ENDORSEMENT: Governor Democratic Primary | Go Local Prov

ENDORSEMENT: Governor Democratic Primary

 

 

Two candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination for governor.

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The choice for Democrats and those independents voting on Wednesday is difficult.

It is a choice hard to define.

A Hobson’s choice is a free choice in which only one thing is actually offered. The term is often used to describe an illusion that choices are available. The best-known example is “I’ll give you a choice: take it or leave it”, wherein “leaving it” is strongly undesirable.

This vote in the Democratic primary may be a decision-making matrix in which both options are severely flawed — more like a so-called Morton’s fork, which is: a choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives (in other words, a dilemma), or two lines of reasoning that lead to the same unpleasant conclusion, as defined by Wikipedia.

We wish we could be more optimistic, but we are not. We have seen these two candidates for years.

Good and great governors have existed in Rhode Island’s modern history, and each had strengths and weaknesses. In the great categories, we would name John H. Chafee and Bruce Sundlun. We would also cite Lincoln Almond and J. Joseph Garrahy as fine men and fine governors. 

They did things; they did not break people or things.

In 2022, GoLocal endorsed Dan McKee on the strength of his period as governor after Gina Raimondo resigned to join the Biden administration.

During his time filling Raimondo’s term, he took Rhode Island from the worst-vaccinated state in the country to the best. He advocated for improvements in education by leveraging his expertise in balancing traditional public schools with public charter schools.

Moreover, he promised to be a steady hand during the post-COVID recovery.

In his full term, he has struggled, and we will delve into a detailed review below.

Now in 2026, there is a deeper understanding of the two candidates who have been running against each other for five-plus years.

 

Helena Foulkes

We start with Helena Foulkes.

In 2022, there were great concerns over her role in the opioid crisis — a perverse health emergency in which 750,000 died, and corporations and executive officers profited. Foulkes was one of those executives taking tens of millions in salaries and bonuses as pills flew.

Her answers to critical questions are often misleading and sometimes blatantly false. Especially her claim about when she learned about the crisis.

But even more disturbing is her decade-long leadership as chair of the board of her family’s Dodd Center — an entity funded by the Sackler family — the clan held most responsible for the opioid crisis. The Sacklers not only funded her family foundation, but also served on the board, as did their lobbyist. Foulkes only resigned from the Dodd Center when she ran for governor and continued her close ties to Sackler lobbyist Steve Kenney, from whom she solicited thousands of dollars in campaign donations for her gubernatorial runs.

Who would serve on a board with these people? Who would gladly take their money?

Her explanations of her roles in the grotesque opioid killing fields reek of being written by a bad PR team or a creepy legal firm.

Foulkes often refuses to answer questions about the entangled web linking Foulkes’ family and the Sacklers, following a GoLocal multipart investigation.

If you are so inclined to put the opioids and the Sacklers aside, then we look at her professional record, and it would appear that Foulkes is an outsider even to the values of the most conservative Democrats. She is a donor to right-wing Republicans like Mitch McConnell and repeatedly to pro-life Republican Rhode Island Governor Don Carcieri.

As president of CVS, the company’s political action committee was the largest donor to President Trump at one point during his first term, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal.

She claims her greatest CVS success was removing cigarettes but yet has taken campaign donations from tobacco CEOs and had a tobacco heiress host a D.C. fundraiser.

There is a significant question mark about Foulkes as a chief executive. She served as the top decision-maker only once in her career, as CEO of Hudson’s Bay Co., and it was a short tenure with a poor outcome.  She left that position after a little more than two years. She profited with a $29 million pay in just one year. She refuses to disclose her total take.

She’s also very selective in what she discloses about her tenure as CEO at the Canadian retailer Hudson’s Bay.  The Toronto Star called her short-term stint there “turbulent.”

Three months before she left as CEO, The Toronto Star featured a story titled, “Eye-popping losses, a failed European expansion and a bid to go private — can Hudson’s Bay survive?”

Hudson’s Bay did not survive — it closed this year.

Based on her GOP giving and actions in the opioid crisis, it is remarkable that she is a viable Democratic primary contender. She seems so much more like a new-era Republican.

Her claim of building 20,000 new housing units is simply not possible. Her claim that she will fund it with the millionaire tax is disingenuous, since that revenue already supports the state budget. She is functionally trying to spend the same revenue twice.

But Foulkes is the clear frontrunner simply because she is not McKee.

 

Dan McKee

While the hope was that Dan McKee would focus on education, small businesses, and getting the state’s economy moving forward in his full term, the Governor constantly mismanaged much of government.

Too often, his administration was a walking and talking “how not to.”

He, like Raimondo, had made a deal with the proverbial devil to retain Peter Alviti as the director of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation. That was at the demand of the Laborers’ International Union. Alviti was unqualified for the job and was a strutting ticking time bomb. The 6/10 contamination was Alviti’s first major management failure during the Raimondo administration, and it continued into the McKee administration.

Then, there was the Washington Bridge failure, and McKee refused to fire Alviti — a fateful decision that ultimately sealed McKee’s political legacy.

There were so many other miscues: managing a major hack that impacted nearly half the state, implementing new software to pay state employees, Hasbro, and so on.

He had scored points over his career on education by being a national advocate for public charter schools, but he threw that legacy under the proverbial school bus to curry favor with the teachers’ union in a desperate attempt to win reelection. It raises questions about what McKee actually believes in.

That’s fundamentally the problem with this Democratic primary. 

Unlike the mayoral race in Providence, which pits two distinct candidates and visions: a Social Democrat v. a more pragmatic liberal Democrat.

This Democratic gubernatorial primary pits two candidates who don’t seem to have a political compass beyond ambition. We wish we were more optimistic, but we are not.

For these reasons, GoLocal makes no endorsement in the Democratic primary. 

We look forward to a robust race in the General Election in November, where the winner of the Democratic primary and independent candidate Ken Block will enter into a discussion about the future of Rhode Island. We do not believe that, in the era of Trump and MAGA, a Republican can be elected in RI.