NEWPORT — Whispers about an outsider “mystery” Republican candidate for governor began last fall when no one knew who was going to lead the GOP ticket.
Even many longtime Rhode Island Republican insiders had never met, or didn’t know much about, the woman from outside the political world who was thinking of running if then-House GOP leader Blake Filippi didn’t.
A year later, Ashley Kalus is the Republican nominee, and many Rhode Islanders are still wondering who she is as the Nov. 8 election approaches.
It is not the simplest question to answer.
Voters may be aware that she moved here last year from Florida and before that had lived in suburban Chicago.
But maybe they don’t know much about her time in Boston, New York, London and, right after college, Mongolia, where she lived with a family that raised goats.
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Kalus, 40, also isn’t easy to pin down politically.
Like many Republicans who grew up in New England, she was once a Democrat. And if elected, she might be the only Republican governor in the country to have interned for Massachusetts’ Democratic Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy.
Kalus and her Democratic opponent, Gov. Dan McKee, are a study in contrasts: In age, gender, ideology, temperament and lifestyle.
While Kalus has moved around, McKee’s attachment to his hometown of Cumberland is one of his defining characteristics, and after more than a year leading the state, he at times still seems to identify as a mayor.
In an election year of races featuring claims of provincialism or carpetbagging, Kalus versus McKee may be the most intense.
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“I’ve never seen such an ugly commercial in my life,” Kalus seethes over scrambled eggs at Gary’s Handy Lunch on Thames Street in Newport when talking about McKee’s commercial accusing her of not being “from here.”
“The idea that being born and raised here is a qualification to be governor is really not American,” she went on. “Being in different places has taught me a lot. And I also know what we have in Rhode Island and what we don’t have in Rhode Island.”
If she wins next month, Kalus would be the first GOP governor since Donald Carcieri, who also emerged out of the private sector, in 2002.
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Growing up in California and Massachusetts
Kalus’ earliest years were spent in the San Diego area, but after her parents went through a messy divorce, her mother moved the family from California to her stepfather’s hometown on the South Shore of Massachusetts when Kalus was 11.
Her mother, a physical therapist, started a physical therapy staffing company. Her stepfather, from whom she took the Kalus name, worked on the bookkeeping side of startup companies.
On the campaign trail, Kalus says she came from “humble beginnings” and mentions the tumult of the divorce, but at least in Massachusetts it doesn’t appear her family was poor.
A lot of the hardships and formative experiences she mentions on the campaign trail were from her high school years.
“I was not doing well in high school, and I don’t think they knew what to do with me,” she said. “They have the right to a quality education in Massachusetts, which is a constitutional right there, very different from Rhode Island. So there was an obligation to figure it out, because I was a high-IQ, low-performing student.”
She entered a Dual Enrollment Partnership, which allows students to earn high school credits by taking free college courses. She began commuting from the South Shore to the University of Massachusetts at Boston for classes and “never stepped foot in the high school I graduated from.”
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The experience instilled a belief in nontraditional school arrangements, “school choice,” and the importance of letting children go to school outside their area.
It was during this period, going back and forth between Scituate and Boston, that she said she one day wandered into a gym in Quincy and started taking boxing classes.
Eventually, Kalus said, her parents let her get an apartment in Boston’s North End, and she mostly lived there until college at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Did Kalus live in RI full time before 2021?
Kalus met her future husband, Dr. Jeffrey Weinzweig, while she was studying at UMass and he was a plastic surgeon in Providence. At the time, her sister was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, she said.
At the same time he was practicing medicine, Weinzweig, now 59, owned a comedy club in the early days of the Providence Place mall.
“It was called Stitches, because he’s a surgeon, if you get the sort of double meaning,” she said. “My husband has like a ‘dad joke’ sense of humor.”
In 2001, Stitches Komedy Kafe received a $350,660 loan from the Providence Economic Development Corporation under then-Mayor Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr., according to city records.
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“He loves Buddy to this day,” Kalus said.
The loan was repaid in full in January 2017, according to Andrew Grande, spokesman for Mayor Jorge Elorza.
On the question of whether Kalus ever lived in Rhode Island full time before last year, the answer is hazy. At one point, she said she did in the early 2000s, when she was in college. Pressed on whether she commuted an hour and 45 minutes each way to Amherst, her campaign said, “they were back and forth between PVD and Boston for a long time.”
Kalus graduated from UMass in 2005 with degrees in finance and legal studies.
One possible outcome would have been for her to move full time to Providence with Weinzweig, who had a condo at Corliss Landing. But needing money to pay off student loans, she took a consulting job with Accenture in Boston.
She said she was so ambivalent about joining corporate America that she convinced Accenture to let her spend four months visiting Bayangovi, a city on the edge of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, before she started work.
She spent three years working at Accenture and then went back to school, in New York and London, for joint MBA programs at Columbia and the London School of Economics.
