4/30/2026: Councilor AnderBois; political roundtable

0:00From 12 News, this is Newsmakers. Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos has four challengers so far, and that's just in the Democratic primary. One of them is Providence City Counselor Sue Anderboh, who's making a progressive pitch to primary voters. She's our guest on the first half of Newsmakers. Then, poll after poll shows Governor Dan McKee down double digits against Helena folks, and that's before she spends millions on TV ads. What's ahead as the race heats up, we'll tackle that with the political roundtable. Welcome to Newsmakers on Tim White alongside 12 News Politics Editor Ted Nisi, and we welcome to the program Providence City Counselor Sue Anderboh, Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Good to have you. Good to have you. You're having me, I'm excited to be here. 60 seconds or less, why do you want to be Lieutenant Governor? Yeah, I'm really excited because the opportunity Lieutenant Governor's office, I think, is to take on some really big, kind of hairy challenges. You're independent from the Governor, you're independent from the General Assembly, but

1:00if you know how to make government work and you have good relationships and the ability to get things done, we can really have some real change here in the state, and so that's why I want to run. Hairy challenges. Hairy. Yeah. So, I mean, you would've heard. You've heard that everyone who runs for this office, here's the same complaint that the LG's office is largely ceremonial. The late Bob Healey ran on a platform that if he won, he'd scuttle the ship, you know, all of that, you say you can tackle some, again, hairy problems. So, what is it that you see the office couldn't focus on? Yeah. So, pick one issue. Yeah, I'll pick one issue, so I think I'm going to say two things, because I can never do this one thing, you guys. I already broke the rules. Yeah. But I think it's important because there are some actual roles of Lieutenant Governor's office, and one is that you manage these three advisory councils on emergency management long-term care and small business, and not to be a super nerd, but I can really rock a government task force and get some stuff done. So, I'm really excited about those three topics, but I think the other opportunity is to really take on something that's really complicated, and I'll be really excited to

2:03take on four examples, some of our energy challenges. My background is a lot in energy policy, both here in Rhode Island and across the northeast, and as we're seeing these like skyrocketing energy rates, we're also seeing some really insufficient solutions that aren't really looking at the problem as a whole, and so being able to bring smart folks to the table, of which we have many on these issues in Rhode Island, bring them to the table, figure out how we actually diversify our energy sources, support good, local, clean energy jobs, and be smart about our grid planning, battery storage, how we're actually going to build out our clean energy future, we'll help diversify and stabilize our rates. Let's talk more about that, because I associated that issue, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about. You know, many northeastern governors, Governor McKee, Governor Healy, Governor Hocal, are pushing to ease some of the strict climate mandates that a lot of blue states have put in place. Saying the cost burden is just too high in the current environment to do this as fast as people wanted. I know that makes a lot of progressives uncomfortable, but they say they insist they're like, we're not against tackling climate change, it's just too expensive to do it this way.

3:05What do you say to that? Those are your fellow Democrats. Yeah, those are fellow Democrats. To them I say, like when you talk to energy professionals and you say, hey, what is really driving these energy costs? And this is something I did at my last job when I was the northeast director of climate for a large environmental nonprofit. You're like, let's be real, if it is really the climate mandates, increasing costs, let's address that head on. And so we brought together, we hired a consultant, and I know a lot of these folks from my work, and really dug into what is driving energy costs, and a lot of which driving energy costs are not the climate mandates. It's our supply charges, it's things like distribution and transmission, and the utilities profits. So all the governors have it wrong? So I think that they are looking for solutions because people are hurting now. And the longer term solution is what's going to stabilize energy rates, which is tackling these things like, how are we building our distribution system, how are we building out transmission, what does it look like to, you know, rain in a little bit of the utility spending and really stabilize rates? Some of those things take time, and since people are hurting now, I don't fault them for trying to find short term solutions, but things like cutting the energy efficiency programs are going to impact people this year, next year, they're going to actually raise rates,

4:08they're actually going to raise people's bills. And so it's a little bit of like a, you know, you save a penny now and it charges you at a dollar later. So brass text, governor wants to move the 2033 energy standard handed out to, I think, 2050. Do you support or oppose that? I would oppose that. Why? So if we move out the standard, if we move out the renewable energy standard, and for full disclosure, I advocated on that standard, I pushed for it, along with a lot of folks in the climate jobs coalition, what we're going to do is we're going to have to invest in more resources in our natural gas system. It's just, we're overly reliant on one fuel for both electricity and also heating, and that's fossil gas or natural gas. If we push out our renewable goals to 2050, what we're telling, like, local clean energy businesses is we are not open for your business, we are not going to be investing in this. And in the meantime, we're seeing energy use go up because of data centers, because of AI, because of our over reliance on all of our little devices. For the first time in like 20 years, we're seeing energy use go up. And so we're going to need to get that energy from somewhere, and if we're pushing off our goals around clean energy, we're going to have to get it from fossil gas.

