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

David Morales’s campaign for mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, is providing a model for how a progressive candidate can oust an incumbent.

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.

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........

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