But then he became the leader of the conservative group RI Taxpayers, which takes more unabashedly right-wing positions like denying rights to immigrants denied documents.  And now he has come out as a Republican.

The biggest problem Rhode Island liberals have always had is that Republicans scramble ordinary politics by running for the General Assembly as Democrats.  As Ann Clanton famously put it when she was Executive Director if the Rhode Island Republican Party, “We have a lot of Democrats who we know are Republican but run as a Democrat–basically so they can win.”

Block could have walked this well-tread path, a path that so many talented Rhode Island conservatives have taken.  It is the path that gave us a House Speaker and Senate President who have each taken thousands of dollars from the NRA, passed a voter ID law, and slashed taxes for the rich more aggressively than nearly any other state.

But Block has chosen a different route.  He has chosen to be honest with the voters about his political beliefs.  I really respect him for it. I wish more conservatives would follow his lead.

Block has been saying for months that he would only seek the office of governor if he saw a clear path to victory. That path for victory did not lie in the political party he’d spent the last half-decade building and advocating for. This does two things. First, for everyone who ever accused Block of being a Republican in sheep’s clothing, it confirms that their suspicions were reality. Second, it makes it appear that Block is less dedicated to his causes and more dedicated to himself. Switching affiliations from Moderate to Republican doesn’t further the causes Block has championed. It only furthers his own career.

Republicans should no doubt be both happy and annoyed about this latest shapeshifter in Rhode Island’s political landscape. They should be happy because it removes Block as their personal gadfly; GOP partisans have long suggested Block’s candidacy is what prevented a Gov. John Robitaille from being inaugurated in 2011. Now, come September 2014, Block will either be their standard-bearer or defeated. The smart money is on the latter.

But therein lies the problem. Until now, it seemed as though Cranston Mayor Allan Fung was going to have a easy waltz to the nomination, leaving him free to beat up on the Democratic candidates. Now he has a contested nomination. Resources that otherwise could’ve gone toward tamping down the Democratic nominee’s inherent advantage are now going to have to go to fending off Block’s challenge.

For the Moderate Party, this appears to be its death knell. It never existed much outside the persona of Ken Block. This is exactly what I wrote about in March of last year; that the Moderate Party has an issue of a lack of identity. Block has been very successful at garnering media attention. But that attention has never translated into much support for the Moderate Party. It’s not even clear if there are other Moderates beyond Block. It seems likely the Moderate Party will end its existence as a second most successful third party in modern Rhode Island politics; right behind the Cool Moose Party.

Whether Block will become the new Robert Healey is anyone’s guess.

Say what you will about Ken Block’s policy proposals – and there some I like and many I don’t – but at least he is no longer trying to fool Rhode Islanders into thinking he stands for something other than what he does.

By and large, he stands for the group of people known as “taxpayers” – in politics this doesn’t mean people who pay taxes, it is code for people who want to pay less in taxes, which is usually made up mostly of people who (think they) don’t need government services. This constituency is also often referred to as “fiscal conservatives.”

Sam Bell recently pointed out in a comment on RI Future that oftentimes political party names don’t match their politics: “For instance, the Liberal Party of Australia is conservative, and so is the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan.  And the Socialist party of France is not very socialist.  Many members of Yisrael Beteinu (Israel is Our Home) actually live in the West Bank. Unless Mr. Block seriously pretends that he is not a conservative, there is no harm done.”

That’s where the rub was: Block wasn’t so much pretending his position was moderate as he was pretending that the progressive position didn’t exist. Bell went on the eviscerate Block on that point too which you can read here.

Similarly, by changing its name from the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition to RI Taxpayers, one of the charter members of the chorus of pseudo-think tanks that lobby for the rich and powerful in Rhode Island has also come clean with its actual agenda.

The Rhode Island Statewide Coalition was never a statewide coalition at all. In fact, quite the opposite. It started out being called the Rhode Island Shoreline Coalition and according to Progressive Charlestown was formed in 2003 to win “the vote for out-of-state land owners and fighting the Narragansetts over gaming.”

Will Collette, co-editor of Progressive Charlestown, published a two part investigation into RISC in August when it was moving out of Charlestown and to west Warwick. You can read it here and here.

Moderate Party chairman and possible gubernatorial candidate Ken Block is out with a new website, masterlever.org, which petitions the Governor and the General Assembly to eliminate the ability to vote solely based on party line (a.k.a., the “master lever”).

As a case study for why it should be banned, Mr. Block offers up the 9000+ Rhode Island voters who used the option to vote for the Moderates, despite only three candidates running under the Moderate banner (two Moderates ran in nonpartisan races).