5:09And fossil gas infrastructure is very expensive. We're putting in new pipes, putting in new regional pipelines, local pipelines, tearing up the city of provinces, roads to put it, to put new pipelines throughout the city. That's expensive. And so we're also going to see rates go up because of that. And so I think it's a short term, it feels like a short term win, but it's actually both the short term loss and a long term loss. I have a question about your role as a member of the Providence City Council, but it also has a lot to do while housing is obviously an issue to talk about in the lieutenant governor's race here. I asked this question with Lieutenant Governor Sabinamakis. You support rent stabilization or rent control and providence, Mayor Smiley, vetoed that awkwardness. First of all, do you think you have the numbers right now to overturn that veto? Right now we have nine, we would need ten. Any sign of anyone's flipping? I don't count anything out until the vote happens, you can't count any of your chickens before they hatch. I think we will have a vote for the override and we'll see how it goes, I would be hopeful.

6:09And I think a lot of us who support rent stabilization see it as just a piece of the package. If it were just rent stabilization and we weren't working on anything else, it wouldn't be the right solution. But we're also working on, like I really pushed for in our comprehensive plan, upzoning across the whole city so we could have greater density, particularly, you know, in my word, we have a lot of increased density. Remind people on which part do you represent? I represent Ward three, which includes, it's like the upper, the upper east side, it's like the northern part of the east side includes all of North Main Street, Hope Street, Camp Street, that kind of area. So North Main has always been a place people talked about, why is it so much surface parking lots and short squat buildings and not higher up here? You wanted to see that get higher in North Main? Yeah, I would love to see North Main get higher. And I'm really excited because in the last couple of weeks, I've heard from a few folks who own property on North Main who are actually looking to do that. So there's the new in-home care facility that trains in-home care nurses. They're looking to add some stories. There's a vacant parking lot down by the Roger Williams National Memorial. Just a parking lot. They're looking to add some mixed issues. I've heard the argument against rent stabilization, which is that everything you just said right

7:11there is development in that if rent stabilization passes, that will have a chilling effect on development. Yeah. And the way that we crafted and the way we tried to craft it, and I've heard so much on all the sides and I've lit like anybody who sent me studies or PowerPoints or I'm always like send me your spreadsheets, I've an MBA, like I can figure, you know, send me all your performance. I want to see, you know, what's actually going to happen. If you listen to 25 hours of public comment and public hearings and listening sessions, like really spent time on this, we try to include and talk to folks from across the country who've tried this and some of them fail, as we want to learn from those failures, you know, wanting to make sure that we had careful exemptions and exceptions so that we weren't having a chilling effect on you build. There were exemptions for like projects that were newly being built. There were exemptions for owner occupied. There were exemptions for folks who, you know, we wanted to make sure weren't being impacted by this, including new builds so we could continue to see some of that building happening. Just real quick, you and Mayor Smiley are at odds on this issue. Are you endorsing in the mayoral race?

8:12I am not endorsing in the mayoral race. Isn't not endorsing kind of speaking loudly as well about that? No, I don't think so. And that's an intentional decision of like, you know, we're disagreeing on this, but I don't think it's like some all out, like, or disagreement. We just have like a, you know, a different, I think reasonable adults can disagree about like, you hear all the facts and you're like, is this the right solution? Is this the right solution? Are these five things we need to do versus these five things? Reasonable adults can disagree. Our majority leader on council also voted no and we're like, cool, okay, we just keep going, you know, it's, it's, it is what it is, but we agree on other things like we stood together recently on the green revolving fund that we're moving forward and that will be voted out of committee tomorrow night. So you can agree on some things disagree on others and I think the voters of Providence will decide Mayor. Let me see more about politics. So John Loughlin, the Republican candidate for a lieutenant governor released a poll this week. A campaign poll, but from pollster, I trust, suggesting he's roughly tied with Sabin Amatos and the margin of error for the November election with a lot of undecideds. Do you think Democrats risk losing the seat if they renominate Sabin Amatos?

