Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee faces an uphill battle to win re-election, according to a new poll commissioned by the Rhode Island AFL-CIO and released Monday.
Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they support returning McKee to office, while 34% favor replacing him. The governor was rated as favorable by 31% of respondents, and 30% said he is doing a good or excellent job.
The poll by Fleming & Associates, the same firm used by WPRI-TV, is based on a random sample of telephone interviews with 400 registered voters in January. It has a margin of error of 4.9 percentage points.
The poll shows rival Democratic candidate Helena Foulkes with a 26% favorability rating.
One big difference in the views of the candidates: 18% of respondents rated Foulkes as unfavorable, compared to 57% unfavorable for McKee.
Fifty-six percent of respondents were unsure whether to approve or disapprove of Foulkes, suggesting that voters’ views of the former CVS executive are largely not yet established.
Among top issues for voters, 37% said the Washington Bridge, 18% selected housing affordability and availability, while 9% selected healthcare.
McKee got a boost earlier this month when House Speaker Joe Shekarchi announced he would not run for governor, and a Morning Consult survey showed McKee with a 49% approval rating, his best in recent times.
The AFL-CIO poll, however, is in keeping with a string of previous findings showing a tough path to re-election for the 74-year-old governor.
If the governor’s camp wanted to highlight takeaways, it might point to how McKee’s favorable/unfavorable rating was 53%/42% among Democrats and 50% of Democrats said they would vote to re-elect the governor. However, independents are the biggest bloc of voters in the state and McKee stands at just 24% favorable and 56% unfavorable among that group in the new poll.
The AFL-CIO was among the unions that endorsed McKee in 2022, providing important support as he wound up edging Foulkes by 3 percentage points in a primary election.
McKee’s campaign downplayed the new finding.
In a statement, campaign spokeswoman Christina Freundlich said, “While Governor McKee is focused on lowering costs, creating thousands of good-paying union jobs, and standing up for workers when it matters most, Helena Foulkes built her career in corporate boardrooms – prioritizing profits over people and laying off workers while putting her own wealth ahead of Rhode Island families. That stark contrast is why Democrats, labor, and working families are uniting behind Governor McKee, fueling his momentum and putting him on a clear path to victory this fall.”
Angelika Pellegrino, spokeswoman for Foulkes’ campaign, responded with this statement: “With a nearly 60% disapproval, this poll shows that after five years in office, Dan McKee is almost as unpopular with Rhode Island voters as Donald Trump. Rhode Islanders are fed up with the Washington Bridge failure and a governor who has stood idly by while a housing crisis crushes working families across the state. After years of incompetence and inaction, voters have simply lost confidence in their governor.”
The new poll was conducted before Shekarchi announced his decision and it does not include any head-to-head matchups among current candidates for statewide office.
Exactly half of respondents say they support the implementation of a millionaires’ tax, similar to the one in Massachusetts, while 35% expressed opposition and 15% said they were unsure.
Other highlights of the poll:
- Rhode Islanders are equally divided on whether the state is moving in the right or the wrong direction, with 44% each favoring one side of that view.
- Just 26% of respondents had a favorable opinion of President Trump, to 63% unfavorable.
- The favorable/unfavorable ranking for Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos, who faces a primary with multiple Democrats, is 26%/34%, with 41% unsure.
- In a reflection of why Shekarchi may have decided not to run for governor, his 28% favorability rating was better than the 22% unfavorability measure, but 50% percent of respondents were unsure.
