- Rhode Island Republicans have been on the outside looking in for decades.

The GOP holds just 14 of 113 seats in the General Assembly.

A Republican governor has not won an election here since 2006, and the GOP is locked out of other state and federal offices.

Republicans here have a new chairman, Allyn Meyers of Tiverton who says the one party democratic rule has failed Rhode Island.

He points straight to the Washington Bridge debacle as Exhibit A. So, can Myers turn voter frustration into real wins?

What is holding the party back?

And is President Trump part of the problem for Rhode Island Republicans?

I'm Ian Donnis and that's just some of what we've talked about in this in-depth conversation.

(gentle music) Allyn Myers, welcome to "One on One" and congratulations on your recent election as Rhode Island's new Republican chairman.

- Well, good morning.

It's great to be here.

- How did you get interested in politics?

- I've been involved in politics for a long time.

I've been a registered Republican since 1982 right outta high school.

And my first campaign was 1984.

I worked on a local mayoral candidate, a Republican in Brockton, Massachusetts, of all places.

And he won two terms.

I worked as a precincts captain and I enjoyed it.

I worked with him for the two terms.

I also worked on a candidate who's still a sitting senator in Massachusetts.

He didn't start that way.

He started in my living room for town council, or a school committee, I believe it was in 1996.

And owning a business took me away from a lot of that for a number of years.

And when I moved to Tiverton, I was asked to get involved with some of the local issues.

And so I, you know, I was interested.

And what's funny is the calling for volunteering, it's weird in Rhode Island.

The GOP, I would call them up and ask if they need any volunteers.

You wouldn't get a phone call back then.

And I would say, "Don't they need volunteers?"

We're in a super minority.

I'm sure they need volunteers.

Well, I actually did go down to the office one day to ask why I hadn't received a phone call back.

I guess it was in a transition time.

So, I didn't know that at the time.

And I volunteered.

And they asked me to run for Senate of all things.

And I said, "Are you kidding me?

I've worked in campaigns before.

It's not something you just walk into."

But you know, it was funny.

They asked me to do it and I did it to the best of my ability.

And I did pretty well.

I think I scored 10 points higher than anyone running against one of the favorite senators in the state.

I didn't know that at the time.

But it was good experience learning how the roadmap for the local politics, and I enjoyed it.

- You won the chairmanship defeating rival candidate, Ken Naylor Jr., the head of the Young Republicans by 11 votes.

What difference does it make for the Republican Party in Rhode Island that you are now the chairman rather than Ken Naylor?

- Well, Ken, like I said, is a friend.

And Ken, I've been working with Ken for years as Young Republicans.

My job before was the Chair of Chairs or the chairman of the city and town chairs' caucus.

And my job was to organize and build town committees.

So, it's a similar job.

And with him, he was building the, I guess you'd call it an auxiliary group, which is the Young Republicans in the same vein.

And so, we worked together for doing this over the years.

For three years I've been doing it.

And we've finished organizing just about all of the towns and cities across the state.

There's a few outliers now.

A couple have went defunct over the last couple of months, but for the most part, we've had, we have more town and city committees organized than we had in 20 years.

And I've worked with Ken.

He's a good kid.

And he's ambitious, and I think he'll do well in the future.

- There are 113 seats in the Rhode Island General Assembly as you know.

Of those seats, how many candidates will the Republican Party support this year to try and increase its representation?

- Well, in the legislature we have, I think it's about seven or eight have already declared.

And right about now is that time where you find people.

I think it's late, but what happens is a lot of people decide to run right after the winter.

Starting March or April, we get a flood of new candidates running.

- And the filing deadlines in June.

- Yes, the end of June.

And so, we'll have our convention.

We are having our annual, well, not annual, a four-year convention this year.

We'll have our nominations and we'll have our signatures right afterwards like every other year.

- So, if you could ballpark it off.

For 113 seats, how many candidates do you think your party will have?

- I won't know.

I think we have about 20 to 25 people right now that have come forward.

Most of them have committed and they haven't gone public yet.

2022 is a big year.

I think we had 80.

- Yeah.

- We didn't do so well though.

It was a midterm and we didn't do so well, but we had 80 then.

Right now, I think we have about 25 for different seats.

We're really focusing right now, as you know, the outlook, the national outlook, they say isn't so good for the Republicans, but I'm not sure I'll buy that until it happens.