9:15I mean, I'm running because I think I have a, like, a different vision for this role and I think it's a vision that Rhode Islanders can get really excited about. It is a progressive vision, but it's a vision of like getting things done in government and a government that's responsive and that listens, that does the homework and then like actually does the thing and really pushes forward some real solutions. So I think Rhode Islanders, as I talk with them, really want to see that in government. They want someone who's going to answer the phone they call, who's going to take responsibility when something goes wrong. It's going to work really hard to get things done and that's what I am and that's what I am going to do. Let's stick with that for a second. We're only about a minute left. But something I will hear from viewers who hear, when we do a story about a progressive policy proposal, then they'll point over to like DOT and I'll say, but we put it $100 billion a year into state government for an important agency and part of the bridge falls onto the Amtrak. And the inspections didn't catch the Washington Bridge and so I think sometimes viewers say, you're talking about the same government in the end that you want to do even more, that they don't even trust doing the things we're currently asking to do. What do you say to them? I think that's a fair point. Like when I ran for council and I talked to neighbors and I told them I wanted to work

10:17on things like climate change and housing, they were like, look, our trash doesn't even get picked up. So if we can't even do the basics, how are people going to believe that we're going to do bigger things? And so even on council, I've been very focused on both the very hyper-local things like getting you your crosswalk, making sure that our roads are safe. I have a whole task force on North Main Street to increase safety. We've done things like just change the amount of time that you have to cross at the little crossing signal. Little things really matter and it also proves government can do the little things. We can also do the big things. And so I think just demonstrating that over and over again, because I agree. And as someone who will take responsibility when things go wrong, yeah, thank you. I could go forever. I get so excited about government. You also have to take responsibility when things go wrong and I think we haven't seen that in a while. Like when the bridge collapsed, someone needed to say, I'm sorry, that, whoa, we're going to get right on this. And we've seen that on North Main. We've seen a lot of this. And finally, it was like, look, we're all just going to do this together. We're going to try to make some changes together. Final question, will you debate your Democratic primary opponents here on Channel 12?

11:17Of course, thanks. I would forward to the invite. All right. Sue Anderbrough, our Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. When we come back, new polling in the Governor's race, Joe Fleming joins us on the second half of Newsmakers. Welcome back to Newsmakers on Tim White alongside Ted Nisi. And we welcome back to the program for a political roundtable 12 news political analyst, Joe Fleming. Good to see you, Joe. My pleasure. You're just calculating. This is 42 years you've been doing the fun in your circle. He loves it. I love it. I can't see that. All right. He's got the speakers. Yeah. But still white. Yeah, he's got white. Jack or Tim. So look, I want to start with a survey conducted by Democratic Pulster Pete Broadnitz of Expedition Strategies. It was done for charter school advocates, and it was conducted at the end of March, right, Ted? Okay. Let's look at the Democratic primary head to head. This is Helena folks, Dan McKee, Gregory Stevens, and undecided on the screen. You can see that folks is leading 34 to the incumbent Dan McKee, 20 percent, Gregory

12:20Stevens is at 8 percent, and a big number of undecided there, 38 percent. You know, I guess Ted will start with you. There's been several also UNH polls that aren't flattering to the governor, but it's interesting to see what a different Pulster found in. He has experience in Rhode Island, this Pulster. Yeah. I have a lot of trust, I guess, in Pete Broadnitz as a reliable Pulster. You know, Gene Armando's campaigns were well-funded. He was the person she trusts in this. He's done other ones as well. And that 34 to 20 is the kind of number that seemed to ring true to a lot of people paying close attention to the race, that people I talk to, that Joe talks to. We should reference, UNH had it even wider, had it at 45 folks, 11, Dan McKee. Generally, the reaction I had, and I don't know about you, Joe, was myself, that seemed too low for the governor and too high for folks. And that was even the folks around folks, that's used the word twice. Seemed a little skeptical that they had built up that kind of lead. Yeah, that was an outlier that poll. No question. We would need to see some other polls that show numbers similar to that.