By the time those programs were over, Weinzweig had left Rhode Island for Illinois, a move the Kalus campaign has blamed on Rhode Island’s weak economy and bad business climate.
As it happens, the state in 2010 was finishing eight years under Republican Carcieri.
Was he to blame?
“It’s 80 years of bad policies in this state,” she said. “I am not going to be somebody that sticks up for any politician that has led this state into the place that it is now.”
Specifically, Kalus said Rhode Island “underfunded Medicaid,” which affected the type of work, including cranial and facial reconstructive surgery, that Weinzweig did at Rhode Island Hospital. (As an aside, she said he was on call and worked the night of the Station nightclub fire.)
“And those cases are not insured, or Medicaid hardly pays enough to keep the lights on,” she said. “So this idea that my husband is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon and therefore could make it, it’s just fundamentally untrue.”
Weinzweig moved to a better job in Boston and then, by the time she was out of graduate school, to greater Chicago.
In Illinois, Kalus and Weinzweig set up their own plastic surgery practice. As she describes it, he led the medical side of the operation and she ran the business side. That included a lending arm so patients could finance their procedures. It appears to have been lucrative.
One of Kalus’ policy priorities is cutting regulations in health care, especially the “certificate of need” permits required to open new facilities.
A return to politics, and a change in philosophy
The move to Illinois coincided with Kalus’ entry into professional politics, and her perspective seemed to have changed from her college years, when she interned for Ted Kennedy.
She got a job working on the 2010 gubernatorial campaign of Andrew McKenna Jr. (in a race to replace the imprisoned Rod Blagojevich). McKenna lost the GOP primary.
And four years later, she joined the campaign of Bruce Rauner, who went on to become Illinois governor. After the election, Rauner brought her into his administration as “director of public engagement.”
Rauner ran as a moderate Republican with liberal positions on social issues, but he clashed with the Democratic legislature on spending and, particularly, labor policy. He pushed for an Illinois “right to work” law that would have banned mandatory union dues at union workplaces, and he also supported pension reform.
Asked whether she favors “right to work” legislation in Rhode Island, Kalus said it isn’t politically viable and declined to say whether she personally supports such an idea.
Rauner lost to Gov. J.B. Pritzker in 2018.
From Florida to Rhode Island, and eyeing the governor’s seat
Kalus said that as someone who had grown up around saltwater, she never took to life in the Midwest and moved to the Florida Keys to be by the ocean.
Kalus and Weinzweig started their testing and vaccination provider business, Doctors Test Centers, at the onset of the pandemic and, driven by some combination of New England longing and the soul-searching many Americans felt during COVID lockdown, moved to Rhode Island.
She said she had not thought about running for governor when she arrived to work on her testing contract with the state.
Rhode Island Republican Party Chairwoman Sue Cienki said Kalus reached out to her sometime last year, possibly around 18 months ago, and inquired about opportunities to run for office.
Cienki was impressed with Kalus’ background, but at the time there were others interested, including Filippi.
“At that point I said, ‘You need to be able to raise or put in $2 [million] to $3 million to run for governor, a million upfront because you have no name recognition,'” Cienki recounted. “She didn’t blink. She said no problem. Then I knew she was a serious candidate.”
As of last week, of the $3.85 million Kalus has raised for the campaign, $3.7 million came from her own pocket.
Kalus said Rhode Island’s $1,000 individual contribution limit is “broken” and favors insiders, but she is undecided about whether the limit should be lowered or eliminated altogether.
Since Gov. Gina Raimondo became governor in 2015, the legislature and executive branch have largely worked in concert on big issues.
But as the boxing gloves emblazoned on her campaign Winnebago attest, if Kalus beats McKee in November, that is likely to change.
She isn’t afraid to throw political bombs, and her growing disdain for McKee seems to, at least in part, come from her view that he doesn’t have a driving philosophy or vision.
In one sense, Kalus harks back to other well-known GOP candidates, including Carcieri, who promised to bring business acumen into government.
But compared with Carcieri or two-time GOP nominee for governor Allan Fung, Kalus brings a more populist approach. She often talks about lifting up the less fortunate and sprinkles terms like “inclusiveness,” “engagement” and “community organizing” in conversations.
When picking a GOP governor she considers her political hero, she didn’t choose Massachusetts’ technocratic-style Gov. Charlie Baker, but the confrontational Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (She has distanced herself from DeSantis flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.)
“I just want an economy that works for everyone,” she said of what she admires about DeSantis. “And the thing is that in Florida it is a place where entrepreneurship is happening, where businesses are going there because they feel that they can make it.”
Kalus can’t pinpoint a particular point in time or issue that made her change from a Democrat to a Republican, but said the Democratic Party changed more than she did.
“The Democratic Party left the people, and I have never left working with people my entire career,” she sad.
panderson@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7384
On Twitter: @PatrickAnderso_
