Blizzard Response Underscores Governor McKee’s Steady Leadership
Governor McKee: “The only place I want in history on this one is that we kept everyone safe.”
PROVIDENCE – New reporting from the Providence Journal highlights praise from Rhode Island reporters, local leaders, and experts for Governor McKee’s decisive response to the historic blizzard that blanketed the state with three feet of snow last week. From issuing an early travel ban and deploying aggressive, impossible-to-miss emergency alerts, to coordinating reinforcements and launching a swift cleanup effort, observers agree that Governor McKee did his job and kept residents safe during a moment when steady leadership mattered most.
Key Point from Brown University political science professor Wendy Schiller: “Anytime an elected official looks attentive and competent can boost their reelection chances, provided voters still remember these actions in September… But with a storm of this size and reach, I believe voters’ memories will be long.”
The Providence Journal: How blizzards and snow removal become political in an election year
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As the storm approached, the governor enacted a travel ban to make sure that Rhode Islanders would be home by the time snow started falling on the night of Feb. 22. State officials sent out impossible-to-ignore alerts to every cell phone in the area, and called in reinforcements from other states to help with the daunting cleanup process.
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“Anytime an elected official looks attentive and competent can boost their reelection chances, provided voters still remember these actions in September,” said Brown University political science professor Wendy Schiller. “But with a storm of this size and reach, I believe voters’ memories will be long.”
However, she added, the challenges aren’t over: “Voter sentiment may be positive now, but McKee will have to work hard to make sure that the cleanup continues and that businesses that lost revenue find their way back from that.“
Common wisdom holds that snowstorms can make or break politicians. Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic was famously voted out of office after a disastrous response to a blizzard that struck the city in 1979.
“When the snow comes, when the flakes start falling, politicians all over the city are running to catch it, each flake, just because they’re afraid of what happened to Mike Bilandic,” Chicago Sun-Times reporter Fran Spielman told WTTW decades later.
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Better preparation, forecasting helped state skirt disaster of ’78
Inevitably, any governor who contends with a major snowstorm will be compared with former Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy.
During the Blizzard of 1978, he was an omnipresent, reassuring presence on television, never even returning home to change out of the plaid flannel shirt that became an iconic piece of state history.
“Sometimes, I think the only thing people remember me for is my plaid,” he joked on the 20th anniversary of the storm.
McKee’s navy blue windbreaker may not have been quite as memorable, but the state’s response to the Blizzard of 2026 was arguably far superior to that of the Blizzard of 1978.
Most Rhode Islanders were at work when the storm struck on Feb. 6, 1978, and the result was pandemonium, as thousands of people tried to get home. Some died of asphyxiation in stalled cars, while others died of heart attacks because rescue trucks couldn’t get through the snow. Ultimately, the blizzard claimed 21 lives.
At the time of this writing, two fatalities had been linked to the Blizzard of 2026 – a Salve Regina University student who died of carbon monoxide poisoning while trying to charge his cell phone in a snow-covered car, and a “shoveling-related” death in North Smithfield.
That suggests that the state was much better prepared for this storm, and it’s also a testament to how much weather forecasting has improved. While it’s not quite true that there was no warning about the Blizzard of 1978 – The Providence Journal’s front page that day announced that a “severe storm” would dump feet of snow on Rhode Island – its intensity took many by surprise.
“We love Governor Garrahy, and he’s got his place in history,” McKee told WPRO’s Dan Yorke on Feb. 23. “The only place I want in history on this one is that we kept everyone safe.”