I personally think this is a good idea, the option is archaic, and obviously damaging in nonpartisan contests (of course, I also oppose nonpartisan contests, but that’s beside the point). Yet there’s a cynic in me that has to guess what may come. I worry political leaders in the General Assembly might attempt to squash this merely to prevent the Moderate Party any sort of win. I think this is short-sighted. Let me offer the cynic’s perspective on why the lever should be banned.

Republicans have long advocated the elimination of the master lever, and in this case it’s no surprise to see virtually every local politician from the Grand Ol’ Party backing Mr. Block’s crusade. In fact, non-Democrats often point to the master lever as a reason why they can’t compete in this state.

So, it will be refreshing when the convenient cover of the master lever is eliminated. Perhaps non-Democrats will have to face the unpopularity of their policies for a change. More likely, they’ll rely more heavily on the “stupid Rhode Islanders” line that their candidates and supporters have been throwing around lately. I’m sure that will do wonders for their popularity.

General Assembly leaders should speedily remove the master lever, or at least mandate its placement at the very end of the ballot. Mr. Block rightly points out that his party gained 9000+ votes with the lever alone; votes which the Moderates might not necessarily have received had people had to vote race by race. It’s likely the top-ballot placement gave the Moderate Party the most exposure it got during the last cycle.

With the elimination of the master lever, perhaps non-Democrats will start focusing on issues that affect Rhode Islanders more than once every other year or so. They might consider following in the footsteps of former Sen. Bethany Moura and former Rep. Daniel Gordon; who both spent a great deal of their time fighting foreclosure in our state, much of it fraudulent in nature. I believe conservatives are supposed to care about protecting citizens’ property.

In a year where there were only four candidates across the state marked as belonging to the Moderate Party on the ballot (most people never saw them and the fifth and sole successful Moderate Party candidate ran in a nonpartisan race), 9249 voters used the so-called “master lever” to vote for the Moderate Party.

With only 971 Moderates registered in the state as of October 1, 2012, the master lever gave the Moderates a 952.52% amplification of what its registration should’ve provided. Moderate chair Ken Block referred to this as “horrific” on Twitter, and proceeded to lay out the case for abolishing the master lever, claiming that 20 potential Moderate candidates didn’t run because of the lever.

While the master lever is a major hurdle to organizing a third party (and its abolition would be good), it was particularly short-sighted of those candidates to refuse to run. For one thing, the more candidates running under a party’s name increases name recognition for the party, translating into more votes. Furthermore, in communities where there were no Moderates, many of those votes were wasted.

Fear of the master lever is no excuse for failing to contest elections, nor is the master lever the sole problem that the Moderate Party has (the same should be said of the Republicans). Abolition of the lever is no guarantee that the Moderates will suddenly see their vote numbers increase (they might actually see the opposite). The best exposure the party got all year was that their name and symbol were at the top of the ballot across the state. Voters are still capable of reading party affiliation, and rejecting the parties whose platforms or candidates they reject.

The Moderate platform, while containing admirable ethics and environmental sections, is essentially the same corporate economic and education systems espoused by Republicans and laissez-faire Democrats: don’t increase taxes, give cash away to unproven businesses and charter schools, rely on unreliable data to measure school progress. This platform is simply not that popular among voters in the core urban areas (the data bears that out, Mr. Block did better in the exurbs during his 2010 run for Governor). I’ve mentioned these criticisms before.

But make no mistake, the Moderates are growing. There were 971 of them on October 1st of this year. Three years ago in 2009 there were only 52 on October 1st. Yesterday, WPRO’s Dee DeQuattro placed their registration at 1068. That’s a pretty substantial increase, about 10% growth in about a month and a half.

The Moderates face a major test in 2014. It sounds as if Mr. Block is not committing himself to running for governor, saying that he has confidence in whatever candidate his party fields to clear the 5% bar to keep the party on the ballot. That’s a good thing. It would be disastrous for the Moderates to be tied too strongly to Mr. Block, merely because if his energy flags or fails, so does the party’s. Though if they can’t find a candidate, I assume the Moderates will put Mr. Block up again rather than let themselves fail.

Hopefully, a new candidate can gain over 5% support, though once again they’ll have to build name recognition. If that candidate doesn’t make 5%, the media is waiting with the narrative: the Moderates were merely moderate Republicans and in 2014 they decided that they didn’t want to spoil a real Republican’s chances. While that narrative may or may not be true, it’s out there, waiting for the Moderates to prove it wrong.

The Moderate Party has a long way to go. Focusing on appealing to voters across Rhode Island and getting candidates is its major work right now (as I’m sure Mr. Block is far more aware of then I am). Then it has to prevent brain drain from its organization (a couple of its alums joined Governor Lincoln Chafee’s administration). But the Moderates have one advantage the Republicans don’t when contesting elections. No one would mistake a Moderate for a Republican.

