A Referendum on Affordability: RI Primary Election Recap

Rhode Island Primary Results: An Affordability Referendum, Not Just an Anti-Incumbent Wave

Bill Bartholomew breaks down Rhode Island’s primary results and argues the night was driven by one central issue: affordability. He connects the outcomes in the governor’s race, Providence mayor’s race, and local council contests to a broader rejection of leaders who seemed disconnected from the lived reality of rising housing costs, broken communication, and political inauthenticity.He also looks at how the Democratic Party has shifted, why progressives and anti-establishment candidates surged, and what the results may mean for the general election and the next generation of Rhode Island leadership.

Key topics

• The night’s three big takeaways: bad night for incumbents, great night for progressives, and a statewide referendum on the affordability crisis
• Why Bill sees Helena Foulkes’ win over Dan McKee as the culmination of a long political and messaging collapse around the Washington Bridge
• How McKee’s handling of the bridge crisis became a symbol of a broader disconnect between state government and everyday Rhode Islanders
• Why Providence mayor Brett Smiley and other incumbents were overwhelmed by voters who wanted immediate action on rent and housing
• The role of rent stabilization in Providence as a vehicle for much bigger frustration about housing costs, gaslighting, and feeling unheard
• How local, hyper-specific issues like grocery store covenants, ward races, and neighborhood frustration added up into a bigger anti-incumbent shift
• The collapse of establishment-backed and Trojan horse conservative efforts in Democratic primaries, which Bill says failed because they lacked authenticity
• Why Sabina Matos survived the lieutenant governor primary and how local issue work, like grocery access, may have mattered
• The implications of the primary for the Republican side, including Ken Block, John Laughlin, and Victor Meller
• The larger structural change in Rhode Island politics, from the old machine to a new, unsettled power landscape

Timestamps

00:00 - The bottom line on Rhode Island primary night
 00:59 - Why Bill waited to process the results before reacting
 01:28 - Helena Foulkes’ long runway back into politics
 02:26 - The Washington Bridge as the defining issue for McKee
 03:51 - Why this was a deliberate shift, not an accident
 04:49 - Providence turnout and the impact of mobilized voting
 05:45 - Affordability as the state’s defining crisis
 06:37 - Why the governor’s race became impossible to win without a clearer strategy
 08:12 - The communication failures that hurt McKee
 09:36 - What the Republican field may or may not become
 10:28 - Why Providence turnout signaled trouble for Smiley
 11:20 - Rent control as a symptom of a much larger housing crisis
 13:02 - Local council losses and the punishment of anti-rent vote behavior
 14:19 - Why the conservative primary strategy collapsed
 15:29 - Feeling gaslit about housing, education, energy, and infrastructure
 16:35 - “Get small” and the rise of local organizing
 17:21 - Kim Ahern’s win and the role of coalition strength
 18:11 - The lieutenant governor race and why Sabina Matos survived
 20:02 - Why John Laughlin may make the LG race more competitive, but not simple
 21:32 - Grocery store covenants and hyperlocal issue politics
 22:47 - The Morales victory party and the sense of collective rejection
 23:57 - Why the Providence rent fight became a referendum on being heard
 24:41 - What should have happened between the city and mayor’s office
 25:47 - Why the ordinance details mattered less than the feeling of exclusion
 27:45 - Why the “socialism” framing misses the actual story
 29:03 - Rhode Island’s old political machine and what replaced it
 30:37 - Victor Meller’s dominant showing in CD2
 32:07 - Age, leadership, and who actually runs the world now
 33:34 - Why voters rejected fake, prepackaged politics
 35:13 - The election as a populist correction to out-of-touch leadership
 36:21 - Rent increases, housing pressure, and the lack of real debate
 37:42 - What losing candidates should reflect on now
 39:28 - Coalition shifts across races
 40:02 - The post-machine political universe in Rhode Island
 41:06 - Why this was also a generational referendum

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Bill Bartholomew 0:00

