Rhode Island’s Democratic governor, Gina Raimondo, fended off a spirited primary challenge from Matt Brown, a former secretary of state who positioned himself to Raimondo’s left, in a test of establishment resilience against a progressive insurgency.
But Raimondo’s victory reinforced another trend this primary season: the strength of Democratic women running for office.
Raimondo, a former venture capital executive who became the state’s first female governor in 2014, is the 16th woman to be nominated by a major party for governor so far this cycle. Her win comes a day after Molly Kelly defeated a progressive opponent in the Democratic primary for governor in New Hampshire.
In November, she will face the mayor of Cranston, Allan Fung, who was her Republican opponent four years ago when she was elected to her first term as governor.
Rhode Island is the second to last state to hold primaries before the midterm elections this November. New York will vote on Thursday in a highly anticipated gubernatorial showdown between the Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, and the actor turned progressive activist Cynthia Nixon.
Though Rhode Island’s gubernatorial primary drew attention from progressives, Raimondo beat Brown convincingly. With more than 92% of the vote reported, she held about 56% of the vote, according to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, the Democratic race for lieutenant governor, which pitted the incumbent Daniel McKee against the progressive challenger Aaron Regunberg remained too close to call.
Brown drew support from progressive activist groups, including Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, as well as from the former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-Independent-turned Democrat who has been critical of his successor.
During the bitter primary campaign, he sought to cast Raimondo as a “Republican in disguise”.
“It’s time to change what it means to be a Democrat in 2018,” Brown said in a campaign ad.
Raimondo ran on her record of job creation and improving the economy. The state was one of the worst hit by the economic recession in 2008 and 2009 as manufacturing jobs disappeared and housing prices collapsed. Recovery in the state was slow.
When she was elected in November 2014, the state’s unemployment was nearly 7%, among the highest rate in the country. It has fallen steadily to 4.1%, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. She also touted her efforts to bring new development projects to the state, fix crumbling infrastructure and expand a program that offers tuition-free access to community college.
The general election race is expected to be competitive as Raimondo struggles with her public perception. Polling from this summer showed her locked in a tight race with Fung. They will face independent Joe Trillo, a former Republican state lawmaker who ran Trump’s Rhode Island campaign in 2016.
In a three-way race for governor in 2014, Fung earned 36% of the overall vote share compared with her 41%.
“We can do better than Raimondo’s Rhode Island,” Fung told supporters on Wednesday night, according to the Associated Press. If elected, Fung would become the state’s first Asian American governor.
At her victory party in Providence on Wednesday, Raimondo began to make her case against Fung.
“He does not have the courage to stand up to President Trump,” she told supporters who welcomed her with chants of “four more years”.