Primary Preview: Rhode Island, 2022
Welcome again to Socialism on the Ballot, folks. This week’s primary preview—a look into the members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) running for elected office, and who DSA chapters have thrown their weight behind in the coming elections—covers the humble state of Rhode Island, a perhaps unexpected area for socialists to have any chance in. Although Rhode Island is somewhat notorious for its capitalist, corporatist, corrupt, and centrist politics, there has been a massive effort by the left in the state to change this, and to build an equitable Rhode Island for everyone. The local DSA chapter, Providence DSA, is in particular looking to double its inroads in the state legislature this year, and achieve a three-person block on the 15-person city council of Providence.
Let’s dig deep into who they’re backing, folks.
David Morales (Rhode Island House of Representatives District 7)
DSA member David Morales (he/him) is the first of Providence DSA’s endorsements this year and is standing effectively unopposed in this mostly-Hispanic district straddling the Providence neighborhoods of Mount Pleasant and Elmhurst. He’ll be representing a nearly identical set of constituents his year: the new House District 7 is virtually unchanged from redistricting—most likely because the district is one of just a few majority-minority ones in the entire state. While Rhode Island is a state where it is alleged “both Democratic and Republican incumbents were allowed to shape their districts during private meetings with the state’s long-time redistricting consultant” I have a pretty strong suspicion Morales, who openly identifies as a DSA member on his official House page, is not one of these people. Morales won an impressive 49-29 victory in 2020 against Deputy Majority Leader Daniel McKiernan, who had been an incumbent since 2014, as a part of a broader progressive wave in Rhode Island’s legislature. Not usually a way to endear yourself to the establishment.
Key legislation Morales has supported or co-sponsored in his time in office thus far which have passed include a bill to cap the monthly cost of insulin at $40; a bill to protect immigrant whistleblowers from retribution by their employers; and a bill which prevents workers from being excluded from receiving overtime pay on Sunday and holidays. In the legislature he has also advocated for single-payer, providing essential workers with hazard pay, and preventing people from experiencing utility shut-offs. This session, he pressed for zoning reform (preventing single-family housing in municipalities of more than 20,000), making the tipped minimum wage $15/hr, a prohibition on police robot technology, successfully on legalizing cannabis, and increasing the penalties on wage theft by employers among other things.
Morales does nominally have a challenger—the independent candidate Christopher Ireland—but needless to say this is not a serious candidacy. The most significant stakes here are whether or not Morales (and that his fellow socialist and DSA member Sam Bell) will drive strong turnout in the primary which will have downballot benefits for Providence City Council candidates Jackie Goldman and Miguel Sanchez.
Enrique Sanchez (Rhode Island House of Representatives District 9)
DSA member Enrique Sanchez (he/him) does not hide his membership. It’s on his website, in his Twitter biography, and an integral part of his candidacy. In this district, Sanchez is the major challenger to 30-year, 15-term incumbent Anastasia Williams and hoping to unseat her from the left. It will be an uphill bid: after a scare of a primary in 2016, Williams dispatched a second primary in 2018 with ease; she is also a good fit for this district as an Afro-Latina born in Panama. But success for a socialist in this part of Providence is certainly not without precedent. Both Sam Bell in State Senate District 5 and Rachel Miller in Providence City Council Ward 13 have overlapping constituencies with House District 9 in the neighborhood of Federal Hill.
Sanchez, 25 and a substitute teacher, has been an Olneyville resident for his entire life. Like many socialist candidates he grew up in a household that struggled to get by; as he describes it, “My mom raised my brother, my sister, and me mostly by herself, and when I was in high school, she had to make the difficult decision to put our family on food stamps to get by.” He was not originally involved in politics, but that changed after the combination of the pandemic and George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Sanchez was a cofounder of mutual aid group Wide Awake PVD and became the political director for Rhode Island’s Black Lives Matter PAC that year, and has subsequently become involved in Reclaim RI, the Sunrise Movement, and Providence DSA. (But he might be better known for a… weird hit-piece, for lack of better wording over him expressing objection to Elon Musk buying Twitter to his classes.)
His platform for this district is straightforward. He calls for repealing Rhode Island’s 2006 tax cuts for the rich and advocates for a minimum wage of at least $19; wants to build more affordable housing units in Providence and other cities and stabilize rent; re-fund public schools in Rhode Island; implement universal healthcare; replace lead pipes and keep polluters out of neighborhoods; and categorically oppose ICE.
