A little after 9 p.m. on Wednesday, inside Narragansett Brewery in Fox Point, more than 100 people who worked for or around Mayor Brett Smiley stood holding beers that had gone flat an hour earlier. City staff. A handful of lobbyists. Nobody in that room seriously believed a state representative running on a fraction of Smiley’s budget could beat a sitting mayor in a Democratic primary. Providence had never seen that happen. Then the numbers came in.
Smiley wasn’t alone. Gov. Dan McKee lost to Helena Foulkes by 24 points, the first sitting Rhode Island governor beaten in a primary since before I was born. Pawtucket’s Don Grebien, 16 years in office and rarely challenged, lost to Adam Greenman, a former nonprofit executive. Kim Ahern, a first-time candidate who was massively outspent, beat the outgoing attorney general’s hand-picked successor for the AG nomination. And a coalition-backed slate of Providence city council candidates took seven of eight contested seats the same night, four different races with one pattern running underneath all of them.
I spend most of my time inside small and mid-sized nonprofits around Rhode Island, usually sitting across a table from an executive director trying to figure out how to compete for the same donors and the same attention as an organization five times their budget. Watching this primary, I kept thinking about how much of what won these races is stuff nonprofits already half know and rarely do.
Morales was outspent something like five to one and took zero corporate PAC money. His volunteers knocked on more than 80,000 doors, by his own count. When Smiley’s team ran ads reviving an old policy position Morales had already walked back, nobody on his side bothered answering it. He just kept talking about rent, about affordability, and about neighbors who felt like City Hall had stopped listening. His field director told The Nation that volunteers never got a script. They got told to knock and talk, in whatever words felt like their own.
A donor list built out of real relationships works the same way a volunteer list does: it beats one that’s bought or rented, for the same reason Morales’ 80,000 doors beat Smiley’s massive ad budget. Most nonprofits already know this in theory and still send the mail merge instead of asking a board member to bring two friends to coffee and explain, in their own words, why the work matters to them. It takes longer than a form letter, but it’s the difference between someone who gives once and someone who’s still writing checks in five years.
Greenman ran a different kind of race, but with the same discipline. Instead of attacking Grebien, he built his campaign around a plain accounting of what Pawtucket had lost on Grebien’s watch: the PawSox, Memorial Hospital, a Hasbro headquarters that won’t be around much longer. “Being nice isn’t enough to move the city forward,” he told The Globe when he announced. Blunt, but aimed at the facts, not at the man himself. That’s a distinction worth noting the next time a nonprofit board wants to build a pitch around how great you are, instead of what’s actually broken and what you’d do about it.
Ahern’s race looked different from the other three. The seat was open, and she was running against the party’s anointed heir, Keith Hoffmann, who had the outgoing attorney general’s endorsement and had raised more than a million and a half dollars, including $760,000 of his own money. She had to loan her own campaign nearly $300,000 in the final weeks just to answer his ads, and won anyway, by about three points, on a closing message about the state she wanted rather than a rebuttal of Hoffmann. Nonprofits get this backward all the time: the instinct when you’re outspent is to spend what little you have arguing with the bigger, better-funded voice in the room, instead of just saying, clearly, what you’d do differently.
The city council results might be the most useful example for a nonprofit board, because this one is about infrastructure, not message. Instead of eight candidates each building a separate operation, a coalition of unions and progressive groups ran combined canvasses, sharing volunteers, walk lists, and message across the whole slate. Nobody built a donor base or a door-knocking operation from zero. They borrowed each other’s, and seven of eight of them won. Most nonprofits treat the peer organization working the same issue as a rival for the same donors. Two organizations sharing an event, a mailing list, or a volunteer pool reach more people together than either reaches alone, the way Reclaim RI’s canvassers ran one walk sheet for Morales and eight council candidates instead of nine separate operations.
More than 37,000 Rhode Islanders voted early in person this cycle, more than double the 2022 total and about three times 2024’s, in a state where turnout hadn’t cracked 10 percent two years before. Morales pointed to the surge as one reason he won, and the mechanism isn’t complicated. That kind of jump happens when a campaign puts an actual person at an actual door, someone who lives three streets over, with a specific reason for that specific voter to bother showing up that year.
The messaging held up under the same kind of pressure. Housing in Providence is genuinely unaffordable, and Pawtucket genuinely lost its ballpark and its hospital, and Ahern ran in a state where trust in government sits somewhere between low and nonexistent. Nobody pretended otherwise. What separated the winners from everyone they beat wasn’t a rosier picture of any of that so much as pairing the honest version with something specific to do about it: sponsor a family, fund a position for a year, show up to one event on one date. It sounds small on paper, but it’s the difference between a donor who feels talked at and a donor who knows exactly what their check is covering.
Campaigns could stand to learn something from nonprofits, too. Nonprofits are, out of necessity, good at staying in a relationship with someone after the ask lands, in a way most campaigns never bother to be. A program officer thanks a donor, reports back on what the gift actually did, and finds them some smaller way to stay involved six months later, because the same donor needs to give again next year, and the year after that. Campaigns almost never build that habit. The only transaction that counts to them, the vote, happens once every two or four years, and the volunteer list mostly goes dark until the next one starts.
Foulkes, Morales, Greenman, and Ahern didn’t win because Rhode Islanders got more idealistic overnight. They won because four different campaigns did the slower, less flattering version of politics: naming what’s actually broken, building relationships instead of buying attention, and giving people something specific enough to say yes to. Nonprofits already live the honest half of that. The organizing half, the shared canvasses and the door-to-door discipline, is worth borrowing from this primary. And the part worth handing back, before this fall’s volunteer lists go quiet and this coalition scatters the way most of them do, is the oldest habit in nonprofit fundraising: say thank you, report back on what it accomplished, and keep showing up, for the people who supported you and the people who didn’t.
