Who's Paying for the Victory Fund's Brett Smiley Mailers?

As I watch the September 9 Rhode Island primaries from afar, I've been monitoring independent expenditures. Most of them make obvious sense: charter school advocates are spending for charter school supporters, while the progressive RI Values Project is backing progressives endorsed by its funders. One jumped out to me, though. Why is the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund spending six figures, all of it for a single endorsed candidate? Spoiler alert: I don't know exactly why. But I do know how to follow the money.

The Fund has endorsed seven candidates in the upcoming primaries, spanning a wide ideological range. Those candidates are democratic socialist State Sen. Sam Bell, progressive State House candidate Michael Garman, progressive Providence City Council candidate Jackie Goldman, moderate Attorney General candidate Kim Ahern, State Senate candidate Angela Lima, Providence City Council candidate Dwayne Keys, and moderate incumbent Mayor of Providence Brett Smiley. All seven candidates are, in my assessment, either locked in close races or clear underdogs, with the possible exception of Bell. Yet the Fund has focused its independent expenditure on only the mayoral race.

I found this curious. $127,100.86 is a lot of money to spend on a single primary. If my tally is correct, the Fund spent about half that much, $68,777.20, to elect Smiley back in 2022; unfortunately, I did not record a list of their 2022 endorsements. This year, $112,065.60 has gone to Person 2 Person Solutions for direct mail, with the remaining $15,035.26 going to Northside Research LLC for “research consulting”. Both firms are based in Brooklyn, New York, and the Fund is one of just two federal organizations sending direct mail in the primary as of writing, the other being the DLP PAC on behalf of the Democratic Lieutenant Governors' Association, which is unsurprisingly spending in the Lieutenant Governor primary in support of the incumbent Lieutenant Governor.

Before I continue, I'm told it's good business to plug myself. I'm Eli Spencer Heyman, a Georgia-based political analyst and leftist. I have a bachelor's in Public Policy from Brown University, which I attended from 2016 to 2020, living in Providence for the better part of five years; I moved back home to the Atlanta area in 2021, but Rhode Island will always have a piece of my heart. For many years, I've done political predictions, race calls, and campaign finance analysis as an independent hobby, focusing on Georgia and Rhode Island. I have a pretty good record; to my knowledge, I was the first person to call Georgia for Joe Biden, and I carefully combine data with my political instincts and feel for both GA and RI in my predictions. I'd love to do this as a job, but that requires support. Sign up below to get my Rhode Island primary rundown in your inbox next week, featuring my take on everything from the gubernatorial primary to the contest to succeed the (now-former) state representative who lives in South Carolina.

I should also note, given the content of this post, that I am a donor to David Morales's mayoral campaign. I have not communicated with them regarding this post, and I am not paid by the Morales campaign or by any other Rhode Island politicians. I obtained one photo in this post from someone I believe to be affiliated with the Morales campaign, who posted the photo publicly on Bluesky.

I write about who funds campaigns because it's newsworthy. Money is power, and it's worth examining the interests (both material and ideological) of donors to independent expenditures and campaigns. I try to strike a careful balance between respecting individuals' privacy and covering this subject, and I hope that's born out below.

If you believe that you've spotted an error in this post, or that you've spotted something I missed, you can drop me a note: eli@elium2.com

Mayor Smiley is locked in a tight race with left-wing State Rep. David Morales, who was first elected to the State House with DSA's support.¹ Other left-wing groups like Reclaim and the Working Families Party, as well as the progressive SEIU Council and the Providence Teachers' Union, are backing Morales, while the Victory Fund and pro-charter groups are backing Smiley. The two publicly released polls back up my non-polling-based assessment of a close race.² Rent stabilization has taken center stage in the race after Smiley vetoed a rent stabilization ordinance earlier this year; nine of fifteen City Council members voted to override the veto, one vote short of the required number. Several of those nine are now backing Morales.

Another issue that has served as a flash point in the mayoral race is a rare ballot initiative attempting to force Providence to divest from foreign countries “conducting severe violations of human rights such as ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide.” Supporters and opponents both point to companies linked to Israel as the intended target of the initiative; the linked article from the Rhode Island Current is a good overview. Smiley, who is Jewish, says the measure conflicts with the city charter and is opposed, while Morales is supportive. (As a native Atlantan, I am not exactly a stranger to mayors opposing unprecedented citizen-led ballot initiatives.)

