play with voters remains to be seen. For Fung, it may help that seven Democrats are competing in the primary. During his launch, he described himself as someone who has worked across the aisle, although like other local GOP candidates, he briskly pivoted when asked about Trump or House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, considered likely to be the next speaker of the House. “That’s what’s going to come down the line, we’re talking about months from now,” he told reporters, in response to a question about backing the current Republican leadership, before turning the theme back to curbing inflation and cutting gas prices.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY: Former state Rep. Joe Almeida tells me he plans to run a Democratic primary challenge against state Sen. Tiara Mack. Mack was among the progressives backed by the RI Political Cooperative in 2020 when she defeated longtime Sen. Harold Metts. Almeida — who had two stretches as a state rep going back to 1998, before deciding against seeking re-election in 2020 — said he’s running because he doesn’t think Mack has done a good job representing District 6. While Almeida’s challenge to Mack is a case of old school vs. new school (and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio has made clear his opposition to the Co-op), Almeida said Senate leadership did not encourage his run. Rather, he said, it was his “street soldiers,” residents of the area. As part of a bigger and more outspoken progressive caucus in the Senate, Mack has championed issues including sex education, and LGBT and reproductive rights, sometimes with controversy.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY II: In related news, Jenna Magnuski, who planned a Co-op backed campaign against Sen. Lou DiPalma (D-Middletown), is a scratch due to a move from Little Compton to Westport, Massachusetts. “I am heartbroken that we were not able to find a home in LittIe Compton, especially since my children are the 6th generation to have lived in the family home,” Magnuski wrote in an email to constituents. “Many families, including generational families like mine, aren’t able to afford Little Compton due to years of inaction on affordable housing. Our community institutions are slowly decaying as school populations dwindle and elders can’t age in place. Though I won’t be living in Little Compton, I will continue to work there. I will keep advocating for it and its neighboring communities. Some of that advocacy will simply look a little different.”
INFLATION BLUES: Regardless of whether inflation is an offshoot of the pandemic or a byproduct of policies backed by President Biden, Democrats face the whirlwind, as the party holding the White House. Campaigning against sour elements of current economic conditions is standard politics, even as major U.S. corporations post record profits. According to Brookings, “More than 70% of the wealth generated for U.S. shareholders by the 22 companies during the pandemic benefitted the richest 5% of Americans, compared to just 1% for the bottom half of all American families, including most frontline workers.”
MCKEEWORLD: At first blush, it appeared that Gov. Dan McKee’s campaign team thought he would be better served by skipping, rather than participating in, a debate being staged by RIPEC at the Crowne Plaza at 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 5. Steph Machado is asking the questions, so we know she’ll do an excellent job. McKee’s campaign manager, Brexton Isaacs, initially told reporters that McKee will engage in debates after the close of the candidate filing deadline in June. This came out Thursday, the same day that Morning Consult reported sinking poll ratings for McKee. A day later, McKee’s office indicated the governor will be away next week to celebrate his wedding anniversary.
In other McKee news, the governor made history by selecting Darnell Weaver as the first person of color to head the Rhode Island State Police. And Attorney General Peter Neronha cited red flags about DMV Administrator Walter “Bud” Craddock’s oversight of a property in Cranston.
TREASURER: Is Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor going to pull the trigger on a run for general treasurer or hang on to his current job? “We have been intensively focused on supporting our small businesses and on advancing large-scale projects that will lift our economy,” Pryor told me as TGIF was going to press. “Stay tuned – I will have more to say about the future very soon.” For now, former Central Falls Mayor James Diossa is the only announced Democratic candidate. Asked if he might be considering another comeback, former Treasurer Frank Caprio, who last ran in 2014, said, “I’m not going to comment on anything about politics.”
CITY HAUL: It’s telling that when asked about her road map for victory in the four-way Democratic mayoral primary in Providence, Ward 3 City Councilor Nirva LaFortune zeroes in on her personal story: “My story is unique,” LaFortune said during an interview on Political Roundtable. “I’m an immigrant, I was undocumented, I grew up in the city, I’m the only woman, I’m a mother who has my children directly in the schools. Some of the issues – many of the issues – that our families have to deal with, whether it’s gun violence, safety, ensuring that our kids are going into safe and clean buildings, housing – those things I’ve experienced first-hand. So I know it. I mean, my partner who passed away almost 17 years ago, tomorrow would have been his 44th birthday. So for me, what differentiates me from the other candidates is not only do I bring the professional experience as someone who has been an administrator, as someone who has been a city councilwoman, but also that lived experience. Because the mayor of the city of Providence has to understand the people they’re serving, so that the policies that they create works for every resident regardless of what neighborhood they live in.”
Our interview covered a range of other topics, including the ‘Superman Building,’ and the “radical transformation” that Mayor Jorge Elorza this week called necessary for the Providence schools.
FRESH AIR: Listen to the remarkable story of CNN anchor Zain Asher, one of four children of Nigerian immigrants to England, who each overcame the premature loss of their father to become accomplished adults.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on how social media has “accelerated the stupidity of American life”: “So a variety of changes take social media from a place where you post things about your life and other people say, Hey, you know, great photo. To a place where most of the action is you retweet something, or you forward something and you make a nasty comment about it. Or if you praise it, someone else makes a nasty comment about it. So this is a qualitative change in what life is like on the screen.”
For more, check this.
QUITTING: According to Governing, a number of states are seeing dozens of lawmakers retire all at once. That hasn’t happened in RI, but the situation bears watching. From the article: “ ‘The political atmosphere is something you really can’t look past,’ says Jim Steineke, the majority leader in the Wisconsin Assembly, who is retiring. ’The political atmosphere not only in our state but nationally is pretty toxic. Over time, it just wears on people.’ ”
CLASSIC: How a festival in Newport is reimagining classical music for a wider audience – and making it less like eating your vegetables.
KICKER: In contrast to the bombast about education-related culture wars, an NPR-Ipsos poll finds that “by wide margins – and regardless of their political affiliation – parents express satisfaction with their children’s schools and what is being taught in them.”
Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@ripr.org