All right, the bottom line when it comes to Rhode Island's primary elections, three things. Number one, bad night for incumbents. Number two, great night for progressives. And I think most importantly, number three, this was a total referendum on the affordability crisis in Rhode Island. Period. End of discussion. And this played out in a lot of different ways, in ways that were not identical from race to race. But thematically, it wasn't just simply a scenario where voters looked out and said, you know what, I'm unhappy and I want to see a change. This was an intentional shift in the face of leadership of this state. Welcome into Bartholomew Town. It's Bill Bartholomew here with you on the morning after primary day in Rhode Island. First of all, uh thanks to everybody who joined us last night live on the radio or this morning on NPR, whatever the case may be. We've been breaking this down for a bit of time here. And I wanted to kind of save the podcast for this moment. I didn't want to just do it at one o'clock in the morning last night. I wanted to sit with the experience and the results before offering some thoughts here. Let's start with the governor's race, okay? Let's just go right there on the primary side. Look, this is the natural conclusion to what has been a five and a half, six-year saga between Governor Dan McKee and Helena Bonano folks. It first began when folks emerged as a candidate in the 2022 Democratic primary. She had a pretty strong run there, built some name recognition, so on and so forth. And then really earlier this year, I'm sorry, early last year is when you started to hear Helena's name again, and you started to see her taking selfies on the rip to bus or at this community event or that community event. Or with Joe Paula Sr. Jr., the mayor in Johnston Rhode, right? She clearly got the message that there has to be a lot more institutional grassroots connectivity made, number one, uh, from a strategy standpoint, and that's also going to boost your name recognition because then people are going to talk about you, right? So that exercise was happening at the same time as the obvious, Dan McKee drowned by the Washington Bridge. And in particular, because whether or not you're out there saying, geez, the state did a terrible job with the oversight of this bridge, it nearly collapsed and there was a risk there, and now we've got inconvenience, or it's simply a scenario where you say, look, I don't like the way the governor handled this from a communication standpoint. And that's even too macro of a term, too. I think the thing that really resonates with people is they don't feel like their government was, I don't want to say truthful, but wasn't in line with reality, their reality. Remember the whole, well, we're going over the bridge now. It only takes 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever it was that the the uh you'd have Al Viti, the former DOT director on the radio, constantly telling you everything's gonna be great. It's just, you know, we're gonna get there. We're just that attitude isn't the type of thing that you can park, right? That's not a snowstorm that went awry. That's not a, you know, a one-off type of misstep or even a policy position that one might disagree with, or a policy framework like rent, rent stabilization, right? This is so much bigger, and it was so deeply ingrained in Rhode Island. You know, I was looking at this election thinking, look, the governor still has a chance. And on election day, he did. They just didn't motivate or find those, you know, tens of thousands of voters that they would need. Duh. And it proves that this was very much so, not an accidental or happenstance type of election where people went in and then, you know, I don't know, let's vote for someone different. On the governor side, this feels like Halila Bonano, folks, was duly elected. And whether you love that, hate it doesn't make any difference. That's what happened. Make no mistake about it, that the transformation of the Democratic Party on a statewide basis, right? We've been talking about it on little issues like what goes into mailers or who's going to receive or not receive an endorsement for governor by the party. The transition inside the party from a, you know, from the governor's seat standpoint, uh, that has come to fruition. And the Democratic Party has now gutting what they wanted. They wanted McKee out and that cohort, and then one of the folks slash, you know, kind of residual remondo type of unit back in power. And what you're seeing at the statewide basis and what you're seeing at Providence is a vacuum attempt, an attempt to fill the vacuum. Because this election process showed you, you know, Brett Smiley, for example, on the mayor's side, had Eddie Catunio, the mail ballot king of Rhode Island, right? You know that deal. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. They get legal mail ballots in. And he Smiley won mail ballots, but it didn't matter because early voting, Morales won. And Dea Voting, Morales won. He motivated that campaign motivated people. And Helena Folks was able to motivate people. Plain and simple. So it was a it was a motivated vote. An indictment on a scenario that is on the field test, the anecdotal level, and certainly on the statistical test, the affordability in this crisis, affordability crisis in the state is totally out of control. