“I was the underdog,”Gina Raimondo says of the 2014 Rhode Island gubernatorial election她以微弱的优势赢了,第一个民主党人当选governor of the state in 24 years. As a woman and a political newcomer, despite serving four years as Rhode Island’s general treasurer, Raimondo, 43, had a few strikes against her in her race against Allan Fung, the Republican mayor of Cranston. The biggest challenge, in both the primary and general elections, was her leading role in the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, which reformed the state’s underfunded, $7 billion defined benefit retirement fund over objections from most state employee unions. The bill, currently being challenged in the courts, tied cost-of-living adjustments to the plan’s funded levels and investment returns, and created a hybrid defined benefit and defined contribution system. For Raimondo, a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law School grad who went into venture capital, putting the state pension fund on a sound fiscal basis was just the first step in her plan for an economic revival of Rhode Island, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S. Reducing the amount of state revenue going to pensions gives Rhode Island the opportunity to invest in other things. “Having the money to invest in the future and ability to attract businesses was totally enabled by what we did around pensions,” she says. Raimondo’s election shows that it is possible for a Democrat to take on pension reform and survive. “People love leaders who actually get things done,” she says.
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Gina Raimondo
Governor-elect
Rhode Island
Last year: 11
The 2014 Pension 40