Lincoln Chafee

Lincoln Davenport Chafee ( CHAY-fee; born March 26, 1953) is an American politician. 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. 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.

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. 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 was elected to a full term in 2000 as candidate of the Republican Party. He is the most recent Republican to serve as a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island.

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 switched his political affiliation again to the Libertarian Party.

In 2015, he sought nomination to become the Democratic Party 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 April 5, 2020, and announced he would instead focus on helping "other Libertarians seeking office."