Mr. McKee is the first sitting governor to lose a primary since 2018 and the first in Rhode Island in more than 30 years.
The race between Ms. Foulkes and Mr. McKee, a former lieutenant governor and mayor of Cumberland, R.I., who was seeking a second term, was combative from the start. Ms. Foulkes sought to portray Mr. McKee as an insider prone to protecting his cronies; Mr. McKee criticized Ms. Foulkes’s leadership at CVS during the opioid addiction crisis, suggesting that she could have done more to combat it.
Ms. Foulkes, 62, established an early lead in the race, tapping into lingering frustration over the state’s abrupt closure in 2023 of the Washington Bridge, a critical link between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and the resulting chaos for commuters. She also benefited from a national wave of anti-incumbent sentiment and from a sense among voters that Mr. McKee was an accidental governor.
Since then, Mr. McKee, 75, has spent much of his time dealing with the bridge debacle and defending his management of the crisis, which arose when engineers discovered critical structural failures. During the campaign, he tried to paint himself as a proactive leader who had put public safety ahead of his own popularity by stepping up to address a longstanding infrastructure problem that he said others had “kicked down the road.”