Nancy Pelosi

PROVIDENCE – Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi swooped into Rhode Island on Sunday, Aug. 30 to lead a "get-out-the-vote" rally for her college roommate's daughter: Helena Foulkes.

Speaking to a packed roomful of Foulkes supporters at Farm Fresh Rhode Island, Pelosi recalled the times 60 years ago when she and her future husband, Paul, double-dated with Foulkes' future parents Bernie and the late Martha Dodd Buonanno.

She talked about the candidate – she called "Helena Grace" – who appears to have at least a 15-point lead in the last lap of her second run for governor against incumbent Dan McKee.

And she talked about the enormous responsibility that governors face in the Trump era with a compliant GOP-led Congress, her confidence that Democrats will take back the House in the mid-term elections this fall, and the need for elected officials, at every level, to "protect elections" against repeated threats.

"As Helena said, what's happening in DC has put pressure on Rhode Island, [on] every state,'' said Pelosi, who is not seeking reelection after close to 40 years in Congress.

"They take a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. Shocking. They take a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, hundreds of billions of dollars out of SNAP ... food out of the mouths of babies to give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our country and the pressure falls to the states to try to help the people that are affected by that.

"We need a values-based, determined decision maker, courageous enough to make the decisions,'' she said, calling Foulkes, 62, a person she trusts to do that.

"I'm here as a former first woman speaker of the House, but I'm a former state [Democratic Party] chair and I know what we have to do to win elections. What we have to do is have no wasted time, no underutilized resources and no regrets the day after an election if we've just done a little bit more.

"I know things look great, but we cannot assume anything,'' she said.

In her own turn – before the two women exited the stage to the high-volume blast of Beyoncé singing "Run the World (Girls)" – Foulkes said: "I don't want to just win this race, okay? I want to crush this. We're going to crush it because we're going to send a message: the state needs to work for everyone in this state, not the powerful few.

"This is us taking the state back," she said. "Let's crush this, baby."

The event began with Foulkes' director of volunteers, Elisabeth Wales, leading the crowd in a chant.

Recalling McKee's statement mid-debate on WPRI that – "I am the state of Rhode Island" – she lead the crowd in chanting three times: "We are Rhode Island."

From Sims Avenue in Providence, Pelosi and her husband were planning to have dinner then head to Martha's Vineyard for a confab on how "to protect the election."

How? "There are probably over a hundred ways that the administration could undermine an election, but we have been doing this for a while. This isn't new," she said. "But for this year we've been doing litigation, winning almost every case in court, legislation to make the members [make] a choice about this so the people can see where they are."

"That's some of the easy stuff,'' and now "communicating with elected officials, whether it's governors, secretaries of state and all the rest who have responsibilities in terms of protecting elections so they have the resources intellectually and politically and otherwise to do that.

"It's also about just making sure the public knows: Do not be afraid to vote," she said.