League of Rhode Island Businesses: Republican business owners seeking power by subverting campaign finance rules and misleading voters

Behind the mask

Tom Sgouros

Things are seldom dull in the world of politics. This year, Rhode Island has seen the creation of the “League of Rhode Island Businesses,” an organization running several candidates for the General Assembly, many in Democratic primaries. League founder Dave Levesque, who owns the Brewed Awakenings coffee shops in Cranston, Johnston, and Warwick, is a Republican pro-gun activist who feels his point of view is underrepresented at the State House.

You can see a “Lively” interview with him where he calls women’s rights and the repeal of Roe v. Wade “little bitty issues” and tries valiantly to avoid saying that Joe Biden was elected President in 2020. (Kudos to Bill Bartholomew for pursuing him on the points.)

(Full interview here.)

Levesque was to be a featured speaker at a “Rhode Island First” rally planned for this past May, featuring Roger Stone. Yes, that Roger Stone, the treasonous fop with a Nixon tattoo on his back, was sentenced to prison for covering up for Donald Trump’s campaign collusion with Russian operatives in 2016. Trump commuted his sentence, leaving him free to become centrally involved in the 2021 “Stop the Steal” event that led to the January 6 assault on Congress.

Levesque’s League has embraced an innovative strategy to fund its candidates. They created 40 different PACs — one statewide and one for each city and town in Rhode Island — and when you donate through the League web page, it automatically distributes your donation among them so that you can totally evade the disclosure rules for campaign donations. 

To me, the remarkable part is that they boast, right there on the website, that they are doing this to evade disclosure requirements. ➜

 According to the state Board of Elections, what they are doing is indeed legal. It is a loophole in Rhode Island campaign finance law that allows a single organization to control multiple PACs. The League is not the only organization doing this, and a few unions control multiple PACs, as do Amica Insurance and Bally’s. 

Presumably, this is why a bill to close this loophole failed in the General Assembly this year. 

⟵ But for the sake of comparison, here is a chart of information from the Board of Elections showing all the organizations who control multiple PACs. (Thank you, Nancy Lavin, of the Rhode Island Current.) Sometimes a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind, and I marvel that any union would lobby to preserve this kind of disadvantage.

As Levesque has explained, the organizing base of the League is the pro-gun activists who show up to the state house every year to lobby against any proposed regulation of guns. Their website features lots of calls to action like this one. ⬇

As the League, they embrace more issues than just guns. They also inveigh against taxes, road tolls, and business regulation. In other words, standard Republican stuff. However, try as I might, I cannot find the word “Republican” anywhere on their website, or on any of the websites of candidates they endorse.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with advocating for positions I do not agree with. Obviously, I think people who hold positions I disagree with are misguided (that’s what it means), but go ahead and take those positions and defend them. 

What’s remarkable about the League is the extent to which its candidates seek to obscure those positions, mainly by running in Democratic primaries on an essentially Republican platform.

Take Kevin Hoyle, for instance, a candidate in the Democratic primary for House District 32 in North Kingstown. Here’s how he introduces himself on Facebook, an image he included in an email exchange with me.

Challenged to endorse the state’s Democratic Party platform, Hoyle emailed me a detailed list of where he agrees and where he does not. 

I suspect he thought this would end a conversation about what kind of Democrat he actually is by allowing him to say he agrees with most of it. 

But his endorsement is filled with cautions and careful wording, such as saying “Recent IPCC reports may change some of this” in response to the platform’s Environment and Climate section, or noting that investment in transportation and infrastructure is important but not through taxes. 

He supports the party platform on voting rights, but felt it was important to emphasize that he only wants voting rights for citizens. Imagining that there is anyone out there advocating for voting rights for non-citizens is a standard part of the MAGA fever dream, of course. Hoyle even included a strange hedge on the civil rights plank, questioning its use of the word “equitable”.

As an exercise in power, running very conservative, if not covertly Republican, candidates in September’s Democratic primary is not a terrible strategy. As we have seen all too well, many voters are not inclined to do much research on the candidates they vote for, and it is relatively straightforward to mislead them. 

Blake Filippi, who was the Republican leader in the House from 2018 to 2022, first won his seat in a Democratic primary in 2014. After defeating Donna Walsh, one of the leaders of Progressive Charlestown, he was unopposed in November and promptly disaffiliated upon his election. Eventually, he became the House Minority leader, successfully — and repeatedly — winning re-election while never using the word “Republican” on his campaign website. You can say this is essentially dishonest, but you can also say, hey, it worked.

EDITOR'S NOTE: While Rep. Donna Walsh was a Progressive Charlestown favorite and I personally work with Donna on issues and her campaigns, she never had any official connection to Progressive Charlestown.  - Will Collette

So this is the League of Rhode Island Businesses: Republican business owners who are seeking power by subverting campaign finance rules and misleading voters. Hoyle is not the only such candidate, and with the lure of plenty of untraceable money to spend, the League has recruited several others, including Mark Mesrobian in Narragansett and North Kingstown; Vanessa Lopez in Pawtucket; Brian Coogan in East Providence; and Leah Boisclair in Charlestown and Westerly. These are all going to be well-funded campaigns, and here’s hoping that money is not enough in the state’s Democratic primaries.

A guest post by Tom Sgouros, Public policy nerd and data scientist. Currently at work on projects in public finance, immunology, astronomy, and information theory. Also a bus rider.

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