Gina Raimondo has always been somewhat out of step with insular, Rust Belt Rhode Island. The state’s governor styles herself “Gina from Smithfield,” a hat tip to the depressing Providence suburb from which she originally hails. But the Democratic Raimondo hit for the academic cycle: She boasts degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford. Before she entered politics, she worked in venture capital in Boston. And despite her state’s deep-blue reputation, Raimondo is a pure centrist, New Way technocrat at heart.
When she was the state’s treasurer, Raimondo imposed landmark pension reforms that endeared her to the likes of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Manhattan Institute. But not to the state’s powerful government workers: When Raimondo ran for the state’s top job in 2014, she barely won the Democratic primary. Then, she squeaked into office with a mere 40.8 percent of the vote in a three-way race, having lost the support of the unions. (She lost Smithfield, too.)
2018 looks no easier. Raimondo has never really built on her small base of support—summer polling has her approval rating just a little above 40 percent. Rhode Island is now again setting up for a three-way governors’ race with a Trump-loving independent named Joseph Trillo, Cranston mayor Allan Fung, and Raimondo all gearing up to run. But first, the incumbent faces a tough primary, and the vote is next week.
The generically named Matt Brown, Rhode Island’s former secretary of state, is running hard to Raimondo’s left for the Democratic nod. He’s pointed to Raimondo’s long history of taking corporate money and branded her a “Republican in disguise.”
Perhaps most crucially, Brown has vowed to reverse the landmark pension changes that made Raimondo a household name all the way from Sixth Avenue to Vanderbilt Avenue. He wants to reinstate the annual cost-of-living increases for retired government workers, for example, that had been bleeding the state dry for decades. He recently hosted a “Restore Our Pensions” town hall. In other words, his is an anti-reform candidacy in many regards.
Polling has been scant, but Raimondo’s actions suggest she does fear she may lose the primary. Her campaign released a harsh ad about chicanery that occurred during Brown’s failed 2006 Senate run. (After his defeat, Brown went on to Global Zero, an advocacy group that campaigns against nuclear weapons.) The former secretary of state charges the ad is defamatory, has sent a cease and desist letter, and threatened to sue.
So, yes, it appears that on September 12, Gina Raimondo could join the likes of New York’s Joe Crowley and Massachusetts’ Michael Capuano as Democrats who lost their primaries. But in an important respect, her defeat would be different: Both Crowley and Capuano were defeated by younger upstarts who pledged to change the status quo. Raimondo, by contrast, would lose to someone who plans to restore business as usual.