Our first election of the year already, a Republican won 89% of the vote in Coventry for local town council seats.

So, we'll see how that plays out in Rhode Island.

But I think we're gonna find out over the next month when we have a lot more commitments to run.

- Part of the message from Republicans in Rhode Island is that Democrats have been running the state for so long, virtually since the Bloodless Revolution in 1935, that they bear responsibility for whatever shortcomings Rhode Island might have.

If that's the case, why have Republicans had such difficulty winning more representation to the point where they only hold 14 seats in the 113 seat legislature right now?

- Right.

Since the mid-50s they've had a super majority.

And for most of this last 70 years, they've had a trifecta.

When you control all three parts of government, you have your House, Senate and your Governor's seat, it's kind of hard to get your message out.

Many of the press act accordingly.

And of course, it's access.

So, the press goes where the access is, and we understand that.

And so, they get a lot more coverage.

It's about ideas.

And I think that this year, one of our biggest focus is getting the message out, getting our elected officials, getting that message through the party, out to our committees and out the towns and cities.

I think we'll have a lot better chance this year.

- I've been covering Rhode Island politics for more than a quarter century.

I've interviewed many of your predecessors as party chair.

They've all talked a big game about increasing legislative representation.

- Yeah.

- And yet here we are.

- Yeah.

- What will you do differently to try and make more headway?

- Well, last year our focus, for me, as the Chair of Chairs, was to build our bench.

The problem is really is we didn't have a bench.

A lot of the town councilors, school committee seats is what we, is a birthplace of our legislators.

We didn't have those places.

We took a lot of seats last year.

That isn't something that's in the news.

We picked up four fresh faces in the Republican caucus in the legislature.

But the big news is that we took a lot of town council seats and Portsmouth turned red, Tiverton turned more conservative.

So, even if they weren't all Republicans, we had a lot of independents that were conservative that seemed to come forward.

So I think our bench, as our bench builds, we'll find more and more legislative candidates.

- You issued your first news release about the Washington Bridge, which has been an obsession for many of us.

In Rhode Island you criticized a lack of accountability.

Probably many people would agree with you on this.

My question is whether the Rhode Island GOP waited too long to make that an issue?

Because you recall how it was about five months after the emergency closing of the bridge in May 2024, when your predecessor as GOP Chairman Joe Powers staged his first news conference on the issue.

So, has the GOP been late to this issue?

- No, it's, what happens is you wanna give people the opportunity.

I mean, a physical damage is physical damage.

Blaming everybody constantly is never gonna get us forward.

We have to work together to fix our state.

And so, looking to see what they were planning on doing it, now and a couple of months later when we find out that it was stalled, nothing was happening, and then we found out that there was, there may have been some missed inspections and these kind of things.

We had to wait till the information got out.

I don't think we jumped the gun.

I just think that we sat back and we watched and found out the information.

Now, the legislature was supposed to get monthly reports.

When we found out those monthly reports were not coming out and they were not forthcoming to our legislature from Alviti's office, that's when we started complaining.

- There are pockets of Rhode Island that lean more conservative, arguably offering fertile terrain for Republican candidates.

And yet we've seen how legislative candidates have underperformed.

President Trump's most recent performance, which was his best performance in Rhode Island, he got almost 42% of the vote.

So why is that, and what will you do differently to try and perhaps attract and recruit better quality candidates?

- Well, one of my focuses as Chair of Chairs was recruiting.

And we did have an unprecedented amount of new Republican town council school committees during my reign as the Chair of Chairs.

And we're gonna carry that forth into being a Chair.

So, I have a feeling that we will see a lot more recruiting happening in the coming months here.

And we'll probably, number will jump up quite a bit.

- As I said, President Trump had his best performance of his three presidential runs in 2024.

I think it was 41.8% of the vote.

But that's less than half the vote.

Is he a drag on efforts to elect more Republicans in Rhode Island?

- I don't think so.

We've seen places like Central Falls.

For the first time in many years, we were able to organize a town committee in Central Falls, a city committee.

And they went from 11% support for Donald Trump in 2016 to, I think, it was 21% in 2020.

But they're in the mid-30s.

I think it was 35%.

I think it made national news, the percentage of votes for Donald Trump in Central Falls.

So, he is having a positive impact on things.

But things don't happen immediately in Rhode Island as you know.

We have 70 years of a super majority.