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that everything that Helena Folkes has brought to the table in the debates or anything that's guaranteed to dig us out of the affordability crisis. But between the bridge and the sentiment around the bridge that there was just such a major disconnect, right? In terms of attitude, response. And then a messaging operation that wasn't in any way able to communicate what the governor's been doing, is doing, wants to do. It was just the meandering, centerless operation. And it's a shame. Now I have a lot more to say about Dan McKee in in the future here. But this race should have been a lot, this should have been different. I've been complaining it's going to be opioids versus the bridge for years. And it was that. And the reality is it is an affordability crisis of epic proportions, and we didn't dig into that in a way that I think would have really, really answered basic questions on differentiation and strategy on housing, on economic development, whatever. People are tired of a notion of being out of touch. And the idea that Governor McKee became the candidate that was out of touch running against the former a person who made $80,000 at Hudson's Bay, a person who was a C a chair, a major executive, all right, at CVS, a person who is connected more to the Dunes Club than anything else, or that kind of stuff. The idea that that person became the resonant voice of the people in this race, it shows you just how toxic the messaging became around the governor. Impossible to overcome. And she is not to the left of McKee. She isn't it's not that type of swing. This is not the progressive slash DSA movement across the country. This is people saying, this guy doesn't seem to have any idea what he's talking about. What world are we living in here? And if we did have an issue wrapped up, it wasn't communicated in a digestible way with infographics, commercials, general press conferences. I mean, how about this one? I got to say it. I said it today on television. I mean, I said it last night on the radio. How many times, if you listen to WPRO in the afternoons when I'm on it, how many times have we tried to bring you live coverage of the governor's press conferences? And how often are there issues with the microphones or the inability to hear the reporters asking their questions, a lack of professional contemporary media operations, right? And then last night, as the governor gets up to do his concession speech at the funeral home, the former funeral home, now Italian restaurant, he's up there and there's feedback and you can't hear him. And it was absolutely 100% encapsulating his entire campaign. He had no shot between the bridge and between not having any kind of operation to latch onto that could say, bring his 2030 plan to life. What are you talking about? Nobody knew. And folks had no problem just being the opposition. The opposition to ambiguity. And look, Ken Block's gonna give her there'll be something there now on the Republican side. We don't even know. Aaron Gakin has a slight lead over Elaine Polino by like a couple hundred votes. We'll see how that plays out. Doesn't matter. Ken Bloch could give folks a run for her money. Will it will it be real? I don't know. We we have to see what Ken released his first ad yesterday, television ad. We'll s we have to see what lane he takes. One thing that Ken Block has a disadvantage to McKee in going up against folks is that Block is not going to be able to play the, you know, I'm the working class guy, the blue-collar, the, you know, working families. That's not who Ken Block is either. So I don't know what lane he finds. Province mayor. You saw the turnout yesterday and you knew this thing was looking you. If you were a Morales supporter, you were feeling good when you saw that turnout. Look. It's rent control, but that is just a vehicle to package sentiment. Again, you cannot look out at the city of Providence right now with an honest lens and not say, we need to triage this situation right here, right now. The option that is on the table, maybe it's rent stabilization, rent control, whatever it is. But any notion of punting, any notion of, well, we'll figure this out later, on basic questions of rent, are a non-starter in a city that is the type of uh, frankly, runaway capitalism that is drowning people every single day. In a rental market, that's laugh out loud, absurd. It's it's it is it's a joke. Well, the supply and the demand, people want to be here, they'll pay the money. It's a joke. Profits over people. Period. You can make anything scarce and charge a premium for it if you if that's the kind of world you want to be in. If you want to see Providence turn into something like uh Waltham on the outskirts