With all this in mind, I would still ultimately consider this one in the Williams column—it’s simply difficult to unseat long-running incumbents like this, and by now Williams should be well-suited to a primary challenge as this is her third in four cycles. If Sanchez were to win this race, I’d anticipate him needing strong performances in the area between the Huntington Expressway and Bridgham Street—which is consistently Williams’s worst area due to its plurality white population. He would also need to shave her margins significantly in Olneyville, his home neighborhood, as Williams generally gets between 70% and 80% out of it.
Kinverly Dicupe (Rhode Island House of Representatives District 62)
DSA member and co-chair of Providence DSA Kinverly Dicupe (she/her), who hides her membership in the organization even less than Sanchez, is running in this Pawtucket-based district that slighted her during redistricting—it moved slightly, necessitating her to move in kind. Dicupe is challenging incumbent of 14 years Mary Messier, who hasn’t even faced a general election opponent (much less a primary challenger) since 2014. Although running in a different city, Rhode Island’s small size means that Dicupe is just a few minutes removed from the hotbed of socialist success that is Providence, no doubt with hopes that this success can expand northward into the future.
Dicupe, like Sanchez, is also 25. But she is an Afro-Latina born in Puerto Rico to Dominican parents, and she’s certainly not a newcomer to politics. She is the co-founder of Reclaim Rhode Island which sought to build on the momentum of the Bernie 2020 presidential campaign, and served as its organizing director prior to her campaign. As mentioned before, Dicupe is the co-chair of Providence DSA, having served in that position since at least 2020. Also on her resume are creating food programs, electing several progressive candidates, and advocacy for Medicare for All both in Rhode Island and nationally. Not surprisingly these priorities form the basis of her campaign’s platform: implement Medicare for All, fight for a Green New Deal, build low-income and public housing, invest in education, and enshrine a $19/hr minimum wage in the state.
But again, I have to lean toward the incumbent here, although this is not a district I’m as confident about. When Messier was primaried in 2014, the margin was about 60-40, with her best performances in the west of the district—Pawtucket proper—and her worst in the outlying areas. (Messier, for what it’s worth, also lives around the center of the district and did well there too.) But I’d also expect Dicupe to have that pattern of vote if she was going to do well: her coalition is likely to be relatively non-white, and non-white voters are almost entirely in the west of the district. So it seems like a question of who can turn out their respective base more, and if that’s the case the advantage should go to Messier, whose primary coalition is likely to be whiter than Dicupe’s and thus whose primary coalition is presumably in the majority in this mostly-white district. But weirder things have happened—and it’s not a given that my presumptions are correct. In many cases, even non-white socialist candidates like Dicupe do better with white voters than non-white ones. Definitely keep an eye on this district.
Sam Bell (Rhode Island State Senate District 5)
Last among the legislative candidates for Providence DSA is fellow member—and their first successful candidate—Sam Bell (he/him), now 33, who ousted twelve-year incumbent Paul Jabour in 2018. Bell is now looking for his third term in office in this plurality-Hispanic district that covers much of the neighborhoods of Federal Hill and Mount Pleasant, and no doubt because of his advocacy and positions, for the second cycle in a row he has a primary opponent.
Bell has done extensive work throughout his time in office, most prominently as a vocal advocate for the end of budget cuts to Rhode Island’s Medicare, deprivatizing the system entirely, and eventually implementing a Medicare for All system. But he has also been an advocate on other contemporary progressive issues in Rhode Island: repealing tax cuts to the wealthy, building affordable housing, codifying Roe v. Wade into law, and implementing a state level Green New Deal among them. And Bell has also led the fight on a number of novel issues too, particularly LGBTQ+ rights—Bell is a proud and open bisexual, as is his wife—and prison issues, where he has advocated for paying prisoners the $12/hr minimum wage Rhode Island and making it easier for them to vote. These policies have without question drawn the ire of Rhode Island’s establishment. In 2020, Bell drew Ward 5 councilmember Jo-Ann Ryan as a primary challenger but dispatched her by 73-27; this year, he seems to have drawn another Providence councilmember: Ward 14’s David Salvatore.
Salvatore, who primarily represents the neighborhoods of Wanskuck and Elmhurst (immediately to District 5’s north), is a fairly credible opponent who is by all accounts well liked by his constituents. But the vast majority of his constituents are not in the new District 5, which only loosely overlaps with his city council district. And Sam Bell is by all accounts well liked by his constituents too—not least because of the previous primary attempt by Jo-Ann Ryan, whose Ward 5 overlaps heavily with District 5, being defeated by a titanic margin. It’s almost absurdist to see a second councilmember launch a bid like this, when arguably a better one in the previous cycle has already failed spectacularly, but nonetheless Salvatore is pressing forward. His main support is organized labor, which has backed him up to and including the Rhode Island AFL-CIO. Bell has the party endorsement and a whole host of institutional endorsements, however—this should really not be a close race, and I think Bell is the strong favorite here. If it is a close race, Salvatore is most likely obliterating Bell in the north of the district, and seriously clipping his margins in the center of the district with Hispanic voters.