Data centers have not been a major topic in the primary, as far as I can tell, but Morales stated in a forum recorded by Steve Ahlquist that he would not allow data centers in Providence as mayor. Yes, all these things will be relevant later.

Let's get back to the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund's six-figure expenditure. Here are some of the mailpieces, courtesy of Richard Corso on Bluesky:

Kenny Uong also posted one side of a different mailpiece publicly on Bluesky:

Like many independent expenditures, these mailers emphasize the message that the organization's consultants think will resonate – Smiley's identity as a gay man is mentioned nowhere on any piece, and it is not immediately obvious what the Victory Fund's particular interest in the race is. (The “absent” mailer does assert that Morales failed to show up for “our LGBTQ+ community”.) I decided to follow the money. Spoiler alert: the donors' interests aren't featured in the mailpieces either. Well, except for maybe the pension fund. And the affordable housing.

As a federal PAC, the Victory Fund has to disclose their donors in FEC filings. But those filings are monthly and aren't due for weeks, unless they spend on a federal election. Their August donors won't be disclosed federally until September 20. Fortunately, Rhode Island law requires independent expenditure groups to disclose expenditures near a primary or election within 24 hours, and they must also disclose donors who give at least $1,000 within the current election cycle on those filings. The full filings can be found below, with telephone numbers, signatures, and individuals' addresses redacted.

Two donors jumped out from the rest due to the size of their contributions: Jeannie Lavine, who has seemingly given $100,000 and definitely at least $50,000, and the Build New England Fund, which has given $50,000.³ More about the Build New England Fund and the other donors later. First, let's talk about Jeannie Lavine, a woman in Massachusetts with virtually no history of Rhode Island political donations.

I note that while I am not experienced with Massachusetts' independent expenditure reporting platform, I did attempt to check and was unable to find any Massachusetts expenditures by the Fund.

Lavine and her husband, former Bain Capital chair Jonathan Lavine, may not have a history of Rhode Island political donations, but they have a very long trail of other donations. In addition, Jonathan's parents, Jerrold and Barbara, both contributed the maximum amount to Smiley last year, both reporting a Providence address; Jerrold, a lifetime Rhode Islander born in Providence, has since passed away.⁴

Jonathan and Jeannie Lavine's only Rhode Island political donations, aside from a pair of donations by each of them in the early 2000s (to Sheldon Whitehouse and Matt Brown), are federal, with the pair's only activity this cycle being donations to Gabe Amo and Seth Magaziner late last year. Given the Victory Fund's stated purpose of supporting LGBTQ+ candidates, I did note that Jonathan donated several times to David Cicilline's congressional campaign committee, and Jeannie gave to his most recent reelection campaign in 2021; Cicilline was Providence's first gay mayor. The contributions to Cicilline only date to 2011, after Cicilline had already won election to the seat in a competitive 2010 race. The Lavines also have an extensive history of donations to Democrats in swing seats, and Jonathan is a major donor to the Democratic Hill committees and SMP/HMP. News articles have covered their philanthropic donations, supporting a cancer hospital and Columbia University Athletics, among other causes. They are also “generous” donors to Combined Jewish Philanthropies.

“Our parents helped us understand that tikkun olam — repairing the world — is part of what it means to be Jewish. CJP has been a central organization in our pursuit of tikkun olam,” says Jeannie Lavine. I could not agree more with the first sentence. “In recent years, [the Lavines have] felt compelled to increase their investment in Israel,” CJP explains. I think it's rather offensive to invoke tikkun olam in support of Israel, although to be clear, that invocation doesn't appear in the direct quotes and is the result of CJP's juxtaposition.

Several of the Lavines' favored federal candidates are among the most aggressively pro-Israel members of Congress. Just since January 1, 2025, Jeannie Lavine is a donor to Missouri's Wesley Bell, New Jersey's Josh Gottheimer, and New York City's Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman. Jonathan Lavine has donated to Torres as well as to the unsuccessful senatorial campaigns of two staunchly pro-Israel members of Congress, Angie Craig and Haley Stevens. Bell, Goldman, and Stevens all faced opponents who were well to their left on Israel/Palestine, and Torres is notorious for his obsessive focus on Israel. Of the above, only Gottheimer and Goldman are Jewish, so this cannot be explained as a focus on Jewish candidates.

