Caprio leaves Dems, tweaks Obama two years after ‘shove it’
November 5th, 2012 at 10:52 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
It sounds like Frank Caprio may not vote for Barack Obama in this week’s election.
Caprio, the Democratic nominee for governor in 2010, tweeted on Saturday: “This election has come down to who shows up-JFK’s ‘silent majority’ for @MittRomney- or women & the celebrity culture for @BarackObama.” The former treasurer, who now works as a managing director for the private-equity firm Chatham Capital, didn’t elaborate.
Caprio has also left the Democratic Party, at least as far as the voting rolls are concerned.
Records at the secretary of state’s office show Caprio is now registered as an unaffiliated voter, meaning he is an independent and not formally a member of any political party. The change takes effect Dec. 10. Lincoln Chafee, who defeated Caprio for governor, made the same move in 2007 when he left the Republican Party and registered as unaffiliated.
Caprio has not responded to a request for comment.
The moves don’t come as much of a surprise, considering the most famous interaction between Caprio and Obama was the fall 2010 spat when the president traveled to Rhode Island but declined to endorse Caprio, his party’s nominee, because of his friendship with Chafee, who served with him in the U.S. Senate. Chafee is now a co-chair of Obama’s re-election campaign.
Caprio famously told WPRO the morning of Obama’s visit that the president could “take his endorsement and really shove it.” The comment quickly made national headlines and didn’t help Caprio’s public standing; the next month he finished a distant third to Chafee and Republican John Robitaille despite a $2.7 million campaign.
Caprio’s tweet about the election came the same weekend Chafee traveled to Pennsylvania and Virginia to rally Obama supporters ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
Caprio hasn’t given up on all Democrats, though. He donated $250 on June 30 to Democrat Joe Kennedy III’s U.S. House campaign in Massachusetts’ 4th Congressional District, FEC filings show.
Tags: barack obama, campaign 2012, democrats, frank caprio, lincoln chafee
Nesi's Notes covers politics and the economy in and around Rhode Island for WPRI.com. (Twitter: 
Rhode Island has long known Caprio was a Republican. I really respect him for making it official, and I only wish other Rhode Island conservatives would do the same.
So let me get this straight…you ‘really respect’ someone for basically LYING about their party affiliation just to get elected to office?
Wow. People like you just reinforce the idiocy that exists in this state.
I am also leaving the democratic party and will be voting for Doherty and Romney! Caprio should have been our governor, he would have been excellent! This chafee is horrible!
Caprio was a joke, but your a comedy show.
When I saw Mr. Caprio’s tweet, I tweeted him a comment saying that it was Nixon, not Kennedy, who popularized the “silent majority” term. I have not seen a response from him. M. Charles Bakst
maybe one of the ri political elite can explain to us what a democrat really is today. i mean not what they purport to be what what they really are and what they represent.
example- elizabeth warren – fights for little people, claims she is not a 1%, misleads about wealth
reality – is paid $350k a year to teach one course at harvard(a disguised political donation), lives in a million dollar mansion, exploited affirmative action by lying about being an american indian, is worth several million dollars. a 1%…
ditto sheldon whitehouse, langevin, obama, joe kenedy, etc i call them the princes of politics. all multi millionaires, all have never had a real nongovernment job in their life.
Being wealthy is not bad. End of that story. Lying is almost always bad. Misleading people in political advertising is lying and that is bad. The problem is how can you be sure someone is misleading you? Many times you can’t.
That’s why politicians approve of the messages that vilify the wealthy even if they are wealthy themselves. It sounds good to the gullible voters who actually believe that the person they are voting for cares about them in particular.
That being said Elizabeth Warren is a statist-socialist-communist and is therefore not a good choice for MA or for America.
[...] strongholds overwhelmingly chose Chafee over Caprio (a right-leaning Democrat who has recently disaffiliated from the party). Part of that was Shove-It-Gate, but a more important factor in the Latino [...]