As an extra, if you avoided the link to WPRO (don’t get stuck in an echo chamber!), Mr. Block had a killer takedown of the RI GOP in the comments:

Dee DeQuattro gets this one all wrong. 6.5% of the vote in a competitive 4-way race starting from zero is a monumental achievement – I am certain the 5% threshold was written into law because few thought it could be done by a brand new party.

Her biggest swing and miss is that RI does in fact need a new political party – because the state GOP has utterly failed for the 2 decades I have lived here to bring political balance to our state. Whether it was the striking out Strike Force or the empty Clean Slate, to a large extent the state GOP has been tone deaf, missing what RI voters really care about.

The State GOP did not get wiped off of the political map in 2012 because of the existence of the Moderate Party. There were no legislative races where a GOP and Mod showed up on the same ballot. The State GOP is flailing all of its own accord – with a substantial boost from the national GOP messaging which works in TX but not so well in RI.

I am always amused by the hand wringing done by stalwarts in the GOP who fret that silly Rhode Islanders keep voting for the same Dem jokers so they deserve what they get. The more appropriate observation should be why does the GOP think that running the same folks with the same failing message will result in a different electoral outcome.

It will not.

On Election Day 2012, there were 786 candidates for all offices across Rhode Island, from U.S. Senator to Town Sergeant. According to a list provided by the Secretary of State’s office, the make-up was such:

• 301 Democrats
• 209 Republicans
• 116 Independents
• 4 Moderates
• 1 Libertarian (Independent)
• 1 Vigilant Fox (Independent)
• 154 candidates for nonpartisan offices

In evaluating partisan strength, we need to put aside the 154 nonpartisan candidates and the offices they ran for, merely because nonpartisan offices don’t identify party affiliation. Including the federal offices contested (not including the U.S. Presidency), there were 373 partisan officials elected in 2012 (not all offices are contested in a given election year, the total number of offices in this state is at least 505 and the 1992 Census of Governments by the US Census Bureau put the total number of elected offices at 1186).

How did the parties do? Well, of the 301 candidates put up by the Democrats, 244 of them were elected; a win rate of 81.06% per candidate. The Republicans? Of their 209 candidates, just 96 of them made it to elective office, a win rate of 45.93%. Political independents placed 33 candidates, winning 28.45% of the time. The Moderates (and everyone else) had a win rate of 0%.

Basically, with no organization behind them, political independents did about half as well as the Republicans, despite that party’s over-hyped “Strike Force”, their poorly-constructed/conceived “Rhode Island sucks” website, and chairman Mark Zaccaria’s “less-is-more” strategy (which I criticized back in June). Deep organizational/strategic thinking or cheap gimmicks?

The answer is clear from the results: Republicans in Rhode Island were crushed in 2012. With only 11 members in the General Assembly, it is no longer tenable to think of Rhode Island as having two major parties with minor parties like the Moderates and Greens. Instead, we need to think of Rhode Island has having a primary party, the Democratic Party; a secondary party, the Republican Party; and tertiary parties like the Moderates.

Despite the insight to the RI GOP’s issues provided here by Patrick Laverty (running inexperienced candidates for statewide office), he misses the deeper structural problem for Republicans: they’ve largely ceded much of the state to Democrats and independents (a problem exacerbated under Mr. Zaccaria’s time as chair). If you lived in all but one of Pawtucket’s six city council wards or House District 46, after you completed the federal office section of your ballot there wasn’t a single Republican anywhere down ticket.

Republicans may feel strong in towns like East Greenwich, West Greenwich, and Scituate (towns where the majority of voters voted straight Republican for President, U.S. Senator, and U.S. Representative), but even in these towns, Democrats contested town-wide offices and majorities of voters voted for the occasional Democratic Assembly candidate (in East Greenwich, they picked Mark Schwager; West Greenwich went with Leo Raptakis and Lisa Tomasso; and Scituate returned Michael Marcello).

A strategic problem for the Republicans is that they don’t appear to have a plan to actually fix Rhode Island’s problems, and the only ideas they’ve expressed are an anathema to the majority of Rhode Island’s voters. Without an appealing plan or vision, Democrats will continue to accrue the state’s new talent and fresh blood in politics, while the Republicans will remain a party adrift and rudderless. The only question is whether the party will finally drown under a tide of blue, or find a way to reform and provide a serious challenge. It’s a project that will take decades.

CORRECTIONS: An earlier version of this article missed that there were four expressly partisan Moderate Party candidate. It also failed to give a justification for not counting nonpartisan offices. Thank you, Ted Nesi.

An earlier version also incorrectly referred to Rep. Michael Marcello as “Phil Marcello”.