While I admit I did not examine all 1,000+ reported federal contributions from people named Jonathan or Jeannie Lavine, one recent contribution also jumped out to me: both gave to Patrick Roath, who was challenging incumbent U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch in the Democratic primary. (Lynch may be the Lavines' representative in Congress.) Virtually all of the Lavines' other donations were to incumbents or to Democrats in GOP-held seats. Lynch, one of the most right-wing Democrats in Congress, came under scrutiny in the primary for his support for ICE. Interestingly, though, Lynch was also backed in the primary by J Street PAC, which noted that he cosponsored legislation by Betty McCollum that would place restrictions on the use of funds the United States provides to Israel. Jeannie Lavine's only other contributions to non-incumbent federal candidates this cycle are in open seats.

The Build New England Fund, the second largest donor to the Victory Fund's independent expenditure, is based in Rhode Island and is tied to LiUNA, a conservative union with close ties to the Rhode Island Democratic establishment. Just to pick a few examples, LiUNA's national treasurer, Michael Sabitoni, is the head of the RI Building and Construction Trades Council, and the late Dominick Ruggerio, who served in State Senate leadership from 2003 to his passing last year, once served on the board of LiUNA Local 808. Oh, and LiUNA's federal PAC is partnering with the Democratic Governor's Association to spend six figures in support of embattled Gov. Dan McKee's reelection bid under the name Working Rhode Island Forward. Their support for Smiley is easy enough to explain, and they also gave to the Victory Fund in the 2022 primary to back Smiley (they were the only reported donor for those 2022 expenditures, although some other donors appear in the FEC filings). It is worth noting, however, that while unions and the Rhode Island Democratic establishment are closely entangled, unions almost always eschew pro-charter school candidates out of solidarity with teacher's unions. And yet the BCTC and LiUNA are backing Smiley.

What about the other contributors? A full list of the contributors disclosed in the Rhode Island filings is below, with my apologies in advance for what may be some rough HTML. A few themes emerge, including private equity, real estate, and artificial intelligence. At least a couple have ties to companies that might plausibly be targeted by the divestment initiative. Many are also closely tied to either the old-school Rhode Island Democratic establishment or to former Gov. Gina Raimondo; Smiley was once Raimondo's chief of staff. Note that at this stage, the Victory Fund is only required to disclose donors who give an aggregate of at least $1,000 on the Rhode Island filings. I've included a CSV file if you prefer a direct download.

Lou Hammond's contribution was perplexing to me at first, and I nearly published this post with a mere handwave. Her namesake group has no Rhode Island office, nor do they have a Tennessee office (the Fund made some Tennessee expenditures in late July totaling $10,025). But Lou Hammond Group does have Rhode Island work. Terry Gallagher, though not a donor himself, is president of the firm's New York office and has been with the firm since before I was born; I do not know if he is related to Victory Fund donor Kevin Gallagher. Earlier this year, Terry Gallagher posted on LinkedIn, “Very proud to serve the Providence Tourism Council (PTC) for the past 20 years at Lou Hammond Group.” PTC's board includes the managers of several downtown hotels.

The state's controversial plans to move the RIPTA bus hub away from its current downtown location of Kennedy Plaza have not been a central topic in the primary, in part because it's not up to the mayor, but Smiley is one of the few political figures who openly supports it, while Morales has long been against it, speaking against it at a 2020 rally I attended shortly after he won his first primary. (Thanks, as usual, to Steve Ahlquist for the writeup.) Opponents of the planned move have long charged that the downtown developers who support the move are motivated by fear that poor and working-class individuals in the downtown area harm their business. Former Providence Mayor Joseph Paolino Jr. in particular is almost always cited as a proponent of the move. (I promise I am not making an effort to name every former mayor of Providence.)

The other donors outside the Northeast are of some note. Amos Hochstein, who gave $1,800, is Managing Partner at TWG Global, which Wikipedia states was “created to form partnerships and make investments in artificial intelligence,” citing the Financial Times. TWG Global has partnered with companies like Palantir and Technologies Elon Musk's X on AI. In a forum recorded and transcribed by independent journalist Steve Ahlquist, where the candidates were asked about their stances on AI in education, David Morales stated, “As our mayor, we will not allow data centers to come into our city.”