there, like the business park or Stanford, or all those, you know, you're going down 95, you get through Bridgeport, all those like satellite cities or Armonk in upstate or uh Westchester County. Satellite cities for the major city, right? That's what Providence could become. Oh, good, you know, the malls there, go to your Costco, go to your $3,000 apartment on in the Superman building, then, you know, get uh get yourself to the train to get up to Boston to work, et cetera. That model could exist. This could be kind of like a technocratic, semi-middle class, upper middle class, rich kid playground, right? And you can have all the versions of that. And maybe that's the that's the vision that was in play here. But anything short of that, the mistake was it is a critical mistake to not look at at the electorate and say, yeah, you know what, geez, you guys deserve some kind of strategy, some kind of direct acknowledgement that you're suffering and need intervention. And that's what this race was about. Look at the other examples, the, the, the reality of the province of city council. John Gonzalez spends $150,000 to keep his Ward 1 race uh seat. He loses. Remember, he voted no on rent stabilization. Then he came on here on Bartholomew Town, did a long-form 45-minute, maybe more explanation of why he voted no. And then during the override vote, he was absent. He did, he was not in town to override the mayor's veto on that rent stabilization. Guess what? He's out, spent $150,000. He's got video crews following him around for a year and a half. There were rumors he was going to run for mayor this time. There was rumors, there are rumors he was going to run for mayor in 2030. He who knows where a guy like that goes now. That Connor Belliger, he's out, got 18% of the vote or something like that, and a Jane Yolkin. And that uh and then Ward 13. On and on it goes. Progressives dominating in the council slate. Why? Not because of national messaging or the boogeyman or whatever. No, because people are suffering. People are hurting. They know it's wrong. They know that they have a voice and they used it. Protucket, Don Grebin goes down, 16 years as mayor. Adam Greenman's in there now. How about that League of Rhode Island business, that MAGA group, they disguised themselves Trojan horse. Remember that guy that came on lively experiment? I asked him if Biden won the election, because they're out there telling you, well, we're a moderate pro-business group. Now we're running in some Democratic primaries. We've got all these great candidates. They're gonna go out there in primary and defeat unconstitutional progressives. And then he wouldn't admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because it's MAGA in a Trojan horse scenario. They got smoked, they got crushed, they lost every race. He's boasting they got this Mark Mesrobian who's gonna beat Alana DeMaro, crushed down in Charlestown. Tina Spears, dominant performance, total joke, snuffed out. People want authenticity. People want real, actual, on the ground acknowledgement of their problem with existing in this moment because of the affordability crisis and beyond. Inauthentic garbage. You know, that's just the reality. Gutless to not run as Republicans, so you'd put a Trojan horse thing together. And people looked at it and said, we don't want that. We're tired of AI, we're tired of social media, we're tired of, you know, the real housewives. I'm tired of like whatever. Like everything feels fake and plastic and pre-pre-planned and just enough. And it doesn't feel good enough. And we feel gaslit. All right. We feel gaslit. How about that? We're not imagining the rent situation or the housing situation on the whole if you're if you're trying to buy or whatever the case is. We're not imagining the education situation. We're not imagining the energy situation. We're not imagining the healthcare situation. We're not imagining the climate situation. We're not imagining the infrastructure situation and all the nonsensical, ill-prepared type of projects we see on a regular basis on state roads. We're not imagining that we are living in a moment of fascism. And local communities strengthening, going small. Remember, I've been saying, get small. Let's get tight. People did that in this election. They looked out and they said, damn, we're good. We're going to band together around actual, authentic ideas. Now, maybe they're not all going to see them. You can't sit here and tell me that everything that Morales has proposed or folks has proposed or whatever is going to come to fruition because there are things in their plans that are simply almost impossible to execute by decree or statute or contract. But that doesn't mean from an ambition standpoint, you can't at least acknowledge the pain that people are feeling. When you don't acknowledge people's experience, you