A lot of people feel disheartened.

They wanna see the messaging come through.

And I think this year, we'll work better on our messaging to see if we can get the messaging of the Republican Party out to the people.

- President Trump won election in 2024 in part due to voters' concerns about inflation.

Polling shows that that's still a top concern for voters.

Are you worried that Republicans are gonna have a hard time in midterm elections for Congress this year and that that might filter down to legislative races here in Rhode Island?

- Well, speaking about Rhode Island, our economy's not good and hasn't been good.

It hasn't changed one bit.

I think it's, a lot of the policies in McKee administration, I think, other places in the country, they're seeing very low inflation.

They're seeing better gas prices, kitchen items.

You know, this is where it hurts people.

Our energy costs, I think, is 38 cents a kilowatt.

It's 9 cents just a couple of states over.

I mean, the energy is killing us here.

Our Act on Climate for 2021 Bill absolutely is driving up prices, having us import natural gas from a far away island.

We have Trinidad and Tobago, I think are our two largest importers of gas when we can open up a pipeline a couple of hundred miles away and kill that charge.

We see our bills, you'll get a $200 charge for usage and a $400 charge for delivery.

And that can't be.

It's gonna hit our seniors, our people on fixed incomes.

Rhode Island has a large population of senior citizens.

I mean, we are, we're probably one of the highest in the country.

I mean, I think the average, I think, is like 50% plus are over 60 years old.

And a lot of these people are on fixed incomes.

They cannot absorb that kind of cost.

We have to do something to fix it.

- I take your point about Rhode Island's economic struggles, but at the same time, voters in many states are concerned about inflation.

Are you, and traditionally, the party that holds the White House suffers losses in midterm elections.

- Yeah.

- Is that a concern for you?

- Well, it was a concern in 2022, and it turned out to be right in 2022 here in Rhode Island.

So, we're gonna see what happens here.

I don't think the economic outlook has changed in Rhode Island as opposed to other places across the country.

And I'm not really sure how that's gonna affect this year.

We're gonna see what happens.

- We used to see that Republicans frequently won the Governor's office in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Not so much more recently.

Here in Rhode Island, we know that the last Republican to win the governor's office was Don Carcieri when he won reelection in 2006.

This year the best known GOP candidate for governor is Aaron Guckian.

And do you think he's the best hope for Republicans to retake the Governor's office this year?

- Out of the three gubernatorial candidates we have, he seems to have the biggest organization.

The other two candidates, Rob Raimondo and Elaine Pelino don't seem to be getting past social media.

I don't know if they actually have organized campaign teams yet.

Aaron Guckian seems to be the only one working across the state right now.

So, we'll see what happens with that.

- So, you don't expect any other big names for prominent people to become Republican candidates for governor this year?

- I haven't heard of any yet, but there there's always rumblings.

But until people actually come out and say their names, it's kinda hard to talk about it.

- GOP Chairman Allyn Myers, you mentioned a short time ago, the issue of energy and the high prices for energy, which the Northeast tends to be more expensive on this kind of stuff.

But we see Democratic Governor Dan McKee making an initiative to try and reduce energy prices.

This is a controversial issue because some people are, say the state should not step back from its clean energy commitments.

What do you think of Governor McKee's plan for reducing energy costs?

- Well, if it's opening a pipeline to reduce actual cost of energy, that's a good thing.

But I think what he's talking about is more subsidies, and that only adds to our tax base.

That only adds to our costs.

Because what happens is, if you look at your tax, if you look at your gas bill, some of those hidden costs are in there to take care of the subsidies for other people.

And so, it never really is lowering the energy cost by just passing it on to other people.

We need to have real energy policy.

We need to be looking to the future.

Our future should be in small modular reactors.

They're going up around the country.

I mean, we see them up in Vermont right now.

They're putting them in New England.

These things are about the size of the studio right here.

And they're safe, very safe.

They can't melt down, can't do anything.

And they produce large amounts of power 24 hours a day, whether the wind blows or not, whether the sun is out.

And that's part of our problem.

Solar and wind are the most expensive way to generate power.

And so, we need to get away from that.

Right now, until we find that we have a cheaper alternative to what we have right now for oil and coal and natural gas, we really just need to focus on getting the cheapest amount of natural gas, the cheapest natural gas we can get here 'cause we still run 93% of our heat from that.