Hochstein actually has his own Wikipedia page, unlike most of the donors, which made my work here significantly easier. Citing Bloomberg, Wikipedia states that Hochstein joined TWG to support the firm's AI strategy. Furthermore, Hochstein is (according to Wikipedia) a former draftee of the Israel Defense Forces. You can't decide where you're born, of course, but you can avoid working with fellow Biden administration member Brett McGurk to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

John Struck, who gave $10,000, has a listed address in Florida, but a John Struck is the registered agent and sole member-manager for Hilders, LLC, a real estate company located in Narragansett (fellow donor Harry Struck gives a different Narragansett address, and I do not know if they are related). John Struck's listed employer, Wand Partners, is a private equity firm. Rhode Island campaign finance records show that John Struck donated to past Providence mayors Angel Taveras and Jorge Elorza, former state Attorney General Patrick Lynch (himself a Fund donor), and to Smiley's unsuccessful 2014 mayoral campaign; although the Florida address given for Struck in these records is hours away from Winter Park, the listed employer is Wand Partners.

Moving to the donors giving Rhode Island addresses, Bhikhaji Maneckji, who gave $10,000, is a philanthropist with a record of donations supporting education; for example, he has made donations to the RI Foundation supporting hiring teachers of color in Providence public schools, and he gave CCRI a $500,000 gift in 2017. He has contributed the maximum amount to the Smiley campaign every year dating to 2022, totaling $8,000.⁵ As the Providence Journal story about the CCRI donation notes, Maneckji is a former executive at Textron, a major aerospace and defense industry company headquartered in downtown Providence just a block away from Kennedy Plaza. Textron is perhaps best known as a U.S. Department of Defense contractor and is not listed by the official BDS Movement website as a boycott target. However, the American Friends Service Committee's directory notes that they have supplied the Israeli Air Force 100 Squadron with aircraft and are also a supplier of aircraft to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

Speaking of divestment, multiple donors are closely tied to private equity, including John Struck (above), Edward Galvin (of Raymond James, which has a Providence branch), and Samuel Mencoff, cofounder of Madison Dearborn Partners. Mencoff is also the former chancellor of Brown University; in that role, he met with student protestors seeking to have the university divest from Israeli-affiliated companies. While the university ultimately declined to divest, Mencoff appears not to have made any public statements about his position on divestment. He is now board chair of Brown University Health, formerly Lifespan, which owns Rhode Island Hospital and various other medical institutions in the state. I do not know if any of the private equity donors have any relationship to Providence's investments.

Another donor, Kevin Gallagher, who previously served as a senior advisor to Gina Raimondo (during both her governorship and her tenure in the Cabinet), is now a senior advisor at WestExec Advisors, although the Victory Fund says he is self-employed. WestExec was founded in 2017 by Obama administration alumni Antony Blinken and Michèle Flournoy; Blinken, of course, went on to serve as Joe Biden's secretary of state and was noted for his strong pro-Israel views, which stood out even within the pro-Israel Biden administration. Blinken is no longer at WestExec, but as of 2020, the company represented Shield AI as well as the Israeli artificial intelligence firm Windward.

There are several donors involved in real estate, including Harry Struck, who is retired but previously was in the mortgage industry; Greg Weiss of Providence's J&W Property Management; and developer (and former Boston Celtics owner) Stephen R. Lewinstein, who may or may not now live full-time in Newport. The total assessed value of Lewinstein's three properties at the Newport address given on the Victory Fund's filings is over $4 million. Trusts with Lewinstein as trustee own thirteen properties in Providence, all on the East Side, including both apartments and commercial properties. As previously discussed, rent stabilization has been the defining issue in the mayoral primary, with Smiley opposed and Morales supportive.

Merrill Sherman's firm Sherman Consulting LLC does not have a significant public profile (although there are several firms with the same name), but she is a cofounder and former CEO of Bank Rhode Island who has served on the boards of the Rhode Island School of Design, the Providence Foundation, and Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Rhode Island, and currently serves on the boards of Johnson and Wales University and Ocean State Media Group. Perhaps most notably, she also served on the board of Crossroads Rhode Island, an organization that provides services to homeless individuals. Crossroads RI has very close ties to former Gov. Raimondo, who also served on its board.