13:21But the one thing that's constant, when all the polls we've seen for the first of the year, Dan McKee is well behind Halina folks in the race. And it seems like he hasn't been able to do anything to close that gap in his running out of time. There's only a little over four months left before the Democratic primary. He's done nothing to make the gap small together. Yeah, but you know what? His campaign might say, I don't know, I haven't been asked about this specific issue, is people just, Joe, aren't paying attention. And so the needle, of course, isn't going to move because he hasn't had the opportunity to, you know, really grab their attention. True. But look at his job rating. Look at his favorability. Those numbers are very negative. And a lot of those people may be setting their ways. So as a campaign, it's still not going to convince them to go to Dan McKee, unless he does something to try to move those voters. What I've seen so far, like he's tried the million attacks, eliminating so security attacks. None of those have seemed to move much at this point. I'm going to pause you here, Joe. So on the screen right now, as you called for, Joe is Dan McKee's favorability rating.

14:22And this one, this is a UNH poll, though, I believe. Right. And this was conducted in mid-April. So favorable, 11%, unfavorable, 64% and then neutral, don't know is 20, 25%. And this is with, again, likely primary voters. This is not with the general public. And to Joe's point, this is where, and granted, again, we'll keep caviating to be fair. If you can bring it back up, Alex, this is the UNH poll. It was a particularly bad poll for the governor. So maybe these numbers are a little worse than broaden it's might have gotten or somebody else. But, you know, when you have a gap of, you know, what is it? That's like almost 50, 50-ish points favorable to unfavorable. And if this is a little extreme, that's a very tough place to be when you need undecideds. One, getting in the weeds and the polling, the one number to really look at is the voters that say the unsure hold the voting for. How do those voters view Dan McKee and Halena folks? I think Ted, you have some numbers here. I actually asked UNH, because Joe Fleming has taught me over the years what I should be looking at in the polls.

15:23UNH didn't release this, so I asked them for a cup. I asked him, how do the two candidates look with just the undecideds in their poll? Halena folks, 41% don't know with undecided. Almost half of them just don't have an opinion. Her unfavorable reign is only 17. So, you know, there's people there who don't like or aren't voting for, but allow them just don't know. Dan McKee, 68% unfavorable among undecided voters in the UNH poll. He needs to get those people all the way back to liking him and then voting for him in four months. Does that mean 64% of undecideds aren't voting for Dan McKee? I mean, can you translate that one to one? I would translate, looking at those sets of numbers, that she's going to do a lot better with undecided voters than Dan McKee. And he has to tune that around really quickly. And as he said, he has a come up with anything at this point. I mean, the media is going to pick up, I agree. But he has a lot less money than Halena folks. She can go up and stay up. I mean, with Dan McKee, when you say video, she just clarified people, paid advertising, you know, that kind of outreach.

16:24She just raised what, $1.1 million, Dan McKee's reports do what this evening. We're taping on Thursday this weekend tonight. Right. And I'm hearing he's going to do a good quarter. This campaign told me he got a half a million dollars. So which is better than he's? Best quarter I think he's ever had. But she got 1.1 million. There she is again, the challenge for him. It's not necessarily that he's not doing anything, he's not working hard at it. It's just. If his favorability and his job performance was higher, he could probably do better with that. But he has to change the job performance and the favorability number. Or he gets the mode of vote for him. So he has a lot of work to do. And one more thing on the, as we look in the guts of these polls to try and understand the landscape better, if you pull back up the head-to-head, Alex, in the control room of McKee and folks. So I looked at the crosstabs of this expedition poll that Pete Broad and it stayed. So 34 to 20, that was with a ton of people in the poll claim they were going to vote in the Democratic primary. But we all know that in the end, fewer people then say they will vote because primaries don't get huge years turnout. And when you look in the crosstabs and you get down to the number of people who say

17:28they're absolutely certain to vote, Helena folks hits 40%. When you get to people with a history of voting in the Democratic primary and even smaller pool, she hit 45% in this poll. Again, we are looking for, you know, the governor's one tough race is I'm not trying to bury their campaign. I'm just saying, these are really tough data points. It's definitely challenging. As you said. Real quick. We have about 120,000 people in the Democratic primary. One group that could have a big impact on this is the unions. They, if they go with the M. McKee, it's going to really help them. I think there's been a lot of things that try to entice the unions to support them over the last few months and they could bring in 30,000 votes if their members all vote the same way. Yeah, but just because a union, of course, doesn't necessarily mean the entire membership does that. All right. So we have done, we've taken the temperature of voters on Governor Dan McKee. We're going to take the temperature of voters on Helena folks. We'll do that when we come back. Stay with us. You're watching Newsmakers. Welcome back to Newsmakers.

