Mark Stockwell/AP Photo
Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos gives her victory speech at an election night gathering of Democratic candidates and supporters, November 8, 2022, in Providence, Rhode Island.
In the September 5 special-election primary to replace Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) in Rhode Island’s First Congressional District, a crowded field of 14 candidates has narrowed into a proxy battle between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. With just under a month left, recent polling shows that the top two contenders are Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos and former state legislator Aaron Regunberg, who narrowly lost a race for lieutenant governor in 2018. The race also includes former Biden administration aide Gabe Amo, who has been endorsed by former chief of staff Ron Klain, and clean-energy investor Don Carlson, whose personal funding of his campaign has given him the most money in the race.
Regunberg leads the pack with both the most money raised from individuals other than the candidate’s personal finances and the most small-dollar donors, according to FEC filings. However, Matos is getting significant help in the final stretch of the race from independent-expenditure money, largely from Bold PAC, an outfit run by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and funded by corporate donors.
The PAC recently spent $300,000 on a round of TV ad spots lauding Matos’s credentials as lieutenant governor, with another round of ads for the final weeks estimated at roughly the same price tag. Regunberg is the only candidate in the race to take the “No Big Tech Money” pledge, run by the same group that organized the No Fossil Fuel Money drive.
This is a far cry from the flood of money seen in other open-seat primaries in the past few years. Even the campaigns’ fundraising numbers have been fairly anemic for a House race. The muted interest is likely due to the fact that the race might look from outside the state like a benign contest in a safe blue district with few ideological distinctions. Regunberg is a 33-year-old local fixture popular among the state’s climate activists, while Matos, who was born in the Dominican Republic, became the first Black woman elected to statewide office in 2022.
But recent endorsements have put in stark contrast the showdown between the progressive and moderate wings of the party playing out in the race.
At the end of last month, Regunberg drew endorsements from both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This added to the list of other national figures who’ve endorsed his candidacy, including Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Ro Khanna (D-CA). With backing from the Working Families Party as well, he’s running on left-wing policy priorities such as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and curbing monopoly power.
Shortly after the CPC entered the race for Regunberg, Matos received support from the centrist New Democrat Coalition following other national endorsements from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and EMILY’s List.
Cicilline, a Progressive Caucus member who led the House Antitrust Subcommittee in an anti-monopoly direction, hasn’t weighed in on the race.
MATOS’S MESSAGE HAS FOCUSED LESS on distinct policy goals and more so emphasized personal authenticity and a track record of pragmatic leadership as lieutenant governor and former president of the Providence City Council. Her recent ad is entitled “Worked Hard,” a nod to both her experience serving in government and her immigrant background working in a garment factory in New York.
But her campaign’s pitch of technocratic competence has been undermined by a recent forged ballot signature scandal that’s hanging over her campaign. Last month, the Rhode Island Board of Elections reported that dozens of signatures Matos’s campaign submitted to qualify for the ballot were invalid, traced back to either deceased residents or others who said they had never signed the nomination papers. Matos has placed the blame on one of the vendors hired by the campaign to collect signatures. The vendor, which is now facing charges, claims that the campaign never provided adequate training or instruction to its canvassers.
After initially waiving the case, the Board of Elections this week reversed course and voted to open a probe into the forged signatures. The Rhode Island state police and the attorney general’s office are carrying out active criminal investigations as well, which will drag out the scandal well beyond primary day.
Though the forged signatures don’t threaten to disqualify her nomination for the primary ballot, the whole affair has opened Matos up to scrutiny, including from other candidates in the race.
The Matos campaign’s pitch of technocratic competence has been undermined by a recent forged ballot signature scandal that’s hanging over her campaign.
“We’re living in a moment where faith in our electoral system is under threat from the right, and unfortunately this signature scandal is the kind of event that provides fodder for that,” said Regunberg in an interview with the Prospect. “I haven’t seen the lieutenant governor take ownership for that component.”
In a statement to the Prospect, Matos’s campaign responded to the criticism of her handling of the scandal. “The Lt. Governor’s campaign was defrauded by a vendor that it hired to help with signature collection. Unfortunately, our opponents have tried to use this circumstance to try to boost their profile and score political points.”
But Matos’s opponents have also tied the signature debacle to a number of past scandals that took place under her watch as president of the Providence City Council and which are now coming under renewed scrutiny.
ONE CONTROVERSY ENTAILS A SWEETHEART TAX DEAL that the city government handed a big real estate developer, just months after Matos left her post as council president in early 2022. In a drawn-out court settlement, the city made a deal with developer Buff Chace to list a number of luxury apartments as affordable housing, qualifying the firm for $30 million in tax breaks. The developer had been a major financial benefactor to the campaigns of former Mayor Jorge Elorza and most members of the city council, including Matos.
The tax giveaway has been such a drain on the city’s coffers that the current council just voted last month to challenge the deal. Though the blame largely falls on Mayor Elorza for brokering the settlement, critics argue that Matos, as president of the council, was privy to the details of the case as it made its way through court, and should have raised alarms about it. Matos’s campaign argues that she had no involvement in the settlement.
“The only thing [Matos] knew is they were seeking that tax relief,” campaign spokesperson Evan England told The Providence Journal. “Whatever came out of the negotiations and the final arrangement was after she left.”