end up like Hillary Clinton. Attorney General Kim Ahern pulls it out. Look, she had a lot of advantages from intangibles. A lot a large network across multi-administrations and multiple departments. And honestly, Joe Fleming from Fleming and Associate said it earlier this year after the first AG poll came out. That she could win because she's a she's got an advantage just being differentiation-wise. She's a woman. And I I have no idea if that was a factor in someone's vote. But there it is. Alright, Lieutenant Governor. I'm very surprised, and I'm also not very surprised. I'm surprised by the spread. I thought it would be a lot closer. I thought everybody in that race ran a very inspiring campaign. I thought Zycoms of War of Ong did so. Um former mayor of Newport, City Councillor there. I thought Sue Andrebois brought a very serious attitude mixed with and knowledge mixed with a very accessible voice. I thought Cindy Coyne ran and Ross McCurdy each ran campaigns that provided value. A couple of weeks ago, I saw the Lieutenant Governor at the Rhode Island Folk Festival and we spoke for five minutes or something like that. She seemed so confident. She seemed so confident. This in spite of the fact that it was really a two percentage point spread in the most recent polling. And quite frankly, you know, she got $100,000 in outside expenditures to come her way the next day. So that's probably why. She probably knew her coalition is deep. There was a big Providence turnout. That doesn't mean that she dominated in Providence. Sue Edwards had a great performance. And I keep hearing people say, oh, would you have guessed that the one survivor would be Sabina Matos out of this cohort of people? I I don't know. I don't know. I think a lot of people have no interest in the lieutenant governor's race. And they just go and vote for Helena Folkes or David Morales or both of them. And there's that lane of, oh yeah, well, I guess the incumbent. Sure. And now she goes to face John Laughlin in the general. Laughlin, of course, is a former talk host, weekend talk host. On WPRO, he was a in the in the General Assembly, ran for Congress. Now he's running for lieutenant governor as a Republican look. I think John Laughlin's a classy enough guy that he's not going to drag this race into the type of muddy, uh racist, xenophobic space that some of the commentators online that seem to be in alignment with Mr. Laughlin's campaign have suggested already. We'll see.

unknown 23:20

Mr.

Bill Bartholomew 23:20

Laughlin's running on this b convoluted idea that the LG's office can function as some kind of inspector general, which is statutorily impossible and he would lack subpoena power sufficient to do that. So you know. Some people are I've already heard I was just someone told me, oh, this would be the first competitive race in between a Republican and a Democrat in ages. I'm like, no, it's not. Not yet. It could be. We have to see what Laughlin does. But Sabina Matos, you know what, she showed, she showed that she knows the business. And I think at the end of the day, that's probably the biggest takeaway when you really think about, you know, the actual operations of winning an election like that. What does that actually look like in real time? Sabina Matos knows the business. And by the way, let's not take anything away as well, people voted for her. The lieutenant governor doesn't get a lot of media attention. You know, I heard um, you know, was it Dan York yesterday said, well, you know, what has she done? Saved a grocery store. Well, she did attack the issue of grocery store covenants, which is an outrageous, absurd runaway capitalism type of move that creates food deserts and drives prices up. She did work on that project, and you know what? Maybe that resonated with a lot of people. You know what I mean? That res I'm in a food desert where I live. And that would resonate with me. So I'm not so sure that those hyperlocal micro issues don't add up. And if you're a lieutenant governor That's in the community with regularity. And you have those little micro shoes. Maybe it's not, hey, guess what? We just solved, you know, we figured out, you know, one of the never-ending math equations that ChatGPT is working on, or something like that. You know what I mean? It doesn't have to be that. It can be, hey, we're working on trying to bring a new grocery store to WindSocket. We're working on whatever problem it may be. And if you go on an individualized basis, one by one by one by one by one, everybody thinks they're working, you're working for them. The bottom line. You know, I was at the uh Morales after party last night. I went over there. I saw so many people that represent a wide coalition, okay? It's not just the usual suspects or whoever that you, whatever your imagined version of that event would be. It wasn't. It