At Three Sisters coffee shop, Gina Raimondo is announcing a bonfire of the regulations. Flanked by small business owners and the head of the local chamber of commerce, Rhode Island’s governor boasts that her administration has successfully implemented a first-in-the-nation program.
Starting two years ago, she says, “We charged every state agency with doing a full inventory of all their regulations. And we gave them two years, and they either have to justify every regulation’s existence . . . or eliminate it.” The upshot? “I’m here to announce that in the past two years, we’ve cut 8,000 pages of regulations, almost 30 percent of all state regulations.” Raimondo brags that she “cut taxes for small businesses,” too.
Incidentally: Gina Raimondo is a Democrat. An unorthodox one, to be sure. Raimondo, 47, locked in a tight reelection race, made a national name for herself as Rhode Island general treasurer from 2011 to 2015.
Refreshingly for a Rhode Island politician, her notoriety was not for corruption but for policy derring-do. When the former venture capitalist took office, the state’s public employee pension fund was less than half funded. Rhode Island was looking at a future of ever-higher taxes and diminished services. So Raimondo spearheaded a politically courageous plan to remake the pension system: Annual increases were suspended, and she curtailed defined-benefit plans, instead compelling government workers to convert part of their pensions into 401(k)-style investment accounts. The pension reforms drew praise from the likes of the Manhattan Institute and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
But the reforms were less popular in Rhode Island, where the state government is one of the largest employers and the workforce is heavily unionized. When Raimondo, a native of Smithfield, a small town near Providence, decided to run for governor in 2014, she had a tough go of it. The unions essentially sat it out, and she won with only 40.7 percent of the vote in a three-way race pitting her against Cranston mayor Allan Fung, a Republican, and the Moderate party candidate Robert “Cool Moose” Healey, since deceased.
The first female governor of Rhode Island, Raimondo was a trailblazer by virtue of that fact alone. But she went on to govern as a highly unorthodox Democrat—cutting taxes repeatedly, for instance. At a moment when Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are in the ascendant, Raimondo is arguably even more of an outlier today.
“As a governor I have the luxury of not having to locate myself on that kind of a partisan spectrum,” Raimondo tells me in an interview, reflecting on her party’s leftward lurch. “I have to do what helps Rhode Island. So if that means cutting thousands of pages of regulations, which [is] ‘to the right,’ then I’m going to do that, because it creates jobs in Rhode Island,” she says.
Raimondo points to her “Rhode Island Promise” program, passed last year, which grants free tuition to the state’s community college. “I essentially took that from [Tennessee governor] Bill Haslam, who is a Republican in a Southern state,” she says. “I spent a lot of time with Bill . . . and I did have people saying, ‘Gina, what are you doing? He’s a Republican governor of a Southern state.’ ” Raimondo has cut taxes every year since her election, including the car tax and the corporate tax. The Tax Foundation—which is ideologically more Milton Friedman than Paul Krugman—gave her an award this fall for outstanding achievement in state tax reform. “And I’m proud of it!” she says.
More controversially, she has used tax incentives to lure businesses to the state. “It’s created almost 20,000 good-paying jobs,” she says referring not just to the tax incentives but her policies generally. Ideally, “you really want to have a generally good business environment: low taxes, fair and limited regulations, excellent talent pool, great education system. And we’re trying to do that.” But on the matter of tax incentives, she argues, “To be perfectly honest, every other state uses them, and I can’t let Rhode Island be disadvantaged.”
Raimondo refers often to the fact that when she ran for governor, Rhode Island had the nation’s highest unemployment rate. The state is indeed a perennial economic laggard, a onetime industrial hub stuck between the financial and tech powerhouses of Connecticut and Massachusetts. These days, though, the unemployment rate is in the middle of the pack—31st in the country as of last month—and last year Rhode Island had the nation’s fastest wage growth.
But despite a pragmatist’s record with results to show for it, Raimondo has hardly cruised to reelection. She first faced a primary challenge from Rhode Island’s former secretary of state Matt Brown, who ran as a crusading liberal (not to mention a panderer: He promised to reverse Raimondo’s pension reforms). She turned that challenge away, showing again that while Rhode Island is heavily Democratic, it isn’t particularly liberal. Rhode Island is basically a one-party state, which means that Democrats there are very ideologically diverse. Cases in point: The state’s heavily Democratic legislature implemented a voter ID law, and Rhode Island was the last state in New England to implement gay marriage.
Now she’s in a race that once again pits her against Fung and another independent candidate, former Republican Joe Trillo. Fung, who nearly won in 2014, is weaker this time around: Not only does he have to fight off a challenger to his right, but in the intervening years a scandal wracked the police department of Cranston, Rhode Island’s third-largest city. The state police issued a report blasting Fung’s poor leadership. Making matters worse, with Raimondo’s moderate record, Fung doesn’t have much of an ideological way to go after her, so he’s focusing more on her competence. For her part, on some issues Raimondo is running to Fung’s right—she’s torching him in TV ads for raising taxes in Cranston.
Trillo, a 75-year-old former state representative whose Rhode Island accent is thicker than clam chowder, also criticizes Raimondo’s technical aptitude. He points to the United Health Infrastructure Project, a $364 million computer system supposed to manage the state’s benefits program, which had a disastrous rollout in 2016. People couldn’t get their food stamp payments, for instance. “That’s her greatest downfall,” Trillo says. (Raimondo has apologized repeatedly for the mess.) Fung, meanwhile, “has too many skeletons in his closet [too],” Trillo says. “When you walk into his closet it’s like a laugh-in-the-dark house in an amusement park.”
But Trillo has competence problems of his own. This summer, the candidate was campaigning on his yacht. He unfurled a huge banner and sailed along the shore, blasting John Philip Sousa marches. Too close to the shore it turned out: The ship ran aground and Trillo required a Coast Guard rescue. He claimed he was a safe distance from shore, but dozens of witnesses said that he was obviously way too close. Trillo brushes aside the incident, dubbed “Trilligan’s Island,” in an interview. “I’ve run a boat tens of thousands of miles. Allan Fung couldn’t do a rowboat in his bathtub!” he says.
With Raimondo’s approval rating below 50 percent, she’s obviously lucky to be facing two conservative challengers—so much so that there is speculation that Trillo will expect a favor or two should she be re-elected. One recent poll has her leading Fung, her closer competitor, 48 to 34 percent. Another shows Raimondo at 40, Fung at 32, and Trillo at 17.
A prodigious fundraiser and former Rhodes scholar, Gina Raimondo clearly has her eyes on a prize larger than governing America’s smallest state. Insiders here suggest that she was counting on getting a job in the Hillary Clinton administration and Trump’s victory scuttled her well-laid plans. In our interview, Raimondo disavows any interest in being a senator. But it’s not hard to see her vying for vice president. Could she aim higher? Given the leftward march of her party, it’s hard to imagine Gina Raimondo, champion of tax and regulation cuts, winning the Iowa caucus in our lifetime.
