When I first met David Morales it was December 2019, and I was standing in David’s ill-lit bachelor apartment as he announced to a small holiday party full of socialists that he intended to run for state representative. I was skeptical. David was young—only 21 at the time—just recently graduated, and not a native Rhode Islander in a state where that kind of thing still matters. The Providence neighborhood where he was living, Mount Pleasant, was a working- and middle-class, historically Irish and Italian part of town that had an emerging Latino majority and had also begun to see an influx of younger liberals. But longtime residents tend to dominate primaries, and the district was not yet, in my mind, a ripe target for a Bernie Sanders–inspired electoral challenge. I doubted, but David put together an impressive campaign—driven by his own extraordinary dedication to listening to voters, especially but not exclusively working-class and immigrant voters, as well as what was, by the standards of Providence politics at the time, a small army of volunteer canvassers—and it was enough to deliver him a convincing victory.
We celebrated David’s win: It was 2020, and socialists and progressives were riding Sanders’s coattails into office across the country—and, thanks to the political network we’d played a small part in building, across Rhode Island. David took office, and later met and moved in with his partner Andrea (and, mercifully, out of that bachelor apartment). For us too, life moved on. My wife Anna—who had worked as a volunteer coordinator on David’s first campaign and returned to volunteer as a field coordinator on the mayoral campaign—and I had a little girl. My kid met David early on, roaming the halls of the State House. In fact, she knew him first as “Spider Man” because that’s how he’d dress to read books to children at the library. She loves David, and every time he sees her, no matter what else he’s doing, he kneels down to get to eye level with her, give her a hug, and ask her about her day. I find that there aren’t many grown-ups like that in the world.
David told me in December of 2024 that he was considering running for mayor against Brett Smiley. I wasn’t sure it was worth picking that fight. David had built a reputation as a serious and hardworking state representative who was popular in his district and well-liked among his colleagues; he had the part-time state rep job for as long as he wanted it and the chance to carve out some power in the chamber. (By the end of his career in the legislature, he’d introduced or supported successful legislation on worker’s rights, including laws to prevent tip theft and protect janitors; on tenants’ rights, including laws to reduce Rhode Island’s catastrophic rates of childhood lead poisoning, on healthcare, lowering prescription drug costs, on utility justice, delaying utility shut-offs for nonpayment, and on education, supporting libraries, opposing book bans, and funding multilingual public school programs.) Why not stay put, play politics, angle for a committee gavel, and try to make a move into leadership in a few years or a decade? By then, maybe we’d have a few more socialists in the chamber. I could see the advantages of challenging the mayor to a one-on-one race that would pit David’s democratic socialism directly against Smiley’s technocratic centrism rather than wait to run in a crowded field for an open seat. But the risks seemed to outweigh the benefits: Smiley had a vast donor network and ties to national Democratic groups, and while there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for him, the city had not actually burned to the ground on his watch. Most importantly, no incumbent mayor of Providence had ever lost to a primary challenger. Morales was proposing to do something that had never been done before, and to do it with less money than I thought was wise. Again I was skeptical. Again I was wrong. I’ve been wrong a lot lately, and I can’t say it’s something I particularly mind these days.
Over the course of an extraordinary underdog campaign, Morales helped unite left and progressive groups, including labor unions representing health-care workers and service workers (especially the Rhode Island SEIU), bus drivers, teachers, and academics; electoral organizations like the Working Families Party, and crucially, housing justice groups like Reclaim RI (of which I am a member). David’s campaign slogan was “A Providence for All,” and he cannily addressed widespread concerns that the city is at risk of losing its identity as a creative, multicultural and slightly grimy haven for immigrants, artists, students, young people, and workers and becoming instead just another picture-postcard New England town where clapboard houses cost millions. Though David proposed investing in transit, expanding support for public schools, and further restricting city collaboration with federal immigration enforcement, housing affordability was the major campaign issue, and the policy area in which Brett Smiley was weakest and looked most out-of-touch. (Just this spring, Smiley vetoed an extraordinarily popular rent stabilization law, and consistently seemed unable to respond to the severity of the housing crisis with anything like appropriate concern.) The outgoing mayor, for his part, mostly bet on motivating his base of older, wealthier homeowners by playing on their fears of David and his supporters as dangerous socialists who wanted to defund the police. The negative campaigning was not successful—or at least, not successful enough. Together with Reclaim’s tenant union base and formidable electoral infrastructure—and working closely with a pro-tenant city council majority—Morales’s team pulled off something I’ve never seen here before: They built a citywide electoral operation that expanded the movement left’s capacity rather than hijacking it, leaving us stronger, more united, and—one hopes—more ready to help govern than we were a year ago.
Rhode Islanders like to make much of the idea that the state’s motto—visible on our seal, our flag, and on official buildings across the state—is “Hope.” According to the official state factbook, the origin of this rhetorical device is unknown, but it’s been in use since at least 1664, and the most likely reference is to a bible verse from the book of Hebrews, Chapter 6, verse 19: “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul . . .”
There hasn’t been a lot to be hopeful about lately. And there’s no reason to believe that one municipal election—or even a series of municipal elections in cities across the country, from New York to DC to Ann Arbor—can, on their own, begin to untangle the knot of systemic, cascading problems that threaten not only our own political collectivity, but, eventually, human life on a planetary scale. Still, hope is irrational. Tenacious. The thing you hold onto when all else fails; the thing that dies last. The book of Hebrews is an epistle written to steel and comfort an early Christian community, exhorting them to keep faith alive even in the face of suffering and terrifying religious persecution.
Morales frequently opened campaign communications—including his victory speech last night—with the salutation: “Hi neighbors!” It’s endearing and just a little bit saccharine—the perfect greeting for a campaign that was young, idealistic, and always a little too big for its britches. It invokes, I suspect, the slogan of the popular Narragansett beer (still “officially” headquartered in Rhode Island, even if it’s mainly brewed out of state), whose “Hi-Neighbor!” stickers are all over Providence. More poignantly, it invokes a kind of universality. We are all neighbors here, and who’s to say where the neighborhood stops? It’s a little Mr. Rogers—won’t you be my neighbor? But it’s a little Jesus too: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
The list of the suffering and the persecuted in this country is long and ever-growing. The biblical epistle’s vision of a messiah in whom to anchor our hope might feel misplaced, and anyway, no one I know really believes a messianic politics might be instantiated by a single deliverer, no matter how charismatic (though my daughter, for her part, still thinks David is some kind of a superhero). Still, it is worth remembering that in the face of a shredded social fabric, movements are made by people who have hope, sustain themselves on solidarity, and mobilize in the service not only of building political power, but of delivering material change to those who need it. As long as I’ve known David, he’s believed—and here I quote the man himself, or at least his Instagram account—that “hope will always outshine fear.” He’s right, maybe. The next time David—that is, Mayor Morales—makes a big announcement, I’m going to be a little less skeptical and a little more hopeful.
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