Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee, 75, faces a primary rematch against Helena Foulkes, 62, a former CVS Health executive, in a race that could make him the first U.S. governor to lose a primary since 2018 and the first Rhode Island governor to lose one in more than 30 years.
Foulkes has outraised the incumbent and flooded the airwaves with campaign ads. The winner of the Sept. 9 Democratic primary in the deep-blue state will be the heavy favorite in the general election.
The central liability for McKee is the Washington Bridge, which he closed on the westbound side in 2023 after state officials flagged a 'critical failure.' Nearly 100,000 vehicles cross the span daily, now squeezed onto the reconfigured eastbound lanes. Repairs, originally promised within months, have dragged on for years as costs climbed above initial estimates.
McKee insists the bridge will be finished by 2028 and notes that will still beat the 2030 target for replacing Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed in 2024 after a container ship strike killed six construction workers. Political scientist Adam Myers of Providence College said bridge failures are easy for voters to pin on government, unlike diffuse issues like crime or cost of living.
McKee has counterattacked by branding Foulkes an out-of-touch corporate executive trying to buy the election, and has accused her of helping fuel the opioid crisis during her 25 years at CVS, where she ran the pharmacy division from 2014 to 2018 — a charge Foulkes denies.
Foulkes counters that CVS cut its opioid dispersal by 40% while she led the pharmacy division. In 2022, after she had left the company, CVS agreed to pay $5 billion to settle nationwide opioid lawsuits without admitting wrongdoing.
Foulkes also says McKee's attacks have angered CVS employees in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, telling him during an August debate that 'the 50 largest companies' business leaders in this state wrote a letter to you, asking you to stop criticizing CVS... You are going to drive them out of the state.'
McKee has also raised Foulkes' family political ties: her grandfather and uncle, Thomas and Chris Dodd, both served as Democratic senators from Connecticut. After leaving CVS in 2020, Foulkes served as CEO of Hudson's Bay Company.
Foulkes says voters increasingly feel 'state government just works with a powerful few,' even as they hear officials insist 'everything's great.'
---
What this race reveals has less to do with who wins the Democratic primary and more with what happens when one party runs a state uncontested for decades. A bridge repair that ballooned in cost and years past deadline is not an abstraction — it is taxpayer capital sunk into a project with no market discipline forcing it to come in on time or on budget.
Equally telling is a sitting governor's instinct to attack a private company and its former executive rather than answer for the infrastructure failure under his own watch. When 50 of the state's largest employers feel compelled to write a letter defending a business from a governor's rhetoric, it signals how quickly officials in one-party states reach for corporate scapegoats instead of accountability. Free enterprise built CVS into the state's largest employer; politics should not be in the business of punishing it for winning elections elsewhere.
