TGIF: Ian Donnis’ Rhode Island politics roundup for Feb. 6, 2026

Do I cheer for the Patriots? Of course. But for me, the Super Bowl is mostly about the nachos and the approach of baseball. Thanks for stopping by for my weekly column. You can follow me through the week on Bluesky, threads and X. Here we go.

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Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee just had one of his best political weeks in a long time.

Consider:

***House Speaker Joe Shekarchi revealed Tuesday he will not run in the Democratic primary for governor.

***A Morning Consult survey showed McKee’s approval up by 17 points, to a respectable 49%.

***It hardly seemed coincidental when word came within 24 hours of Shekarchi’s announcement that RIDOT Director Peter Alviti – a pugnacious face of the Washington Bridge saga, and someone whose rise was fueled by the support of the influential Laborers’ union – was riding off into the sunset.

In short, the week marked a reset in the Democratic primary for governor, with McKee and challenger Helena Foulkes locked in a collision course for the election on Sept. 8. Foulkes continues to significantly outpace McKee in fundraising, bringing in more than two times what his campaign collected in the last quarter of 2024. The former CVS executive seems to have learned the lessons of her three-point primary loss to McKee in 2022. Foulkes, 61, got an early start this time, she’s worked to build statewide connections, and an incumbent’s record offers plenty of grist for the mill. McKee, 74, maintains he has a good story – about jobs and affordability, education, and so on – and he’s come to the realization that it’s his job to tell it (the governor makes his first appearance since 2021 on WPRI’s Newsmakers this weekend). On the other hand, voters’ views of the Washington Bridge are baked-in to some extent, and McKee stuck by Alviti for years after the failure of the westbound side. So is the Morning Consult finding a signal of a turnaround for McKee or an outlier? What is clear is that with eight months and two days until the primary, the campaign will be nasty, brutish and short. On the plus side, the battle between two main rivals offers an opportunity for a lot of contrast, helping voters to make their choice for Rhode Island’s top elected official.

Rhode Islanders remain pessimistic about the cost of living, housing affordability and their overall financial situation, according to the latest RI Life Index, a statewide poll done by Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island and Brown University’s School of Public Health. More here from Luis Hernandez.

The more time went by, the less likely it seemed that House Speaker Joe Shekarchi would jump into the Democratic primary for governor. On Tuesday, Shekarchi, 63, told a gaggle of reporters outside his third-floor Statehouse office that his decision not to run was based on logic, not emotion, and that, yes, the uncertainty of competing in a three-way primary was a factor in his decision. Pragmatism and deliberation have been a signature of Shekarchi’s five years as speaker, and his calm persona, coming after mercurial predecessor Nick Mattiello, ushered in a new era of good feeling into the House of Representatives. The Warwick Democrat has more than $4 million in his campaign account and he was likely to get considerable labor support, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Shekarchi second-guesses his decision. What does the future hold for him? Timing is to politics what location is to real estate, so that’s hard to say. History is replete with would-be candidates who missed their shot. There are also counter-examples, like how Sheldon Whitehouse experienced a crushingly narrow loss to Myrth York in the 2002 primary for governor – and then vaulted into the U.S. Senate four years later. Shekarchi said he plans to seek re-election and hopes to remain speaker next January. But he continues to tout Majority Leader Chris Blazejewski (D-Providence) as his (eventual) successor, and it’s unclear when Shekarchi – who has talked of being closer to the end of his speakership than the beginning – will decide to sign off.

RIDOT Director Peter Alviti, one of the longest-serving department directors in state government, wanted to have his cake and eat it, too, while making his exit. With his weekly call-ins to WPRO, he winked at the notion of public accessibility, taking notes on callers’ gripes about this pothole or that traffic jam. But Alviti steered clear of doing an in-depth sit-down interview on the subject that obsessed Rhode Islanders in recent years – the Washington Bridge – ever since the westbound section was closed on an emergency basis in December 2023. When I ran into Alviti at the Statehouse in early 2024 and expressed concern about his inaccessibility, his office scheduled an interview – only to later cancel it on short notice. At the time, Attorney General Peter Nerhona said RIDOT’s pretext for scrapping the interview, the state’s lawsuit against 13 bridge contractors, wasn’t valid. “The media is the means by which we speak to the people who elected us and it’s why I think the better approach is to be always accessible,” Neronha said. It ultimately took the General Assembly’s move to hire former U.S. Attorney Zachary Cunha to get Alviti to sit for an array of appropriately tough questions. That inquiry shone a light on the RIDOT head’s comfort with how the agency relies on state contractors to check the billions of dollars of work of other contractors – a situation rife with potential flaws.