18:29I'm Tim White, Ted Nesey and 12 News Political Analyst Joe Fleming. We're going over some new polling data that came out in the past week or so. All right. So I want to bring up a voter's feel about Helena folks. She's Democratic challenger to Governor Dan McKee. This is the UNH poll of likely primary voters, favorable 35%, unfavorable 18%. Pretty high. I don't know. 47%. I've joked on the show before with Helena folks that she's essentially been running for four years. So are you surprised that these don't know or so? No. Tim, I'm not surprised. I've known polling for 40 some years and I've seen candidates really don't get known until they get their pay TV up there. Helena folks at 47 don't know. She's been running for four years, but it's more behind the scenes, raising money, talking to organizations, not to the general public. But I notice with these numbers is she has almost a two to one favorable unfavorable rating. That's good for her. And now the 47% means she has an opportunity to define herself to the voters. They don't have a picture of me. And McKee, of course, is going to try and define her for her.

19:32Right. He's going to try the negatives out here. However, she has a lot more money to spend a lot more on the positives for her. With Dan McKee, he is known, but his unfavorable so high. I'd rather be in Helena folks's position where people don't know me and I could define it and get better known. Yeah, just briefly. I mean, you know, we're heading into May. I'm expecting pretty soon. They're going to start to use this $3.5 million she has in the bank. You know, TV ads. I'm sure they'll be doing digital ads. Of course, it's 2026. But starting as Joe says to try to speak to a broader people and trying to lock down the people who's currently say they're with her in these polls and then get those undecideds or I don't even know you people to like her. Right. But Dan McKee has been leaning into the incumbency. He's been holding events like in every day, multiple times a day. Now there are some events he doesn't want to hold, which is standing next to a bridge where there was yet another collapse on it. But you know, he was out there Friday night upside and downside of incumbency. Yeah, upside. Yeah, he's on the news every night, often with something he's promoting, something in his budget. He likes millionaires tax, the social security, et cetera.

20:33But the downside is when a big chunk of a bridge falls onto the Amtrak tracks, I happen to be anchoring Friday night. Yeah. 11, 30 at night, saying they're trying to explain another bridge failure. That's not what they want to be talking about. All right. Another person who was up for re-election, which we don't talk about a lot as a US senator, Jack Reed, he's largely viewed as very safe for re-election, but UNHP poll numbers. They looked at that as well. Yeah, we don't have these to throw on screen, but just they had Jack Reed at 52% support. His Republican challenger, Ray McKee, at 34% undecideds at 12. Frankly, very unsurprising number for me, based on recent elections in Rhode Island, where we've seen the Republicans locking down about a third of the vote in Rhode Island, sometimes nudging up a little over 40 last time with Trump and I think Patricia Morgan did. But Reed, 52, that's often where a strong Democrat starts out before they've even started doing any real campaigning, so no real sign. They had him up by a huge amount over his primary opponent, Connor Burbridge as well. So not that we thought Jack Reed had any real problems facing re-election this year,

21:35but he certainly looks to be in safe shape. What do you think, Jack? I think Jack's probably in a safe position. I was a little surprised that the Republican number was so high, but again, as Ted said, people are Republicans. It's like 35%, 37%, definitely Republicans. If they're all supporting him, then he's done what's going to be up there. But I think Jack Reed at this point hasn't spent any money either. He hasn't run in six years. So now we start getting to tell people what he's done over these six years. And I was going to talk about, I was against Trump. That should play really well in Rhode Island, and it's not going to help the Republicans. Yeah, people have no, this would probably be a whole different conversation we'd be having if Kamala Harris had won. And this was a midterm backlash against a Democratic president. That's right. Jack Reed, he's been strong enough, could probably survive in that environment too, but maybe the numbers are a little worse. But for Reed or the other members of Congress, it's looking like a strong year for Democrats all across the country. Well, then in blue states, you're really probably in blue states. I mean, we have to see how the Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering this week is going to affect the midterms, but here in Rhode Island, we're in Massachusetts.

22:38Yeah, that doesn't affect for sure. Okay, we are out of time, Joe Fleming. Thanks so much for joining us on the program, Ted. And you see, as well, if you missed any of it, it's on wpri.com. We'll see you next week on Newsmakers.