2022 Rhode Island General Assembly general election ratings 2.0
Now that we are past Rhode Island’s September primary election, it’s time to revisit (later than I planned, but such is life) my general election ratings for the 113 seats in Rhode Island General Assembly. If you missed my first set of ratings from July, I would encourage you to read that post first, as it touches on the various factors that I weigh in putting these ratings together. I will go into some, but not all, of those in this post.
While this primary was hugely consequential at the statewide level, from Governor on down, there was also a significant opportunity for a reshaping of the General Assembly, with a healthy number of incumbents being challenged, including the state’s top legislative leaders. That reshaping, at least in the primary, did not come to pass. Much has been made of how poorly progressive challengers fared given their lofty promises, but incumbents of all ideological stripes fared well, just as challengers of all stripes fared poorly.
Given the general security of incumbents in the RIGA, the success of incumbents in the primary is a major reason why I don’t have many rating changes to make for now. Naturally, for this reason, I’m looking a lot at open seats and, in fact, the only two changes I’m going with are in open Senate seats in the City of Warwick.
Senate
Rating change — SD 29: Lean D to Tossup
Rating change — SD 31 Lean D to Likely D
In SD29, Senate Majority Leader Mike McCaffrey will be replaced by either progressive Democrat Jennifer Rourke (Rourke is the founder of the progressive Rhode Island Political Co-Op) or Republican Anthony Deluca III, who is a city employee in Warwick. Both defeated one primary opponent.
I debated whether to leave this race at Lean D. If you forced me to choose now, I would say Rourke is a slight favorite. But when I went digging, one finding solidified for me the move to toss-up: SD 29, which was (using the new district borders) Trump +1 in 2016 and Biden +9 in 2020, would be the most competitive district to elect a Co-Op candidate in a general election (the Co-Op was founded ahead of the 2020 elections) . If Rourke were to win, she would be alone among the progressives in the legislature in representing a seat that went for Trump, or even for Biden by single digits (barring an upset by a different progressive candidate in a red or purple district this year). Senator Jeanine Calkin, who I discuss more below, held a single-digit Clinton seat (SD30), but did not face a general election in either 2016 or 2020.
This presents a rather interesting test case for RI progressives. Progressives are often fond of claiming that their ideas are broadly popular with the electorate, and especially at the national level, there is talk every 2 years about how Dems should nominate progressives for purple and even red seats. Nationally, there is very little evidence that this would be a successful strategy, and actually many examples to the contrary. Progressives, in Congress and in RI, have shown they can win primaries in ultra-blue districts, but signature victories in toss up seats are inevitably harder to pull off.
Rourke is likely to benefit from having the resources of Co-Op at her back (it’s not like they have other races to worry about), and had $19,834 on hand pre-primary, more than Michael Carreiro, who she defeated in the primary. Republicans should be glad that Deluca prevailed in his primary, given that he appeared to be a more serious candidate. Deluca had $3,178 on hand pre-primary, while his opponent Christopher Barker had just $284. This is still a significant financial gap for Deluca, so I will be interested to see what the next financial disclosures look like for both candidates
In SD 31, the more moderate candidate Matthew LaMountain prevailed against progressive Harrison Tuttle. LaMountain will face Republican Lisa Morse, who defeated John Silvaggio in the primary. This is the most Democratic of the 3 Warwick Senate seats (Clinton +11/Biden +20), and moves to Likely D with the primary victory by LaMountain, who is establishment-backed and the most well-funded in the race, with $13,986 cash on hand pre-primary compared to $8,948 for Tuttle. Morse had just $1,399 on hand and faces an uphill battle even in an open seat.
What else am I keeping my eye on?
First, in SD 30 (Clinton +3/Biden +13) progressive Senator Jeanine Calkin was the only incumbent senator to lose her seat. Mark McKenney, who unseated Calkin once before in 2018, before losing it back to Calkin in 2020, is a favorite to win in the general election against Marjorie Tudino, who was uncontested in the Republican primary. While I view races with no incumbents as more competitive naturally, McKenney is not a typical non-incumbent. With no Republican primary, I have no fundraising info on Tudino, and would need to see a notable haul from her or some issue with McKenney to move this to Lean D.
SD 22 (Trump +5/Biden +2) in Smithfield stays at a toss up even with the victory of establishment-backed David Tikoian in the Democratic primary. Republican Paul Santucci took 42 percent of the vote against longtime incumbent Stephen Archambault in 2020. The three-way race in Lincoln’s SD-17 (Trump +5/Biden+4), currently held by Republican Senator Thomas Paolino, had no primaries, meaning a lack of recent fundraising data as well. So it stays where it is for now.
House
No rating changes to give here. Three incumbents were defeated: Jean Barros (HD 59 — Pawtucket) by Jennifer Stewart, James McLaughlin (HD57 — Cumberland) by Brandon Voas and Anastasia Williams (HD9 — Providence) by Enrique Sanchez, but all in either uncontested or uncompetitive districts.
In HD42 (Trump +12/Trump +7), Edward Cardillo prevailed in a messy primary which can only be described as extremely Johnston. You can’t really be confident that we’ve seen the end of the strangeness in this one, so I am leaving the race in this red district at toss up for now. Certainly interested in learning more about the seriousness of the campaign by Republican Harold Borders in the next round of fundraising reports.
I am also keeping an eye on Warwick’s, HD21 (Clinton +1/Biden +12) held by Rep. Camille Vella-Wilkinson, a conservative democrat who survived a progressive primary opponent. Republican Marie Hopkins appears to be running a serious campaign in that district.
That’s all for now. The next round of fundraising disclosures that I mentioned throughout will cover the period thorough September and are due in late October, which will give me a chance to publish a final set of ratings before election day, barring any major story between now and then that changes something about any of these races. As always, I would never rule out such a thing.
