Lincoln Chafee

Lincoln Davenport Chafee ( CHAY-fee; born March 26, 1953) is an American politician who served as the 74th governor of Rhode Island from 2011 to 2015 and as a United States senator from 1999 to 2007. Previously, he served as mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island, from 1993 to 1999. A member of the Libertarian Party since 2019, he previously was a Republican until 2007, an independent from 2007 to 2013, and a Democrat from 2013 to 2019. He is the last non-Democrat to hold statewide or Congressional office in Rhode Island. The son of Republican politician John Chafee, who was the 66th governor of Rhode Island, the United States secretary of the navy, and a U.S. senator, the younger Chafee first held elected office as a member of the Warwick City Council in 1985. After his fathers death in 1999, Chafee was appointed to his seat in the U.S. Senate, to which he won a full term in 2000. Chafee was the only Republican in the Senate to vote against authorization of the use of force in Iraq in the lead-up to the Iraq War. He was defeated in his 2006 reelection bid by Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. Chafee subsequently shifted his affiliation towards the Democratic Party by first endorsing Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, running as an independent for governor of Rhode Island in 2010, serving as the co-chair of Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, and then finally officially switching his registration to the Democratic Party in May 2013. In March 2019, he joined the Libertarian Party. In 2015, he sought nomination to become the Democratic candidate in the 2016 presidential election, but withdrew prior to the primaries. In January 2020, Chafee filed to run again for president, this time seeking the Libertarian nomination. Chafee withdrew his candidacy on...