was very, very wide demographically, ideologically. But I'll tell you what, I haven't seen that type of experience since the George Floyd murder major protest, June 2020, 10,000 people outside of the Statehouse. That's the last time I tasted a collective nope in this community. Uh nope, we're good. You know what? Matter of fact, we're good on being gaslit about the fact that we can't afford to live in our community. We're all set. We're gonna go ahead and make a change. That's how this election felt. Now, that's not to say, again, Mayor Smiley has his positions on rent stabilization and brings facts to the table that are real. It's not as if it was, you know, just this total, you know, good versus evil type saga or anything like that. That's not at all. There are major considerations when you're talking about any kind of rent control or stabilization, or it's not as simple as a yes or no. Okay, everyone's capped at 4%, move on. Of course not. Now, the ordinance that the city council passed had a lot of carve-outs in it. But Rachel Miller, outgoing Providence City Council president, told us here on Bartholomew Town that they never once were had had the Smiley administration reached out to them about sitting down to get a deal done. They should have cut a deal. It would have been politically not helpful for morales, that's for sure. But in terms of immediate relief, they should have found a way to negotiate the correct con the uh the the correct carve-outs, timelines, moratoriums, whatever it is, in real time. Hey, huddle. Everybody's weekend plans are done. We're meeting at this location, somebody from the mayor's office, from somebody from the city council, and somebody, you know, whatever the negotiators you want in the room, and we're gonna figure out a deal, and we're gonna have a press conference on the steps of City Hall, and it's gonna be called the Save Rhode Island, Save Providence Residence Act. That would be the triage, the whole thing we need to do that. That didn't happen. Right? It didn't happen. So people acted on their own. They organized, they knocked on doors, they got behind a movement, they said, we don't feel listened to. It's not just simply we want rent control. It's simply we want our voices to be taken seriously. And when you pack out City Hall with constituents, and again, I'm not saying, I'm not sitting here telling you right now, make it very clear, on the record, I'm not sitting here telling you right now that the ordinance as it was written was the right move for Providence. I'm not saying it wasn't either. If you don't do rent control, then literally everyone's gonna move out of the state. Like, no, it's it's more a reflection of people feeling like they are a part of their government. And in a moment where, hey, you're checked out at some level because of Trump, you might be checked out because of anything. And that's totally okay. You shouldn't feel bad about that. It shouldn't be that you should be punished for not being engaged. You should be rewarded for being engaged when you're engaged on something authentic. Like, I can't afford to live in my city, I can't afford to live in my state. I'm tired of seeing the place that I want to be, the place that I have rooted down in, feeling like the rug is going to be pulled out from under me. And that's how it feels. It's a moment where it is so hard to root into anything right now. I'm at that event last night. I'm at a Morales' event, and I'm just feeling like, wow. Let me look around. Let me let me think about and feel what's happening here, which is people came together on the grounds of their own best interest. Not on the grounds of any national level psyop about socialism coming at what that is just stupid. And watch out, because now I see on the media, uh, the the of course I am the media, and we are the media, uh, the Channel 10, you know, they've got a reporter out there immediately, Democratic Socialist David Morales has won the mayorship or won the primary. What does you think about the national level of socialism? This morning I turned on the radio, Gene Valicity, socialism, socialism, socialism, socialism, socialism, socialism, socialism. They're gonna keep going until they just get fatigued. They're gonna eventually it's gonna get you're gonna start to see, okay, it doesn't really happen in New York anymore. Okay, we're moving on, okay, great. And it'll be the first crisis or whatever. But for now, that's gonna be the storyline. Oh my God. Like, move away from pro like I saw somebody post last night, hey, if you own a rental unit in Providence, you should probably get out of there now. Why? What are you an idiot? What are you stupid? I'm sorry to be harsh here, but this this is like ridiculous to know that we have seen a remarkable shift in institutions of power in recent times, right? Rhodalum politics, the