Rhode Island
Same Hands, New Candidate: Laborers Dump $250K Behind Foulkes—the Union That Installed RIDOT’s Alviti
What happened
On Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, according to a Rhode Island Board of Elections campaign-finance disclosure reported by GoLocalProv on Thursday, the Laborers Political League – Education Fund put $250,000 into the governor’s race to support Democrat Helena Foulkes. GoLocal ties the spend to Michael Sabitoni of the Laborers’ International Union and frames it as the same political machine that once installed Peter Alviti as RIDOT director.
Three days earlier, WPRI’s Ted Nesi reported that an arm of LIUNA was planning to spend $500,000 for Foulkes in the coming weeks, citing a person with direct knowledge. That report also said the group spent about $100,000 backing Gov. Dan McKee against Foulkes in the primary, and that Sabitoni’s Rhode Island Building and Construction Trades Council had endorsed Foulkes. Foulkes’s own TV spot sells her as an “outsider” who will make state government work “for everyone, not just the well-connected.”
The pattern is not new. GoLocal’s earlier “Organized Influence” series documented how the Sabitonis steered Alviti into RIDOT under Gina Raimondo in 2015—Alviti had come from a mid-level Laborers post and Cranston public works—and how Laborers money via Forward Rhode Island poured hundreds of thousands into McKee’s narrow 2022 primary win over Foulkes ($300,000 each from the Political League–Education Fund and the Build New England Fund, per GoLocal).
Original reporting
Read the underlying sources:
Virtue Forge commentary
Rhode Islanders are being asked to believe Foulkes is the outsider who will break the well-connected’s grip—while the same Laborers political apparatus that picked RIDOT’s director and bankrolled McKee’s 2022 survival now writes six-figure checks for her. That is not a workers-vs.-bosses story. It is a patronage story: a statewide construction-political network that treats the governor’s office as a client account and switches candidates when the old client loses a primary.
Taxpayers already lived through the Alviti years—billions in road money under a director whose path to the job ran through union politics, not a transportation résumé. When the same shop that built that arrangement can drop $250K (with more reportedly teed up) behind the Democratic nominee three weeks from Election Day, “make government work for everyone” starts to sound like campaign copy, not a governing theory. Free enterprise needs competitive politics and competent public works, not a revolving slate of candidates funded by the same gatekeepers.
What to watch: further Laborers Political League / Build New England / Forward Rhode Island-style filings before Nov. 3; whether the full $500K WPRI heard about materializes; Foulkes’s answer, if any, to the Alviti precedent; and whether Block or Guckian force the patronage question into the Oct. 20 televised debate.