1. STORY OF THE WEEK: Three primary factors seemingly fueled Donald Trump’s win for the White House last year -- Democrats’ slow response to voters’ concerns about inflation and immigration, and Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last June. U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has a different view. “My theory of the case is that the electorate in that election had a number of gates that you had to get through if they were gonna vote for you. And gate one was, are you a fighter? And Joe Biden never showed that he was a fighter. In fact, we talk about things like fighting to get a bill passed. No, that's work. Fighting is when you have an adversary and you're exchanging blows, all of that. He never showed that.” Then, as Whitehouse put it this week during an interview (airing at 7 pm Sunday on RIPBS Weekly and Monday during Morning Edition of The Public’s Radio), Kamala Harris squandered an initial surge of support by failing to differentiate herself from Biden. “I think what's coming at us with climate change, the corruption of our country from all the dark money and all this mischief at the Supreme Court, plus a corrupted tax code, make a pretty good packet of things to have been on offense fighting about from day one. And people would've thought differently of us if we'd been hammering those forward,” he said, instead of more abstract concepts like the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. While Whitehouse credits Republicans at being better at politics and political messaging, he’s looking to mid-term elections next year as a time for Democrats to strike back with more rhetorical muscle and focus.

2. TAXING MATTERS: A chunk of better than expected revenue during the May Estimating Conference and the general disinclination of state leaders to support broad-based tax increases seem to augur poorly for supporters of boosting taxes on Rhode Island’s richest 1%. During an interview this week, Gov. Dan McKee argued that it makes more sense for Rhode Island to avoid such a tax hike. “It’s not the time to do it,” he said. “If the time comes, then certainly we’ll address that.”

3. STORM CLOUDS: URI economist Leonard Lardaro -- the creator of such pithy expressions as “Rhode Island and Sisyphus Plantations” -- is sounding a warning about the trendline of the state’s economy. Via email, he said his March Current Conditions Index “was the worst

monthly showing since the Great Financial Crisis. The CCI went from a neutral value in January to two months of contraction. The March value, however, was only 16, as two of the twelve CCI indicators improved relative to a year ago, and barely at that. Last month, I stated that I could no longer rule out the possibility that Rhode Island had entered the earliest stages of a full-blown recession. I have updated that to stating that I would be amazed if Rhode Island is not currently in the early stages of a full-blown recession. Remember, this month's results, as bad as they were, came before the tariff war in April, so we can't reasonably expect much upward momentum from the national economy.” 

4. PAWTUCKET RISING: During our Q&A, Gov. McKee argued that a lot of work in the pipeline around the state will soften the blow of an economic downturn. And the governor -- who cast the tie-breaking vote to move forward the Pawtucket soccer stadium project -- remains bullish on the project as a confidence booster for the state. He said a planned pedestrian bridge will make the nearby area more attractive. Asked about how taxpayers face up to $132 million in costs over 30 years to pay for the stadium, McKee said a buyout option after 10 years could significantly reduce that cost.

5. ECONOMIC GROWTH: Here’s the view from state Sen. Meghan Kallman (D-Pawtucket) on whether the Centerville Bank Stadium will be the economic catalyst predicted by the governor: ‘[W]e’re going to need to be really thoughtful and intentional about how we handle development going forward,” Kallman said on Political Roundtable. “That includes paying particular attention to the surrounding areas. This is in a residential neighborhood. It includes really investing in the small businesses that are both the backbone of the economy and in places where sports stadiums can be or are shown to be better catalysts. It’s because there’s a robust infrastructure of small business and the whole thing isn’t sort of lumped into the stadium itself. So it is a catalyst. When we were first talking about the development first of old McCoy and then of Tidewater, those were among the concerns that I, among others brought up that said, we are here, we have this resource which has proved pretty promising in its first couple of weeks. And I think it, again, it is up to us to make smart policy and community-based decisions to reach and exceed sort of the expected potential of that.”

6. NIGHTLIFE: Travel back in time, via this excellent audio history (with superb photos) curated by my colleague Mareva Lindo, to when Leo’s was a vital community hub in Providence’s Jewelry District, a place where lawmakers mingled with lawbreakers, and a lot of people met their significant others. A birthday celebration in honor of Leo’s owner, John Rector, who recently died, will be held at The Met in Pawtucket from 2-5 pm on Saturday, May 17. 