- Democrats and Republicans are very split on the Trump administration's approach to immigration enforcement.

We've seen a lot of controversy and ongoing concern about this in Minnesota.

Based on the experience there, do you think ICE needs to significantly alter its approach?

- Minnesota is, there's just so much to unpack with Minnesota.

I think the ICE issue there is just one of many issues in Minnesota.

That's been a hotbed for many years.

It's almost like a Color Revolution going on right outta Lord Palmerston's book from 1840.

I think that we... - Well, let me ask you this.

I mean, I think people credit President Trump for doing what he said he would do about the border.

President Biden was very slow to address concerns about what was happening at the border.

On the other hand, there might be broad agreement that if there are people who are violent offenders who have sketchy immigration status, yes, they should be expelled.

But if people have been earning a respectable living, if they've been here for 20, 30 years, 15 years, there should be a path to citizenship for them rather than harassing them and scaring them and creating a climate of fear.

What would you say to that?

- Well, well, I think that has been the case to tell you the truth.

If you look back at the last four administrations, President Trump has the lowest amount of deportations per year.

And I think the reason they're doing that is because they're going after violent offenders and people who have committed crimes in the country first.

I think we're still over in the hundreds of thousands of people.

At this time, I think Barack Obama had probably close to a million deportations.

I think in his two terms, it was over 2 million deportations.

It was a crazy number.

I think he was the highest out of over the last four or five administrations and I don't, we didn't see those kind of protests.

We didn't see anything.

- But what about the tactics in Minnesota where people there do, it's very tense.

There is a climate of tension.

- Yes.

- Is that the right way to go?

- Well it's, law enforcement's a dangerous job as we all know.

You can remember back just I think 2017, 2018.

In New York we saw officers having lunch, sitting in their cars getting shot.

Just people walking up to the doors and shooting them and running off.

So, I think there's a heightened fear in law enforcement of this kind of thing.

And some of the things that are going on in these towns.

I mean, it sounds like Minnesota is the new Seattle and Portland.

The violence against law enforcement.

They're on edge, they're on edge.

Mistakes are always made when you're in a high fear environment and you're working in a place where you have a lot of tension.

There's gonna be mistakes made.

I can't say that everything has been done perfectly.

I can't say that.

- President Trump recently amplified a social media message in which a former President Obama and his wife Michelle were depicted as apes.

What was your reaction to that?

- Yeah, I got a text from Ray Baccari.

Young kid.

- Reporter.

- Yeah, he's- - WPRI?

- Yes, yes.

Yeah.

And Ray, when he first came out, I was very supportive of him.

And I think having a young perspective is very, very good.

And so, there's been a pretty good back and forth with Ray.

He texted me the other day about that and he said, "What do you think about this?"

It was minutes.

I think he must live on his phone.

Minutes after the video I guess came out.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

And he said, "What's your comment on this?"

And I said, "Well, can you send me a link?"

He said, "Well, the link's been deleted."

I said, "Well, how do you want me to respond to something that has been deleted?"

- Well, the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged that the president did amplify this.

There's not really any question about that.

- Well, he didn't produce it.

It was amplified.

Maybe the word amplify, I'm not sure if that is a proper, from my understanding, a couple of hours later when I seen that it actually was a thing.

The story that came outta the White House was it was a staffer that put something out and that person's been removed.

For all I know he's in Siberia today, who knows?

But I mean, yes, it's just foolishness.

It's just foolishness.

And I think we can do better.

- The president talks these days about nationalizing elections.

The nation's elections have traditionally been- - Yeah.

- Handled by the states.

That was something that was set up by the founders.

Do you support the President on that?

- The SAVE Act.

Yes.

Is that what you're talking about?

- Yes.

- Yes, I think bringing it back to traditional voting is a very good thing.

I would support a national holiday for voting to make sure everybody has a chance to vote.

- But what about taking the administration of elections away from the states?

Do you support that?

- I would say that our current system of the states handling their own elections is fine.

I think that we just need to shore up our voting.

Having a half a month to vote is probably not a good thing.

I understand the convenience of it all, but I think that there's so much chance for fraud.

At least that's what's been told to us.

The chance for fraud is so great in having open elections, mail-in ballots and things that people do not have to show an ID for.

In Rhode Island, we have to show an ID.

But you can register online without an ID.

They just, and some of these voter IDs are given to people who don't have to prove anything.

