A new video from Allen Waters has officially launched his fifth election campaign in seven years. This time around, he’s running not as a Democrat or Republican, but as an independent.
And instead of a congressional bid, the frequent and familiar face in Rhode Island elections has entered Providence’s mayoral race.
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But that’s not all. Unlike in past years when Waters granted few interviews and even skipped candidate debates, he’s brought on a campaign manager, Christopher Olean, who sent five pages on the candidate and his positions in response to questions from Rhode Island Current.
“AW has never had real representation or true campaign infrastructure, until now,” Olean, who works for consultancy The 401 Group, said via email Wednesday. Upgrading Waters’ political machinery this time around, Olean added, “has blown the doors wide open on what is possible for his campaign.”
November’s mayoral race has already begun to shape itself around the outcome of a somewhat heated primary between Democratic incumbent Mayor Brett P. Smiley and his challenger, state Rep. David Morales.
Waters — a Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican-again who now frames himself as an independent shaped by classical liberalism — is asserting a “Providence First” ethos for his campaign, and hoping to set itself apart from the city’s blue milieu.
The campaign video uploaded Feb. 6 shows the 70-year-old resident of Providence’s West End narrating from the Pedestrian Bridge off South Water Street.
“I’m a financially conservative candidate and will hunt out the fraud, waste and abuse that damns our citizens,” Waters says in the video, the frozen Providence River behind him. “I will stand as a pillar of freedom of speech and freedom of ideas in the Providence marketplace.”
Board of Elections paperwork from July 2025 shows Water filed as a Republican for the mayoral role. Olean said Wednesday that the campaign is currently “looking over paperwork and options to make the change.”
Whatever the ultimate label attached to Waters’ campaign, the candidate has expressed a clear dissatisfaction with the longstanding liberal Democratic order in Providence and in Rhode Island at-large.
“Waters sees classical liberalism rooted in individual liberty, natural rights, limited government, the rule of law, free markets, and the protection of property and speech as the philosophical antidote to Providence’s one-party decay,” Olean wrote.
Providence has not elected a Republican mayor since 1978, when Vincent “Buddy” Cianci’s mayorship won a second term. Prior to Cianci, Providence’s last Republican mayor held office in 1939. Cianci himself later rebranded as an independent, and remained so when reelected in 1991, thereby making him the city’s last independent mayor.
Mayoral campaigns like Zohran Mamdani’s successful bid to lead New York City have embraced leftism – an outside framework that has already been applied to Morales’ campaign.
In contrast, per Waters’ campaign site, “Socialism represents the ultimate threat to my ideals of limited government and free enterprise.”
Olean said the primary influences on Waters’ thinking are Malcolm X and Chicago School economists like Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman. From the latter, Waters embraces concepts like, “The government should be judged by results, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.”
Water’s campaign website lists his priorities as housing, universal school choice, free speech protections, fiscal conservativism with no tax increases, an immigration policy framed around what he calls “citizens come first,” and support for parental rights to guide their children’s upbringing and “ideological mandates in schools and public institutions.”
Smiley has frequently expressed his want to take back local control of the Providence Public School District, which the state education department took over in 2019. Returning the schools to local control, Olean wrote, “would be a dream” for Waters, a graduate of Classical High “who saw the chaos, violence, and demoralized classrooms firsthand.”
Under a Waters administration, Olean said Waters would use the mayor’s powers to make appointments to the hybrid school board to pursue aggressive reforms, including a single, unified enrollment process where “every family ranks any public school or charter in one application, Olean wrote. “No more separate lotteries or zip-code traps,” he added.
Waters would also direct the school board toward handing over some of the city’s lowest performing schools to “proven in-state operators …like Blackstone Valley Prep” with “strict five-year performance contracts that get revoked for failure” attached to these changes, Olean said.
Waters would also propose speeding up the timeline for long-delayed building upgrades tied to the city’s proposed $1 billion school modernization effort.
Waters’ past campaign efforts have included a 2020 run for U.S. Senate against Sen. Jack Reed. In 2022, he ran for Rhode Island’s First Congressional District against then-Rep. (and former Providence mayor) David Cicilline.
The next year, 2023, saw Waters briefly run as a Democrat in a crowded primary vying for the same seat, which was left vacant by Ciccilline when he resigned from Congress to lead the Rhode Island Foundation. In 2024, Waters tried his luck for the same House seat again, losing to Rep. Gabe Amo.
Across all four campaigns, Waters’s best showing was in 2022 when he garnered just under 36% of the vote against Ciccilline.
During the 2023 special Democratic primary for the First Congressional District, Waters declined to attend several debates. He told Rhode Island Current then that in some instances he felt these forums would be “too small to be good for my campaign,” or “not a topic where my ideology would shine.”
That same year, Waters declined an invitation to a debate hosted by the Rhode Island Democratic Women’s Caucus, whose chair (and debate moderator) was a reverend who is a transgender woman.
“As a dedicated father of two beloved, black teenage daughters, I do not want biological males to compete with them as women in traditional biological female spaces,” Waters wrote in a release responding to the invitation.
But now, Olean promised that Waters “will show up to any debate or forum and looks forward to having his ideas compete in the marketplace.”
Waters’ campaign reported $200 in donations from two donors during the last quarter of 2025, and $364 in campaign expenses.
Waters has already stirred up controversy with a late December Facebook post which poked fun at Morales, who is a cat owner, and the openly gay Smiley, who is married to a man.
“Pick your PVD Mayor. Some men love men, some men love cats, but me, Allen Waters for Mayor? I hope you like men who love women most of all,” he wrote. The post included a blue and a red heart emoji and the hashtags #AmericaFirst and #VenezuelaLibre.
Olean called it a “light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek celebration of straight pride.”
“Allen Waters simply stated his own preference clearly and humorously while contrasting the candidates,” Olean continued. “That is not hate, it is equality of individual rights and free speech applied consistently to everyone. Allen is an individual-rights absolutist who believes every adult, gay or straight, has the absolute right to live and love exactly as they choose.”
Waters deleted the initial post, although a screencap of the original post remains public on his Facebook. Olean said that removal came before the campaign team was in place.
“Had we been advising him, we would have told him to leave it up and defend it publicly,” Olean wrote, citing the resulting online discourse orbiting the post as “manufactured outrage.”
Olean argued that the past year has seen “ideologies and voter coalitions” rearrange themselves in a pattern that previously seemed “impossible,” and one advantageous to Waters.
“People who never would have voted together are now uniting behind candidates who refuse to serve special interests and powers foreign to Providence,” Olean wrote. “The corruption runs deep, and its roots have wrapped themselves tightly around Providence. Brett Smiley does not truly care about this city…That is exactly why we are going to win.”
Both of Waters’ parents worked in the city: His father as a patrolman, and his mother as bookkeeper at Wheeler School. The fourth-generation Providence resident received his B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Rhode Island, and worked for almost 30 years as an investment consultant with firms like Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, and TIAA-CREF. He also founded Aquarius Capital Management.
Alexander Castro is a staff writer for the Rhode Island Current.
