Lincoln Chafee comes from a family that reached Massachusetts in the 1630s and gave Rhode Island a governor in his great-great-grandfather and a governor, Navy secretary and senator in his father, John Chafee. After Phillips Academy and Brown University, where he studied classics and captained the wrestling team, he attended a 16 week farrier school in Bozeman, Montana, and spent seven years shoeing horses at harness tracks in the U.S. and Canada. Elected to the Warwick City Council in 1985 and mayor in 1992, the first Republican in 32 years, he settled a long teachers union dispute, paid down debt and pension liabilities, and won EPA recognition for sewer work to protect the bay.

Appointed to the Senate after his father’s death in 1999, he won a full term in 2000 and became the only Republican to vote against authorizing the Iraq war and against confirming Samuel Alito. He lost to Sheldon Whitehouse in 2006 after a primary against Steve Laffey, left the party in 2007, and won the governorship as an independent in 2010 with 36 percent. He joined the Democrats in 2013, ran for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, moved to Wyoming, and in 2019 became a Libertarian, filing for that party’s 2020 presidential nomination before withdrawing. He was the last non-Democrat to hold statewide or congressional office in Rhode Island.

• He shod a horse named Overburden that set a track record in Edmonton.
• He opposed the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts on pay as you go grounds.
• As governor he sent a special master into bankrupt Central Falls.
• He opposed the state backed $75 million loan to Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, and after its collapse the state recovered about $17 million.
• He called the State House tree a holiday tree in 2011 and signed Rhode Island’s same-sex marriage law in 2013.