Lincoln Chafee is running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. He served one four-year term as Rhode Island's governor, beginning on Jan. 4, 2011. He was the first Independent to be elected to that office. He subsequently became a Democrat. As a Republican, he served as mayor of Warwick from 1992 to 1999, when he was appointed to the U.S. Senate following the death of his father, Sen. John H. Chafee. He was elected to a full Senate term in 2000. He is married with three children. In April 2015 he formed an exploratory committee to consider running for President.
"I am very proud that over my almost 30 years of public service I have had no scandals."
"Although the governor doubled the beach fees . . . all the money, as we found out, is all going to an out-of-state company. The state isn't even getting the money for that."
Says Lincoln Chafee "settled a union strike by giving the teachers a 19-percent-raise."
Lincoln Chafee "voted with President George W. Bush and the conservative leadership 76% of the time."
"We had the biggest drop of the rate of unemployment (in) all but 4 states."
Rhode Island's legislature is "the strongest in the country."
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So Lincoln Chafee — Rhode Island’s Republican-independent-Democrat — is running for President.
The former governor of the smallest — and at times quirkiest — state has a PolitiFact record that is as mixed as his political lineage. During the four years that the former Republican U.S. senator served as first the independent and then the Democratic governor of Rhode Island, only once did PolitiFact judge one of his statements Half True.
More often, the Truth-O-Meter swung back and forth from True to False as Chafee battled a stagnant economy and a hostile General Assembly.
Given Lincoln Chafee's record of being willing to buck the system and the Chafee family's reputation, Rhode Islanders were jarred to hear the independent gubernatorial candidate being accused of consorting with someone who might have ties to organized crime.
But that's what happened earlier this month when a local news website reported on Chafee's work at a foundation established by a Ukrainian billionaire.
We explored Chafee's role there, and got different opinions on the politics and intrigue swirling around the effort to set up a think tank in one of the world's fledgling democracies.
We've examined two claims made recently by gubernatorial candidates Frank Caprio and Lincoln Chafee.
Caprio attacked Chafee for his handling of a 1990s teachers' dispute in Warwick. We ruled Caprio's claim Half True.
Chafee said changing Rhode Island's official name would require amending the U.S. Constitution. We couldn't rule definitively on that, but decided to share our research anyway.