The Left Can Win in Small Cities. David Morales Is Showing How.

When David Morales shared with me that he was planning to run for mayor of Providence, I told him I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea.

It was February 2025, and we were getting beers at the Wild Colonial, a bar that seven years earlier had hosted my watch party-turned-concession speech for a primary challenge I’d run against an incumbent Democrat (Rhode Island’s current governor, then-lieutenant governor). I thought we’d done close to everything right in that race, and our campaign still came up two points short. I had learned—and I emphasized this to Morales—that it is very hard to knock off a sitting incumbent in a statewide or citywide primary challenge.

I’m so glad that Morales didn’t listen to me. In the year and a half since I gave that pessimistic warning, he and his team built an extraordinary campaign, based around the belief that our city has the potential to be a Providence for all. It’s a message Morales repeats in nearly all his communications, and it has succeeded in putting Providence’s centrist mayor, Brett Smiley, firmly on the back foot. Indeed, though even coming close to winning would be a substantial achievement, given Smiley’s overwhelming financial edge—to say nothing of all the other advantages of incumbency—I believe Morales will win more than a moral victory tonight.

So how did this campaign go from a long shot to, I believe, the favorite to win? And does it offer any lessons for other upstart campaigns—especially those in smaller cities like Providence that can’t count on the kind of outsized national attention that often helps drive momentum in places like New York City? Here are the core principles I’ve identified, from my own observations as a supporter and occasional adviser to the campaign and from conversations I’ve had with Morales and core members of his team.

A Defining Contrast

The moment I first thought “OK, David really has a shot here” was last April, when Mayor Smiley vetoed legislation passed by Providence’s City Council to cap annual rent hikes at 4 percent. This rent stabilization ordinance was the culmination of years of political organizing to elect a progressive council majority and months of policy work to develop an effective regulatory framework. It was, and is, desperately needed: A recent study found that Providence is the least affordable city for renters in the country. Longtime residents are getting priced out, and essentially everyone who rents—and renters comprise 59 percent of the households in the city—understands that our trajectory is simply not sustainable. So when Smiley—who has fundraised extensively from wealthy developers and landlords—vetoed the most significant-ever attempt to bring this crisis under control, Morales immediately had an answer to the question, “Why should we fire our current mayor, who hasn’t had any major scandals, and replace him with you?”

Establishing such an easy-to-understand contrast is often surprisingly challenging. On most issues, an incumbent can muddy the waters. As corporate strategist Richard Berman once put it in a presentation to fossil-fuel companies, “You get into people’s mind a tie. They don’t know who is right. And you win all ties because the tie basically ensures the status quo.” Berman was speaking about Big Oil’s use of climate denial to stall decarbonization, but the principle applies equally well to how corporate Democrats often undermine progressive challenges. 

It’s one thing to say—to take another issue in this race that’s proven far less decisive—“The mayor hasn’t stood up strongly enough against ICE.” It’s true, but Smiley has belatedly taken (and heavily advertised) enough anti-ICE actions, however performative, to significantly undercut this distinction. But there’s no real way to muddy the waters on killing critical legislation to stabilize our out-of-control rental market, and Morales’s campaign has used Smiley’s veto to effectively frame the race as a challenger fighting to make Providence affordable versus an incumbent who prioritizes the interests of his corporate donors.

A Unified Left

A unified left is rarely enough to build a majority on its own. But it is almost always a prerequisite for a leftist victory, necessary both to activate the needed grassroots energy and to protect against that strain of progressive narcissist, the vote-splitting spoiler candidate.

The Morales campaign has unified the left in Providence and Rhode Island to a degree I’ve never seen before. It is, of course, critical that Morales spent years putting in the work as a movement elected official—walking picket lines, joining protests, pushing progressive legislation. But putting in the work as an individual candidate rarely guarantees a unified left. Much depends on the organizational ecosystem in a given community.

Case in point: Back in 2023, Rhode Island’s DSA chapter made a big show of publicly unendorsing Morales, then a state representative, for voting for Rhode Island’s presumptive state House speaker, a more moderate Democrat. The chapter maintained its boycott of Morales during his mayoral run, and has even criticized other DSA members and leaders outside of Rhode Island who are supporting him. (Because every DSA chapter has its own local leadership, there can be vast differences in strategic approaches and capacity across chapters, as exemplified in the contrast between RI DSA and NYC DSA, which was the driving force between Zohran Mamdani’s campaign). And RI DSA was only one of multiple groups that for several years steered Rhode Island’s political left toward anti-majoritarian purity tests, infighting, and petty grievances. In an environment dominated by these kinds of voices, a movement campaign like the one Morales has built would not have been possible.

Fortunately, in recent years, groups like the RI DSA have been eclipsed by organizations actually working to build real power. The most important example here is Reclaim RI, a group that emerged from local Bernie 2020 organizing but came into its own—with actual staff capacity and a significant base—in the last couple years. Morales launched his campaign with Reclaim’s full support. As my friend Dan Denvir, co-chair of Reclaim RI and host of The Dig podcast, described: “Reclaim has been laying the groundwork for this moment since our founding in 2020. We knew there was going to be another major upsurge in left politics—we just didn’t know when. But we knew that we needed to be ready to provide leadership and infrastructure when it happened. Our volunteer leadership built out a massive canvassing infrastructure to back Morales alongside our endorsed council slate through a combined, cross-canvassing operation that allowed us to boost everyone simultaneously.”

