By Joe Broadmeadow
For more than a generation, the single party governing Rhode Island is so well entrenched that the machinery of state has come to serve itself rather than the people who pay for it. In 2026, voters have a rare chance to break that pattern. The choice is Ken Block, running as an independent, and he has earned my endorsement.
Consider the candidates.
Governor Dan McKee is a product of the Rhode Island Democratic establishment that controls the General Assembly, and he offers no real change to the status quo. He did not campaign his way into the office so much as inherit it, and everything since has been continuity dressed up as leadership. The Washington Bridge fiasco was not an aberration. It was the predictable result of a government that answers insiders and party loyalty rather than to competence and results.
This is a party so entrenched and so accustomed to total control that they won’t endorse either of their leading candidates because it doesn’t matter. I’ll leave it to you to fathom why.
Many, if not most. of these issues, and the hegemony that keeps it in place predates McKee. But he is the current face of the system, and change always has consequences. A vote for McKee is a vote for four more years of the same drift, the same excuses, and the same warped priorities. Even if the person running sought to change, they couldn’t, not from within.
Helena Foulkes presents herself as the reformer. She is nothing of the kind. She is a symptom of the influence of money in politics, and a willing participant in it. Her campaign runs on wealth, corporate polish, and the kind of elite connections most Rhode Islanders will never have. That alone should give voters pause. What should give them more than pause is her record.
Foulkes led the retail pharmacy division of CVS during the very years federal prosecutors now allege the company unlawfully filled opioid prescriptions and turned a blind eye as people died.
A civil complaint filed by Rhode Island’s United States Attorney names CVS Pharmacy as the lead defendant, and the period at issue overlaps her tenure as its president. She disputes the allegation and points to steps the company took.
Voters are entitled to weigh that defense. They are also entitled to conclude that a person who sat at the top of that enterprise, during one of the great public health catastrophes of our time, is culpable through her association with it, and is not the person to lead a state still burying its dead from the same epidemic.
More than two thousand Rhode Islanders have died of overdoses since 2020. This is not campaign trivia. It is the reason the office matters.
That leaves Ken Block.
Block is not a creature of either party. He built his career as a software engineer and a data-driven watchdog, and he has spent years documenting the waste, dysfunction, and misplaced priorities of state government from the outside.
He owes nothing to the Democratic machine, and nothing to the donors who keep it running.
When he says our taxes climb while our roads crumble and our projects fail, he is not reciting a talking point. He is describing what he has measured. His proposals, from cutting the hidden taxes buried in our utility bills to demanding an honest accounting of a fifteen billion dollar budget, come from someone who actually reads the numbers.
The single biggest deciding factor for me with Block is integrity. The man was hired by the Trump administration to prove that election fraud changed the results of the 2020 election.
Block examined the data, wrote a report his employer did not want to read, and a book called Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.
He followed the evidence and told the truth despite the intent of the campaign’s stated purpose for hiring him. Voter fraud did not change the results of the election and continuing to claim it did flies in the face of the evidence. Block let the facts tell the story despite the consequences.
That is integrity.
Rhode Island is fixable. It is worth fixing. But it will not be fixed by the party that broke it, and it will not be fixed by a corporate insider trailing the wreckage of the opioid crisis behind her. It will take an outsider with no debts to pay, no machine to protect, and no reason to defend the status quo.
That description fits one candidate. In November, I am voting for Ken Block, and I urge my fellow Rhode Islanders to do the same.
Excellent analysis!