old machine that controlled Providence politics, that controlled the governor's races, that controlled so much of Congress, you name it. All that, it's still there, but it's really basically gone. It's shifting away. It shifted away largely in the late 2000s, right? You can make an argument that the Travares Raimundo treasurer into governor time period, that was sort of one exit. And then it really, the old machine, it was really gone by COVID, right? And then there's this big, big struggle of who's gonna fill it. Maybe it's gonna be the Northern Rhode Island Merrill Peer Group, and Dan McKee, and Charlie Lombardi, and Bob DeSilva, and Tony Alfonso, and you name it. You know, uh maybe it's gonna be that group. But no, the Raimundo people, they want it back too. So we'll like, sorry, we'll go with Helena Folkes, we'll put a lot of those same bodies, a lot of those same minds behind that. And then there's this obvious movement where there was a huge gap in the election this year where there was no progressive candidate in the governor's race in a year that a progressive candidate probably could have made significant gains, if nothing else. But there's the progressive lane. Which is a what does that even mean? There's different factions there. Hey, is it going to be the Providence progressive lane? What about the more statewide stuff? People are trying to fight for power. The same with the media. The media's shifting. How about last night? Half of the election stuff wasn't even over the air. Channel 12, you had to download an app or watch it on YouTube for the first half of it. Everything's changing, everything's shifting, everything's changed, everything shifted. And on the flip side of it, too, Victor Meller, dominant performance in the Congressional District 2 race. He'll now have the opportunity to go lose to Seth Magaziner 65-35 or 67, whatever it ends up being. But he's the most MAGA. He's a proud J Sixer, all that business. And guess what? He dominated Dr. Stephen Skoly. Skoly, of course, he's that oral surgeon that defined defied the state on vaccine mandates and all that business. But the point is that people in the MAGA movement at Rhode Island said, we're MAGA. We're not anything else. We're not really Alan Fung. We're not really Stephen Skoly. We're not really Ashley Calis. We're not Barbara Ann Fenton Fung. We're not even necessarily Ken Hopkins. We like Vic Meller. He's a proud J Sixer. So it's a level of authenticity. It's laughable and scary. I'm I'm not into it, that's for sure. But it's a measurement of people saying, Yeah, we're tired of this garbage. What are we doing here? What are we doing? And that's also the Trump effect. This is an indictment in plain and simple terms of just how unaffordable Rhode Island has become and how difficult it is to plan a future here for many, many people. Not everybody. Not everybody. David Morales being a renter, David Morales having a perspective from and by the way, the young thing, like, okay. Guys, I hate to tell you. You you I hear so many people going, oh my God, he's only like 27 years old. Guys, do you know the age of the people who actually like basically run the world right now? In AI, in tech, in biotech? What are you talking about? Like, 27-year-olds are le are running the world. Yes, the yours over. And that includes the gaslighting culture that I think just got in impossible for many, many people to take. That doesn't mean Brett Smiley is an evil guy. You know, if you want to do that, you know, the effigies and the stickers and all that, I mean, all right. You know, that's you want to be a bully. Uh, you want to, you want to go go around and do that. You think that's that's your move, then fine. Then maybe that makes you laugh, and a couple of people give a high five as, you know, as you walk out of Riffraff or something. All right. That's not me. I'm not into that, and I don't think most people are either. I don't think most people saw anti-Bret Smiley stickers and said, Yeah, I better go vote against that guy. People just looked up and said, I don't feel like this is working, and we need to make a change. And that's what they did around the state. Grebion out. 16-year mayor of Pawtucket, he's out. Hyperlocal issues, by the way, there. Morley Field is one of them. There's a lot of other ones. It wasn't just, you know what, let's make a change. It's those incremental moments. They they come together, they forge a collective energy, right? That's what we saw. People are just done. It's not even as simple as, well, we want to go progressive. No, people want, it's not even that's that's isn't even a real word, right? Like progressive is like being able to have a city that you can afford to be in where all persons are respected for their personhood, et cetera, et cetera. Like, are those like progressive things? Jeez, not to me. Not