The head of the real estate trust, Arnold Chace, is a campaign contributor to Matos’s current bid for Congress, donating $1,000 at the outset of the race, according to FEC filings.
Matos is also coming under fire for supporting a private equity transaction in 2021 that threatened to shutter several safety-net hospitals in Providence, despite the objections from local hospital unions and the state attorney general.
The transaction was the final coup de grâce by Prospect Medical Holdings and its majority owner Leonard Green & Partners, a private equity firm based in Los Angeles. In 2014, Prospect bought a Rhode Island hospital chain, CharterCARE, including two distressed hospitals in Providence, Roger Williams and Our Lady of Fatima, that served mostly low-income patients on Medicare and Medicaid. At the time, the United Nurses and Allied Professionals union, which represented workers at the hospitals, supported the deal for saving them from financial ruin. Within months of Prospect taking over, they changed their tune.
Prospect immediately sought to slash costs by laying off staff, cutting benefits, and starving the hospitals of resources. A consultant report from 2017 found that dirty and broken equipment was being used in operating rooms, because of limited stockpiles provided to staff by management.
As a 2020 ProPublica investigation showed, these cost-cutting practices followed the private equity playbook used by Prospect across its nationwide chain of safety-net hospitals: purchase precarious hospitals through leveraged buyouts, reduce costs to generate profits in the short term, and then sell off the hospital with piles of debt or file it for bankruptcy.
While quality of care declined at the hospitals in Providence, Prospect executives in 2018 issued a nearly $500 million dividend payment to shareholders, in violation of an agreement it struck with state regulators. Prospect’s top two executives, Sam Lee and David Topper, took in the lion’s share of the dividend, with over $200 million between the two of them.
When the union caught wind of the payout, they tried to inform the public but seemed to be the only ones in the state raising alarms. Rep. Cicilline also blasted the company in a letter to its executives for the dividends and other financial chicanery.
In 2020, Leonard Green decided to exit Prospect and sell its majority ownership stake to Lee and Topper, the two executives who issued the dividend payouts to themselves several years prior.
The union fought the ownership transfer, suspecting that it would leave the hospital in a worse financial state, an intuition that would later be vindicated by a state AG investigation.
By contrast, Matos sung the firm’s praises and supported the transfer in statements to state regulators, which had to approve the transaction. At a meeting of the Health Services Council to review the transfer, Matos focused mainly on how the firm initially saved the two Providence hospitals in 2014 and its critical role during the pandemic, despite reports of the hospitals’ hampered response because of the cost-cutting measures.
The union assumed Matos must not have been aware of the firm’s nefarious practices at the hospitals or the dividend payments. They scheduled a meeting with her that year to tell her directly about their opposition. After the meeting, Matos did not backtrack on her support.
“If you miss something that’s one thing, we all do that, but when you’re confronted with an issue head-on and don’t do anything about it, that’s a major problem for us and raises doubts about your judgment,” said Chris Callaci, general counsel for UNAP, who held the meeting with Matos on behalf of the union.
State Attorney General Peter Neronha held up the transaction after conducting a damning investigation into the firm. It uncovered that Prospect had placed the two hospitals down as collateral on an outstanding $100 million promissory note, which indicated that the executives likely intended to sell off the hospitals with piles of debt.
“Our investigation revealed a company whose principals and investors have issued millions of dollars in dividends from a business responsible for the safety-net hospitals and services they own, which has translated into debt held by the entire system, such that liabilities now exceed assets by over $1 billion,” the report stated.
The attorney general ultimately conditioned the transfer on Prospect putting $80 million into an escrow account to cover operating costs and capital expenditures at the hospitals over the next five years. Prospect is now in the process of selling both Providence hospitals to an Atlanta-based nonprofit chain.
In a statement to the Prospect, Matos explained her rationale for supporting the sale. “The change in ownership was a complex and complicated transaction. I had no doubt that the appropriate governing bodies, including the Attorney General, Health Services Council, and state regulators would take great care in examining the underlying financial and clinical implications of the proposal.”
THE UNION STILL HARBORS RESERVATIONS about Matos, which is why they aren’t endorsing her candidacy.
“With the forged signature controversy on top of our experience with her during the Prospect transfer … it raises questions for me about her leadership,” said Callaci.
UNAP, however, isn’t endorsing Regunberg either. Instead, they’re backing state Sen. Sandra Cano.
In the final stretch before the September 5 primary, both candidates are trying to shore up support with remaining undecided voters. As Matos’s campaign prepares to run another round of TV ads, Regunberg is building an extensive ground game with the assistance of the Working Families Party.
The Regunberg campaign believes national endorsements such as from Sen. Sanders have squashed any remaining questions about whether Regunberg is the true progressive in the race. Early on, Regunberg faced attacks from local left-wing organizations such as the Rhode Island Political Cooperative and Providence DSA, both intent on casting doubt about his record, which they deemed insufficiently hostile to party leadership.
Regunberg has countered that his priorities have always been focused on getting progressive legislation passed by building broad coalitions, not casting stones. The resistance of local groups didn’t hold any sway with national left-wing standard-bearers like Sen. Sanders or Rep. Khanna, nor does it seem to have made any noticeable impact on Regunberg’s support among voters in the district.
