Helena Foulkes, a former CVS executive, won the Democratic nomination for governor of Rhode Island, defeating Gov. Dan McKee, The Associated Press said on Wednesday night.
Mr. McKee is the first sitting governor to lose a primary since 2018 and the first in Rhode Island in more than 30 years.
The race between Ms. Foulkes and Mr. McKee, a former lieutenant governor and mayor of Cumberland, R.I., who was seeking a second term, was combative from the start. Ms. Foulkes sought to portray Mr. McKee as an insider prone to protecting his cronies; Mr. McKee criticized Ms. Foulkes’s leadership at CVS during the opioid addiction crisis, suggesting that she could have done more to combat it.
Ms. Foulkes, 62, established an early lead in the race, tapping into lingering frustration over the state’s abrupt closure in 2023 of the Washington Bridge, a critical link between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and the resulting chaos for commuters. She also benefited from a national wave of anti-incumbent sentiment and from a sense among voters that Mr. McKee was an accidental governor.
Mr. McKee took over the job when his predecessor, Gina Raimondo, left in 2021 to be the commerce secretary in the Biden administration. He won a full term a year later, but barely survived a primary challenge from Ms. Foulkes.
Since then, Mr. McKee, 75, has spent much of his time dealing with the bridge debacle and defending his management of the crisis, which arose when engineers discovered critical structural failures. During the campaign, he tried to paint himself as a proactive leader who had put public safety ahead of his own popularity by stepping up to address a longstanding infrastructure problem that he said others had “kicked down the road.”
But many voters saw it differently. They complained about what they saw as needless communication delays and were unhappy with Mr. McKee’s decision to keep the state’s transportation chief on the job for more than two years instead of firing him immediately after the bridge closure.
“I’ve talked to so many voters in this state who have said to me, ‘If that were my job, I would have been fired right away,’” Ms. Foulkes said during a debate with Mr. McKee.
Ms. Foulkes also promised, if elected, to hire an outsider “who knows no one” to lead the state Transportation Department, instead of having “insiders” running it. Mr. McKee bristled at her critique, calling it an insult to his team.
Adam Myers, a political scientist at Providence College, said that Mr. McKee had not been a particularly popular governor even before he shut down the bridge. Then, Mr. Myers said, “the bridge saga overshadowed all other aspects of his governorship.”
In the meantime, after nearly succeeding in her first attempt to unseat Mr. McKee, Ms. Foulkes had four years to hone her strategy and raise money.
“She started readying for a rematch with him soon afterward, so she came to this race well-prepared and well-funded,” Mr. Myers said in an email. “She has burnished an image of managerial competence, which is what Rhode Island voters seem to yearn for in their state government right now.”
The state leans heavily Democratic, but President Trump won more votes statewide in the 2024 election than he had four years earlier.
Construction on the new Washington Bridge is ongoing, and is scheduled to be complete by 2028.
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