Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

The Rhode Island's Future blog has been focusing (like a laser!) on the Rhode Island Senate race, a cursory look shows that things are likely to get a lot more interesting. (Yes, this is the same race that Matt Brown is running in. Yes, that's the guy I wrote about five pages down. No, he didn't write this post. Yes, he's Rhode Island's future.) First off, our friends at RI Future are saying the evidence shows that Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey will challenge incumbent Lincoln Chafee in the GOP primary. They say the best proof is that one of Laffey's friends just registered laffeyforsenate.com; I say their best proof is this National Review story ripping Chafee and predicting Laffey's rise. National Review, and its community-oriented online counterpart, are super-effective conservative advocacy machines, about as well connected in Republican Washington as an organization can get. Honestly, I no longer believe in coincidences in Republican messaging, and if websites are registered for the conservative challenger the same week an influential magazine writes, "Conservatives would not be any worse off with a Democrat than with Chafee in the Senate," look, the guy's running. So here we are: two solid Democratic candidates, our nominally Republican incumbent, and a primary challenge from the right. If you like interesting campaigns half as much as I do, this should be a good one.

Still, I'm not sure what this means for the race. The conventional wisdom is that Laffey could well beat Chafee in the primary, but he'd never win the general election. The logic's not bad. Primary electorates skew away from the center, Rhode Island has some of the lowest turnout rates in the country, you've only got a population around a million to begin with. Add that up, and you could easily imagine Laffey convincing just enough conservatives to pull off the upset. Then, the philosophy goes, Laffey loses the general election: Laffey is way conservative and Rhode Island is way liberal. RI usually has amongst the highest support in the country for Democratic presidential candidates, the state legislature is seriously something like 85% Democratic, and anecdotally, it was only when I left the state after growing up here that I realized there were valid reasons to support Republican candidates. In such a Democratic state, then, it's not that unfeasible that Laffey could win a low-turnout GOP primary, at which point he'd get shellacked by Brown or Whitehouse.

Still, I'm not convinced about the general election either. For starters, you really can't count Chafee out until he's lost. Sure, his reelect is something like 36, but I can see Chafee assembling a strong coalition regardless. For all the supposed conservatism of Republican primary electorates, Rhode Island is still a pretty liberal state, and the generally preferred level of government activity is pretty high. Chafee's name recognition will be an asset, too: I've always found incumbents to do surprisingly well in primaries, usually because some people vote every time and vote for the guy they know better. Finally, look, in Rhode Island a lot of people just know each other. It just happens, people know the guy, they've worked with him, or they're good friends with his cousin. That's the state I live in. So add all those factors together, and Chafee just might be able to work his way into a win here. They thought he'd be an easy target in 2000 too.

I also disagree that Laffey will be an easy knockdown in the general election. If he beats the incumbent in the primary, he's going to ride a wave of momentum that he might be able to turn into widespread populism in the two months between the primary and the general. He's a really popular guy, and he's been skilled at casting his actions while mayor as populist uprisings against the entrenched establishment. That always plays well around here (the statue on top of the state house is a guy named Independence Man, and we declared our indepedence from the Brits two months early), so I'm not convinced that a Democrat listing Laffey's conservative viewpoints will necessarily win. He'll have no shortage of money, and apparently he's got the fire in the belly worse than any politician out there.

Now, I'm not saying it'll be a surprise for Democrats to pick up a seat by smooshing Laffey around for being worse than Hitler, but I suggest there remain other possibilities. But it's always great to have an exciting campaign in your home state, so to all my readers starved for more commentary on topics peripherally related to wrestling and video games: you haven't heard the last of this one!