Several contributors have obvious ties to the Rhode Island Democratic establishment. Former Rhode Island AG Patrick Lynch and his employee Jefferson Guimond are among them. Lynch notes on his firm's website that he “led efforts against LNG facilities in Rhode Island”. What he doesn't say is that he came under scrutiny after leaving office for emails to then-Attorney General Peter Kilmartin that, among other things, argued against banning online gambling. Lynch was not registered in Rhode Island as a lobbyist at the time, and he does not appear to be registered now, although I do not know whether he still engages in such activity. Given Lynch's stance on liquified natural gas, it seems worth noting that Hochstein, covered above, has previously worked in marketing for LNG company Tellurian. (A proposed LNG plant on Providence's South Side was a major political issue when I lived there, but to my knowledge it is not an active issue.)

I don't think I really need to explain why Ironworkers Local 37, as a union, would have close ties to the Rhode Island establishment, although my point about charter schools above is just as applicable as it was to LiUNA. The last donor is Dick Shappy Vintage Auto Sales, an LLC whose sole member-manager on record with the state is, and this is going to shock you, Richard Shappy. In that capacity, Shappy retained former Rhode Island House Speaker John Harwood as an attorney in a long-running case where he was sued by “convicted New England crime boss Raymond Patriarca, Jr.”

Shappy also owns the Cadillac Lounge, a “gentleman’s club” in Providence which was sued by its dancers for alleged labor violations, settling for seven figures in 2019. The complaint alleged, among other things, that the Lounge misclassified its dancers as independent contractors rather than employees, that “the only compensation that the exotic dancers receive while working at the Cadillac Lounge are tips paid by customers,” that the Lounge took a “house fee” of at least $50 per shift, and that the Lounge “fined” dancers who were late to work $25-50. Morales's past affiliation with DSA, which supports the full decriminalization of sex work, may be of note here; the criminalization of sex work facilitates exploitation of sex workers' labor, even those whose work is not directly criminalized. Again, the Cadillac Lounge was accused of exploiting sex workers' labor in a federal lawsuit that the company settled. (Settling does not entail admitting guilt.)

It's always worth asking whether the correct explanation is the obvious one. But there's one thing I didn't find any evidence of among the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund's recent donors: ties to the LGBTQ+ community. Of course, there are many allies who are not part of the community themselves and may not have obvious ties. Regardless, it's a shame the Fund is pouring its resources into backing Smiley instead of at least spending them more broadly, as we need more lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer candidates in politics, especially with the trans community under constant attack from the Trump administration.

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¹ Providence DSA distanced itself from Morales after he voted to reelect then-Speaker Joe Shekarchi in January 2023. It has since disavowed Democratic primaries entirely and is now known as Rhode Island DSA.

² Both polls came from Education Reform Now Advocacy, a pro-charter group that has not endorsed to my knowledge, although its head, former Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, is backing Morales. The first, fielded July 19-20 with n=305, found Smiley up 42% to 38%, and the second, fielded Aug. 19-20 with n=310, found Morales up 48% to 38%.

³ There appear to be two distinct contributions by Lavine, one on Aug. 11 and one on Aug. 12, each for $50,000, which were reported in separate filings. However, both contributions claim an aggregate contribution amount of $50,000, raising the possibility the second contribution is a duplicate. Another contributor who gave twice has correct aggregate values. I would be surprised if there was a duplication issue, but I can't rule it out. I comment that the Fund's filings misattribute Stephen R. Lewinstein's company as “Steven R. Lewinstein Associates”, so an error isn't exactly out of the question.

⁴ I found no evidence of pro-Israel donations by Jerrold and Barbara Lavine and do not mean to suggest any motive for their support for Smiley. Their donation history is largely confined to successful statewide, federal, and Providence mayoral Democratic candidates in Rhode Island (including supporting David Cicilline in the 2010 U.S. House primary, before he was first elected to Congress, although their support does not appear to predate his victory in the 2002 mayoral primary). I mention their support for Smiley and their Providence residence only to strengthen the association between Jeannie Lavine's Victory Fund contributions and the Victory Fund's pro-Smiley expenditure.

⁵ The legal calendar year maximum contribution increased from $1,000 to $2,000 during this time period.

Edits since posting: I updated the post shortly after publication to reflect that Shappy was not an individual party to the lawsuit when it was settled.