Lincoln Chafee

Lincoln Davenport Chafee (born March 26, 1953) is an American politician.

Lincoln Davenport Chafee was born on March 26, 1953, in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of Virginia (née Coates) and John Chafee.

Chafee's great-great-grandfather Henry Lippitt was Governor of Rhode Island.

Among his great-great-uncles are Rhode Island Governor Charles Warren Lippitt and United States Senator Henry Frederick Lippitt.

His great-uncle Zechariah Chafee was a Harvard law professor and a notable civil libertarian.

The Chafee family was among the earliest settlers of Hingham, Massachusetts, before moving south to Rhode Island.

He attended public schools in Warwick, Rhode Island, Providence Country Day School, as well as later, Phillips Academy.

At Brown University, Chafee captained the wrestling team, and in 1975 earned a Bachelor of Arts in classics.

He then attended Montana State University's non-degree Farrier School (a sixteen-week horseshoeing program) in Bozeman.

For the next seven years, he worked as a farrier at harness racetracks in the United States and Canada.

One of the horses he shod, Overburden, set the track record at Northlands Park in Edmonton.

In describing how his time as a farrier affected him, Chafee stated that "when you're around horses, you tend to be a quieter person."

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 from Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee's first elected office was as a member of the Warwick City Council in 1985.

Chafee entered politics in 1985, when he was elected over eight other candidates to become delegate to the Rhode Island Constitutional Convention.

A year later, he was elected to the Warwick City Council, defeating an incumbent, and re-elected in 1988.

He ran for Warwick Mayor in 1990, losing by 5 percent in a three-way race.

In 1992, he was elected Warwick's first Republican mayor in 32 years, and was re-elected in 1994, 1996, and 1998, when he won by 17% and carried all nine wards.

Chafee was praised for his fair-minded and sensible approach to government, including his ability to work with seven Democrats (of nine seats) on the Warwick City Council.

He conservatively managed the city's finances, strengthening the city's bond rating and paying down the outstanding pension liability.

He worked effectively and cooperatively with the municipal unions, especially in settling a difficult and prolonged teacher labor dispute that he inherited from the previous administration.

As mayor, Chafee made conservation, environmental protection, and wise growth a priority.

He purchased 130 acres of open space, planted hundreds of street trees, and created new historic districts and a new economic development "intermodal" district at the state airport.

His municipal composting and recycling initiatives dramatically decreased landfill waste.

His "Greenwich Bay Initiative", which extended sewer service to the most environmentally-sensitive areas of the city, earned Warwick recognition by EPA as one of the best local watershed programs in the nation.

He was mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island, from 1993 to 1999, a United States Senator from 1999 to 2007, and the 74th Governor of Rhode Island from 2011 to 2015.

After John Chafee died in 1999 while serving in the United States Senate, Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Almond appointed Lincoln Chafee to fill his father's seat in the U.S. Senate to which he won a full term in 2000 as candidate of the Republican Party.

He is the last Republican to serve in Congress from Rhode Island, and the last non-Democrat to serve as Rhode Island's Governor.

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.

When John Chafee died suddenly in October 1999, Governor Lincoln Almond appointed the younger Chafee to serve out the term.

In the general election he faced the Democratic nominee, then-U.S. Representative Robert Weygand.

Chafee won the election 57%–41%.

After his father announced he would not seek re-election in 2000, Lincoln Chafee announced he would run for the seat.

In September 2005, Steve Laffey, the mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, announced his intention to run against Chafee in the Republican primary election.

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.

He was a member of the Democratic Party from 2013 to 2019; in June 2019, The Boston Globe reported that he had become a registered Libertarian, having previously been a Republican until September 2007 and an independent and then a Democrat in the interim.

In 2015, he sought nomination to become the Democratic Party candidate in the 2016 presidential election, but withdrew prior to the primaries.

In March 2019, he switched his political affiliation again to the Libertarian Party.

In January 2020, Chafee filed to run again for president, this time seeking the Libertarian nomination.

Chafee withdrew his candidacy on April 5, 2020, and announced he would instead focus on helping "other Libertarians seeking office."