Once Morales demonstrated viability, he was able to score a number of other significant endorsements—SEIU 1199NE, Unite Here, the Providence Teachers Union, the Working Families Party. But it all started with Reclaim. Its support was key to ensuring that Morales’s run did not feel like some fringe effort, but rather a movement challenge, rooted in a real social base. 

A Different Kind of Field Operation

Morales’s campaign has knocked on over 80,000 doors—a larger proportion of the households in Providence than Zohran Mamdani’s primary campaign knocked in New York City.

I’ve known Morales’s field director, Jenn Steinfeld, since we met in 2010 (during a much less exciting Providence mayoral campaign). When I asked them what their approach has been to building out such an expansive grassroots operation, they named two principles.

First, Steinfeld stressed how the campaign has prioritized volunteer autonomy and empowerment in every aspect of its team-building. “Part of what’s made this campaign a success is that we are letting people practice democracy. We’re letting volunteers take responsibility for things. We’re letting them be in charge of a canvass. We’re not asking people to memorize talking points. We’re asking them to tell their story about why they are here, to have conversations with their neighbors.”

Steinfeld has brought this attitude into every aspect of team training. “I like to give them support, but I don’t like to answer their questions for them. I like to ask them more questions or encourage them to believe in their own intuition or turn it around and say, ‘Well, what do you think we should do?’”

For Steinfeld, this is partially about increasing campaign capacity, but it’s also about building movement capacity for the long term. “One of my big priorities is training a next generation of leftist organizers. Making sure that they have relationships with other organizations—like the Working Families Party, like Reclaim—that can be their organizing home after this election is over.” 

Steinfeld’s other guiding principle for the Morales field program—which progressive campaigns too often fail to prioritize—is joy. “Yeah I wanna reach the voters,” they told me. “But I wanna take care of a team. We’ve built an environment where we get each other’s backs, where you contribute and work really hard on this campaign, but where you can also take space for the other parts of your life.” Steinfeld shared an example of how this worked for them personally. “My dad has Parkinson’s, and he’s never seen a total eclipse. He wanted to go to Europe to see one during GOTV. My team said, ‘Absolutely you should do that, we’ve got this.’ And they did.”

The Morales campaign really has exuded an aura of joy, and that hasn’t been an accident. As Steinfeld said, “We’re not grinding people into dust. We’re channeling our joy and our energy and our passion and our rage and our fear into something that is making Providence a better place for all of us.”

A Dominant Social Media Presence 

This is a more basic, practical observation: A critical ingredient in the Morales campaign’s success has been its absolute dominance of social media. 

It took me longer than it should have to recognize the extent of this domination, simply because I’m a dinosaur who’s not on most social-media platforms. I’m still active on X, where Morales’s footprint has been relatively light. But X has never been the place for local political engagement. That’s always been Meta, and especially Instagram. And Morales has absolutely owned Instagram.

I distinctly remember when I came to understand this dynamic. I’d been in a bit of a friendly debate with Morales’s campaign manager, Ben Shanahan, over a campaign mailer—a long-form introductory letter—that I’d helped Morales draft. I’d been advocating for the letter to be sent out to a broad universe. But it was an expensive mailer, and Shanahan suggested it be restricted to a much narrower universe of older voters in certain neighborhoods. I asked if he was sure that younger voters wouldn’t benefit from reading Morales’s full story, and he responded, “If you live in Providence and you’re on Instagram, you already know all about David.”

It’s true, and this dynamic has only intensified in the months since. If you’re in Rhode Island, and you go on IG, you are going to see Morales’s smiling face practically every time you scroll. This ubiquitous presence has been crucial to the campaign. Not only has it engaged countless voters, it’s helped turn Morales into something of a local celebrity in ways that are extremely helpful for building grassroots energy, enthusiasm, and a sense that our progressive upstart could actually pull this thing off.

If Morales wins tonight, the most important takeaway for leftists considering mayoral campaigns in other small or mid-sized cities may be that the criteria for a run shouldn’t focus on the opposition. If you’d have asked me last year if Brett Smiley was a particularly vulnerable incumbent, I’d have said absolutely not. Sure, he wasn’t super well-liked, but he didn’t have any major scandals, and he was sitting on well over a million dollars—a preposterous amount of campaign cash for the mayor of a city like Providence. This relative strength was all I could think of as I sat there in the Wild Colonial while Morales first pitched me on his plans.

But that’s not the right question for would-be candidates and organizers. The right question is: Could we create a defining contrast? Could we unify the left? Could we build the necessary field operation? And could we dominate social media? If the answer to these is yes, then don’t listen to the doubters like me.

As I write this, I can’t know for sure whether Morales’s attempt will ultimately succeed. Regardless of the election results, he and his team have built something special. But I don’t want a moral victory. I want a Providence for all. And I believe that when the votes are counted tonight, we’ll be one huge step closer to that goal.