7. STATE GOVERNMENT: An early showdown ahead of the June budget debate: RI Senate President Val Lawson declined to join House Speaker Joe Shekarchi in opposing about $80,000 in cumulative raises sought by Gov. McKee for state department directors. Via statement, Lawson said, “I appreciate the concerns that have been expressed by the speaker, particularly with regard to optics during a challenging budget year. I also recognize that the governor believes these adjustments are necessary to keep salaries competitive with other states, so that we can attract and retain talented professionals to run complex state departments. In some cases, director’s salaries have fallen behind the salaries of the staff in the departments they oversee. The Senate leadership considered whether this action by the executive branch warrants a highly unusual intervention by the legislative branch. We determined it does not.” In his own statement, Shekarchi responded: “I respect the Senate’s decision. However, all 75 members co-sponsored the House resolution to block the raises and I stand behind the unanimous vote that was taken on Tuesday. These are challenging and uncertain economic times and House members believe that Cabinet raises are not appropriate right now.”

8. HEALTHCARE: Lots of stuff continues to happen involving this topic, and my colleague Lynn Arditi is on top of it. She had stories this week about unionized employees at Butler Hospital preparing to strike, how healthcare costs in the state climbed in 2023 by almost 8%, and how Brown University Health -- Rhode Island’s largest health system -- blames lagging reimbursement for the demise of innovative cost-saving remote monitoring programs for about 700 patients diagnosed with high blood pressure, heart failure and COPD.

9. RESEARCH DOLLARS: As TGIF was going to press, Attorney General Peter Neronha said a Rhode Island court granted a preliminary injunction filed by his office and 22 other AGs to stop the termination of about $11 billion in public health grants to the states. “If we don’t have our health, we don’t have anything, and that’s why today’s preliminary injunction is such a critical win,” Neronha said in a statement. “Earlier this week, Secretary Kennedy told Congress that doesn’t think people should take medical advice from him, and yet by overseeing an attempt to eliminate billions in critical funding for essential public health initiatives, American people will live and die by his decisions.” 

10. HIGHER ED: Via my colleague David Wright: Defiant and undaunted, Brown sophomore Alex Shieh celebrated the fact that he won’t be sent down for breaking university rules. ‘I’m happy that I’m not being charged anymore, but I’m upset,’ Shieh said. ‘I’m upset that I was charged in the first place.’ Earlier this year, Shieh used AI to scrape contact details of all non-faculty staff at Brown from various publicly available databases, such as LinkedIn.  His Bloat@Brown database quickly grew to some 3,805 names. ‘That’s one for every two undergraduates and twice the number of faculty members we have,’ Shieh said. At 8:30 in the morning on March 17, he sent out an email blast asking all of them to justify their jobs.

11. RI POLI SHORTIES: “Can Democracy and the Planet Be Saved? A Conversation with Attorney General Peter Neronha” will take place on Sunday, May 18, 2025, at 12:00 PM at Hope High School, 324 Hope Street, Providence …. Hayley Gray-Hoehn is the news comms director for U.S. Rep. Gabe Amo. A Milwaukee native, she previously worked for Rep. Hayley Stevens and Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer …. Gov. McKee has nominated Karen Bradbury of the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources to serve on the state Public Utilities Commission …. U.S. Sen. Jack Reed is among the senators asking the inspector general of the Department of Defense to examine DOD’s “involvement in facilitating the transfer of this unprecedented foreign gift” -- a $400 million luxury jumbo jet “for President Trump’s ultimate personal use.” …. U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner, lead sponsor of a bill to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, was among more than a dozen lawmakers from both parties calling this week for an immediate vote on the measure.

12. CYBER-BREACH: A forensic audit by the cyber-security firm CrowdStrike shows that cyber-hackers gained access to RI Bridges, the state’s online portal for health and human services, about five months before the hack was discovered last December. There’s a link to CrowdStrike’s report in my story. A spokesman for Attorney General Peter Neronha said the state is “pursuing all available remedies” against contractor Deloitte.

13. IMMIGRATION: Juan Francisco Méndez, the Guatemalan man apprehended in April when an ICE agent used an ax to smash the window of a car holding him, has been reunited with his family after being held at a New Hampshire facility for about a month, reports my colleague Paul C. Kelly Campos. His lawyer, Ondine Galvez-Sniffin, said the decision to release Méndez “is a reaffirmation of everything that we’ve been saying from the beginning. Immigrants have rights in this country, regardless of their immigration status and we have to fight for them. If we’re silent, if we let people just, you know, run right over us, then we’ve already defeated ourselves.”

14. KICKER: Via Pew: “Americans trust each other less than they did a few decades ago. The share of adults who said ‘most people can be trusted’ declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, according to the General Social Survey.” Read more here.