Jackie Goldman (Providence City Council Ward 5)
We move now to the municipal level, where member-candidate Jackie Goldman (they/them) is doing two things in Providence City Council Ward 5: hoping to build on higher-level success in the area, but also engaging in something of a revenge bid for Providence DSA. See, Goldman is facing off against incumbent Jo-Ann Ryan—the just-mentioned councilwoman who tried to primary Sam Bell in 2020 and lost that bid in an embarrassing landslide. And even if materially the position Jo-Ann Ryan holds currently is not the biggest deal, it would, to say the least, be a rather symbolic blow to the Rhode Island establishment for her to get swamped trying to primary out a socialist and then lose to a socialist in her own back yard. There are real—and funny—stakes for this race!
But Goldman is a candidate defined by more than just their relation to this amusing back-and-forth: they would, for example, be the first nonbinary councilperson in Providence, and one of a growing but still very small number of openly nonbinary lawmakers in the whole country. Goldman has also been socially and politically involved for a lengthy period of their life. Previously an AmeriCorps alumni who served around the country and was exposed to consistent poverty and injustice, Goldman is now a public health researcher working to prevent drug overdoses with Brown University’s People, Place and Health Collective. When they moved to Providence in 2017 to study epidemiology, they also became more involved with community organizing; they canvassed for progressive candidates in 2018 and 2020, and began testifying for bills including “$15 minimum wage, Medicare For All, and a state-wide Green New Deal” by their own description.
Goldman is running on a suite of political reforms that include zoning reform to build more affordable housing and ending tax breaks to developers; creating an elected school committee and giving more local power to Providence Public Schools (which are currently state run); changes to policing that include a mobile crisis intervention team to respond to non-violent crime, restricting police use of pepper spray and other escalations, and giving more power to the Providence External Review Authority (PERA); and being more responsive to constituent concerns and infrastructure issues. By contrast, the biggest signature policy wins touted by Jo-Ann Ryan seem to be winning significant amounts of police funding and public safety money in last year’s Providence budget, and a handful of investments in Providence schools.
It would probably not surprise you if I said Ryan isn’t a very inspiring candidate; nor do I think it’d surprise you if I said that her control of this district is weak. In 2018 she put up a paltry 48% against two Democratic primary challengers, with only the area around the Capitol Ridge assisted living facility and St. Pius V Catholic Church (which she attends) providing her healthy vote margins. With just Goldman challenging her this year, she cannot count on vote splitting to save her. Accordingly, I think this race is in the tossup category, and Goldman’s path is actually very easy to identify: shave Ryan’s margins in the east of the district, and consolidate the 2018 non-Ryan vote in the western half of the district. If they can do that they will unseat Ryan. Watch also for any downballot support they may receive from Sam Bell and David Morales.
Miguel Sanchez (Providence City Council Ward 6)
Our final candidate today, member-candidate Miguel Sanchez (he/him), is in a two-person race in the Ward immediately south—majority-Hispanic, and open-seat Ward 6. Incumbent councilman Michael Correia is term-limited here, and the resulting race to replace him is shockingly quiet, enough that it’s really hard to cover in depth.
To summarize: Sanchez is up against the very anonymous Joseph Giampietro, who does not appear to have a campaign website (admittedly, neither does Sanchez). The totality of the information about his campaign and priorities that I can gleam is from Amy Russo of The Providence Journal, who writes:
[Giampetro] cited educational improvements and healing community divisions as his top issues. Giampietro said his focus would be "getting better performances out of kids and teachers with the help of parents" and ensuring English as a Second Language courses are available to immigrants. To connect community members, Giampietro said "community clean up teams" and social events would be beneficial.
Not a great deal to go off of. Sanchez for his part supports the aforementioned priorities of other DSA candidates here: zoning reform, policing changes, more autonomy to the Providence school system, etc. Russo also notes a unique policy left implied on other websites, but explicit for Sanchez: rent stabilization should be considered for Providence.
I would have to think Sanchez is favored since he has the backing of the progressive left in Rhode Island and their power is substantial, but the lack of any real coverage of this race and a lack of anything to measure it against makes it all-but-impossible to prognosticate here meaningfully.