to anybody. If if that's progressive to you, then I'm sorry, you just seem to be compassionless. It's not progressive. It's humanity. It's humanity. I think one thing that's unfortunate is that Brett Smiley getting caught in the midst of this is going to be framed as, well, he got caught by the the incumbent, the anti-incumbent sentiment, the rise of the DSA, and all that. And I don't think that's what happened here. I don't. I think this was a populist scenario. Where people literally said, I'm telling you, the situation on the ground is not the same as you seem to understand it. And they'll have to reconcile with that. It is sad on one level, because I don't, I don't, I just don't understand how this issue got so out of control. It's kind of like the Washington Bridge for McKee, right? I don't understand how the rent issue just got so out of control. You can tell me, well, donors and money and this, that, and I know that. But why did the why wasn't there collaboration on this? On finding a solution for rent. Um because all it did was tee up the political showdown. And you saw the result. It was a it was a populist thing. People said, we're not being heard. And what we didn't get, when I say it's sad, is we didn't get an actual debate on what the details of rent modification or rent controls or rent stabilization or some sort of tempering of the structure of power here and the capitalist system that has at this point. Look, I I'm right, I've told you guys that before. I've seen a 65 plus percent rent increase in my place since the time I moved in. It's a joke. It's a joke. And it's systemic. I understand tax increases when buildings are expensive. We know that. I'm not, this is not coming from that standpoint. It's just the fact. Major referendum. Major referendum on the affordability issues in this state. I can't believe John Gonzalez spent $150,000 or whatever it was on a city council race, built that persona and all of that. Again, why are we not a solutions-oriented operation here? And that's what I think the the candidates who have been ousted, especially in Providence, or Cranston and Pawtucket, Cranston has swung progressive as well, in terms of the council. But I would advise those candidates that lost to just reflect on what could I have done differently to elevate the conversation around the major issue rather than denigrate it. And I don't think there was any way this Providence mayor's race could have become anything other than a referendum on the rent issue. I did the debate with both of them. There are a lot of major issues. There are a lot of things that Brett Smiley has done very, very well as mayor and has led on, and they just didn't have the oxygen to resonate. Alright, so now we got the general. Look, it's gonna be interesting. The only thing I will say is this. Don't sleep on John Laughlin. Don't sleep on Ken Block. And I got this weird feeling about Vic Meller. You're like, what are you crazy? He can't win. He can't even come within 35, but I don't know, man. I don't know what to think of that guy. I don't know what to think about that guy. But I do think that this is a real um It's a real big moment. We saw a lot of coalition shifts, right? How about Nerona, Attorney General Narona, his coalition. Who'd he get? He won with Helena, but he lost. He endorsed Zycom Savorevant, he lost there. He endorsed Dawn Oyer in that Newport Jamestown Senate race. He won there. He obviously endorsed Keith Hoffman in the attorney general's race. He lost there. Kim Ahern won. I think he backsmiley. I'm not sure that's actually, I'm not 100% sure that's true, but a lot of like, you know what this moment's kind of like? It's like the Big Bang. And there's particles flying everywhere. And there's some of them are banding together for a second and splitting up. Some of them are banding together and become kind of staying one thing. Some of them are uh you know, are fractioning off into even smaller little micro units, and these clusters and power struggles are all happening in real time, and it's all forming our universe, our political universe in the post-Rhode Island political machine era. The players, the stars, the upstarts, the behind-the-scenes people, the talent, the media, the whole thing, it's all coming together, right? That's the other big takeaway. And I think it is a bit of a referendum also on generations. It's time for a new generation of leadership in Rhode Island, period. It's time for a new generation of leadership. Okay. One of the reasons why we have a housing crisis and an affordability crisis is because a lot of millennials are being, and even Gen X folks, are being locked out of the leadership roles that they should be in because of older generations that refuse to step away. It's time. And this election shows you that that energy it's very, very real here in Rhode Island.