Now with Alviti retiring later this month, Gov. McKee’s campaign gets a bit of separation from the bombastic RIDOT director. Given labor’s antipathy toward Helena Foulkes, the governor is poised to enjoy union support somewhere close to the level where it made a big difference for him in 2022. But Alviti and the bridge, and McKee’s decision to stick by the RIDOT chief for years, remain a useful pinata for Foulkes as she tries to win the race for governor. Alviti, being Alviti, his exit tour includes a lengthy statement extolling himself, describing how he is leaving on his own terms and vowing to clap back against his critics: “If anyone lies or misrepresents the facts for personal gain, they will hear from me – forcefully.” This is a bit much even for the governor.

When a Massachusetts judge berated a pregnant woman in 1986 for seeking protection from her estranged husband, it was an egregious example of the judicial system’s abiding indifference toward domestic violence. Episodes like that raised awareness about the extent of the problem and how courts and cops needed to do better. Rhode Island passed a law to address that in 1988. But even though major categories of violent crime have fallen in Providence and other American cities since then, the number of statewide arrests for domestic violence each year continues to top 5,000 – the same number during the late 1990s. (Tim Arango and I wrote about this problem 26 years ago, in 2000 – enough time and then some for him to transform from a shaggy grad student at Brown to a star at The New York Times – and yet here we are.) The state Supreme Court’s Domestic Violence Monitoring Unit only lists cases through 2000. Info provided by court spokeswoman Alexandra Kriss shows that the trend continued through 2023, the most recent available data, with 5,548 arrests. And for every arrest, there are other cases that go unreported.

Services for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking have multiplied, but funding limits the response, according to Vanessa Volz, president/CEO of Sojourner House, my guest this week on One on One on Ocean State Media. “Last year’s a great example,” she said. “Of the hotline calls that we received, we were only able to assist 11% of people seeking emergency shelter in the entire year. So we turned away so many more people who needed that immediate help, who had nowhere to go that night. And it’s because of resources, we don’t have enough resources to really provide the support that victims and survivors need.”

***Floor votes on the $18 million reserve fund meant to solidify the Centurion Foundation’s acquisition of Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital are expected Tuesday.

*** Brown’s School of Public Health is staging a seminar next Wednesday, Feb. 11, on the Future of Health Policy in Rhode Island.

***Enrolled nursing students who commit to join Women & Infants upon graduation and licensure will receive $45,000 in loan repayment over a three-year period under a new program.

***Researchers at Brown University Health have identified a key factor that may help treat glioblastoma, the aggressive and common form of adult brain cancer.

Don Grebien has proven a reliable vote-getter since first winning election in 2010. He’s touting the soccer stadium, train station and residential conversion of old mills as signs that Pawtucket is moving in the right direction. But Democratic challenger Adam Greenman announced his campaign this week and he said the loss of Memorial Hospital, the PawSox and Hasbro points to the need for change.

In a sign that her tenure on the Council on Foreign Relations is bolstering her cred, our former governor, Gina Raimondo, will deliver a keynote at Vanderbilt’s Institute of National Security on “Modern Conflicts and Emerging Threats.” The event is invitation-only …. Marisa O’Gara, who ran Jorge Elorza’s 2014 campaign for mayor, has been sworn in to the bar in Kansas – don’t sleep on the barbecue …. Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos announced her re-election campaign this week …. Kenna Harmony Rubin, a professor in URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, has been named by The Explorers Club to its annual list of people doing remarkable stuff with science and exploration …. Col. Stephen Guertin has been named as the next executive director of SENEDIA, which bills itself as the alliance for defense, tech, talent and innovation …. Brown professor of neuroscience and engineering John Donohue, known for his pioneering work in brain-computer interfaces, is a winner of the 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

Back in 2012, when social media was still somewhat new, I wrote a blog wondering why more state lawmakers in Rhode Island weren’t using Twitter. We had good times over the years, like when Curt Schilling sparred with some of us reporters in real time in the land of tweets. Somewhere along the way, things took a turn for the worse. (And I got locked out of my account, with no way back in.) There’s more diffusion, with Bluesky, Threads, TikTok, Reddit and other stuff competing for mindshare, and less of the communal conversation typical of early Twitter. Now, Phil Eil, in a piece being published in the Globe this weekend, argues that public officials like U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren should get off X. So we’ve kind of come full circle, right?

After living in Providence and Pawtucket, I’ve been consistently impressed by the snowplowing in East Providence. Perhaps the town knows something that other places don’t. If so, it remains a secret because Mayor Bob DaSilva’s spokesman didn’t respond to my inquiry.