So you know, you can register when you get a license.

We have licenses that are given to non-citizens, and they can use those licenses to vote.

We understand that Mr.

Moree said that that is not legal and they don't support that, but they can still do it.

And so to shore up our, to make sure my vote counts, your vote counts, and everyone who's a citizen's vote's counts, I think we can shore up our voting system, sure.

- One more question on national topics before we bring it back to Rhode Island.

Do you believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected as the president in 2020?

- Well, he certainly was the president for four years, and he was our president of the United States, and there's no disputing that for four years.

- What about the election?

Do you agree with President Trump that in his false view, that the election was stolen?

- I think stolen's a hard word.

I think we're seeing some irregularities that are being brought up now in Pennsylvania and other places.

I'm sure as a person who lost the election, knows the concerns of his, but President Biden was the president for four years, and that's my story.

- Ken Block, a former Republican candidate and governor was hired by the Trump administration.

- Right.

- And he was hired to try and find proof of fraud.

He said he could not find anything that would've altered the outcome of the election in 2020.

So, is there something you know about that, that Ken Block does not know?

- No.

In 2020, there was accusations made all over for different things.

And in 2020, I don't think we have some of the reports and the stories.

Look, we have stories now that are coming out.

We have actually prosecutions happening.

They have indictments happening for some of election-based things.

We're not going back to 2020.

It's not like we can reverse time.

So, I think that right now, I think we fix our voting system and we move on.

- Allyn Myers, we often hear critiques of Rhode Island's business climate as not being that friendly.

You've been- - Yeah.

- A small business person for many years.

From your perspective, what should be done differently to create a more hospitable business climate?

- There's a lot of things in Rhode Island.

Two years ago, Senator de la Cruz came up with a 5% sales tax bill.

And honestly, I helped her write some of the dissertations for that and come up with some of the factoids for that.

Now, I would say even lower.

I would say halfing our sales tax would be a boon for the state.

Let me tell you why.

Anyone who lives on any of the border towns and cities here knows we cross the line to get gas.

Why do you think Renton makes so much money?

Every mall is set right over the line and there's a reason for that.

- How would you make up the lost revenue?

- Well, there wouldn't be lost revenue.

See, money, sales tax is very special money.

It's kind of like having a 401k for our state.

Once sales tax and money is inside the economy, it continues to make money.

A typical thing is a dollar bill.

It turns hands about 110 times a year.

A dollar bill makes about 6 to $8 over its lifespan.

Over its six-year lifespan.

So, what happens is the second it leaves that tax zone, goes into Massachusetts, it never comes back to the high tax zone.

So, it's money that is draining.

We hear about people who from other countries taking, earning money here and sending money overseas to their family and that kind of thing.

How it takes money outta the country.

This is the same thing that happens in our state.

The money which leaves the high tax zone never comes back to that tax zone.

Nothing for reinvestment.

We don't, our banks don't have that money.

They can't lend money because they don't have money to lend.

Our businesses just, we don't have any brick and mortar stores anymore.

And I understand that even Amazon, but the fact is, you know?

You can only do so much with that.

We still have people that if you have a cousin that lives over the line and they're paying 5% or whatever, 6.25%, it may be a little bit.

But every little bit counts when some of the families, you buy a widescreen TV for $1,000, you're talking 20, $30.

That's to pay for lunch when you're out shopping.

Many of us are old enough to remember going to New Hampshire to buy things with no sales tax when we were younger.

I lived in Massachusetts, you lived in Massachusetts, we crossed the border.

Everyone remembers going up to the shops up there to buy things with no sales tax.

This is the issue in Rhode Island.

Everything leaves.

Our business has no reinvestment because since there's no one buying in Rhode Island, these brick and mortar stores, there's no investment.

I bet what'll happen is if you have the sales tax, we will see those Best Buys move across the border to our thing that has employees, it has sales tax.

We build a lot of sales tax.

The money is made right away back in the amount of business that we do in the state.

That'll come right back.

Money that leaves the state never comes back in.

And that's our biggest problem.

- Rhode Island Republican Chairman Allyn Myers, thank you so much for joining us.

- I thank you.

I appreciate it, Ian.

- Thanks for watching "One on One" with me, Ian Donnis.

You can find all of our past interviews on the YouTube channel for Ocean State Media.

We'll see you next week.

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