Rhode Island's Gov. McKee fights for his political survival in primary rematch with Foulkes

Rhode Island Democratic primary voters were casting ballots Wednesday in a contest that election analysts have flagged as one of the rarer events in American state politics: a real possibility that a sitting governor could lose his own party's nomination. Gov. Dan McKee, who rose from lieutenant governor to the state's top office in 2021 after Gina Raimondo left to become U.S. commerce secretary, spent the campaign's final weeks trying to close a wide and persistent polling gap against Helena Buonanno Foulkes, a former CVS Health executive making her second consecutive run for the governorship.

Polls are scheduled to close at 8 p.m. Eastern time. The primary, originally set for the first Tuesday after Labor Day under state law, was rescheduled to Wednesday after the General Assembly cited the cost and logistical difficulty of preparing polling places so soon after the holiday; McKee signed that scheduling change into law in April, according to a preview of the rescheduled primary.

The numbers

Public polling in the race's final weeks consistently showed McKee trailing. An Emerson College Polling survey conducted for WPRI-TV on Aug. 21-22, among 522 likely Democratic primary voters, found Foulkes leading McKee 45% to 30%, with 25% undecided and a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points, according to the Boston Globe's report on the poll's crosstabs. When the poll allocated undecided voters based on their stated leanings, the gap widened to 61%-39% in Foulkes's favor. That represented some improvement for McKee since May, when the same pollster had him trailing 40%-20%. In the last competitive primary between the two, in 2022, McKee narrowly won a five-candidate field with 32.8% of the vote to Foulkes's 29.9%.

Ahead of Wednesday's vote, roughly 30,000 Democratic and 3,500 Republican mail and early ballots had already been cast, out of about 235,000 registered Democrats and 695,000 active registered voters statewide as of Sept. 1, according to the Associated Press's election-day guidance for the race. Rhode Island does not register voters by party for its general electorate, so any registered voter who has not previously voted in a party primary can choose which party's ballot to request, a rule both campaigns have spent the closing weeks trying to exploit by courting unaffiliated voters directly.

McKee, a former teacher, small-business owner and Cumberland mayor, has held statewide office continuously since 2015, first as lieutenant governor and then as governor. Foulkes spent more than two decades at CVS Health before leaving in 2018, later running unsuccessfully for governor in the 2022 Democratic primary that McKee won. Her 2026 campaign has centered on a promise to bring what she calls private-sector accountability to a state government she argues has grown complacent after years of one-party control in the General Assembly.

A wounded record

Much of Foulkes's case against McKee centers on the Washington Bridge, a span carrying roughly 100,000 vehicles a day on Interstate 195 through Providence. The westbound side was abruptly closed in December 2023 after inspectors found what the state described as a critical structural failure; traffic has since been squeezed onto a reconfigured eastbound span. A full reopening, once discussed in terms of months, is now not expected until November 2028, Fortune reported in its account of the bridge's role in the campaign — a timeline McKee has defended by noting it would still beat the rebuilding of Baltimore's collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, expected to finish in 2030.

McKee's campaign, in turn, has attacked Foulkes over her tenure running CVS Health's pharmacy division from 2014 to 2018, accusing her of putting "profits ahead of people" during a period when the national opioid epidemic was near its peak. Foulkes has responded that CVS reduced its opioid dispensing by roughly 40% during her leadership; the company agreed in 2022 to pay $5 billion to settle nationwide lawsuits alleging pharmacies fueled the epidemic, without admitting wrongdoing.

The rivalry turned personal at the candidates' second televised debate, held Aug. 18 at Rhode Island College. After McKee accused Foulkes of being unfairly negative about the state, she responded that she was criticizing his leadership, not Rhode Island itself.

"I am the state of Rhode Island."

The remark, made by McKee in response to Foulkes at the debate, was widely replayed by Rhode Island's political press as an emblem of an incumbent seen by many voters as out of touch after nearly six years in office.

What happens next

Should McKee lose, he would become the first Rhode Island governor to lose a primary since 1994, and, nationally, the first elected governor to be denied renomination since 2014, according to the Rhode Island Board of Elections, which is overseeing Wednesday's vote alongside the Secretary of State's official election calendar. Rhode Island's Democratic primary electorate skews toward better-educated, higher-income voters in polls, a demographic where Foulkes has run particularly strong — she led college graduates 49%-23% and postgraduate-degree holders 58%-23% in the late-August Emerson survey, though McKee's campaign has argued lower-turnout primary electorates have underestimated his standing before.

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will enter the Nov. 3 general election as the heavy favorite; Republicans have not won a statewide race in Rhode Island since 2006, though independent candidate Ken Block, a two-time gubernatorial contender, is also on the November ballot. Results were expected to be reported through Wednesday night and into Thursday on the state's official statewide results portal as precincts closed and ballots were counted.