In her campaign for governor, Nellie Gorbea bills herself as the underestimated candidate
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PROVIDENCE – Not long after declaring herself the frontrunner to be Rhode Island's next governor, Nellie Gorbea warned voters in her first TV ad that she remained, like the state itself, "underestimated."
That was June, but the shape of the race has barely budged and with the Democratic primary now a little less than three weeks away, Gorbea still thinks Rhode Island insiders are selling her short.
She's underfunded compared to her chief campaign rivals, doesn't have the incumbents' support of organized labor, doesn't have major corporate backers, lacks an easily defined ideological lane or deep Rhode Island roots.
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And yet the polls show her neck-and-neck with incumbent Gov. Dan McKee, with many voters still undecided.
Gorbea would be the first Hispanic governor in Rhode Island's history and the first Puerto Rican-born governor on the mainland.
She would also be the first person to be elected governor of Rhode Island directly from the secretary of state's office (three other Rhode Island secretaries of state have gone on to be governor after stints as lieutenant governor: John Notte in 1961, George Utter in 1905 and Richard Ward in 1740, according to research by the State Library and Republican National Committeeman Steve Frias.)
As she walks around Wayland Square talking to business owners, Gorbea describes her current role as a kind of bureaucratic concierge, helping voters and business owners through red tape.
And if elected governor, she says, she'll bring that approach to the whole of state government.
"Maybe because I'm bilingual, maybe because I didn't grow up in Rhode Island, I think about those people who don't have the wherewithal, who don't have the education, but they have a good business idea," she tells Hercilia Corona and Sergio Mendoza of Madrid bakery on Wayland Avenue. "And then it turns out when you think of that person and make it easier for them, you make it easier for everyone else."
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In her latest ad, which evokes a famous Nike commercial, a collection of Rhode Islanders tell voters that "Nellie knows" things, from housing to elections, casting her as a kind of all-purpose government helper.
It's a less conventional message than "change," "cheap gas" or "jobs, jobs, jobs," but this is an unconventional campaign season.
From San Juan to Princeton
Gorbea, 55, grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and came to the U.S. mainland in 1984 to attend Princeton University.
She met her husband at that Ivy League school and got her first job in government in the Garden State, working as a policy specialist for the Governor’s Committee on Children’s Services Planning under Republican Gov. Thomas Kean.
When her husband got a tenure-track job teaching oceanography at URI, she followed him to Rhode Island and began working for Fleet Securities.
She first dipped her toe in Rhode Island political waters when Gov. Lincoln Almond named her to the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Hispanic Affairs in 1995.
In the late 1990s, Gorbea returned to Puerto Rico to work for then Gov. Pedro Rosselló before his New Progressive Party was defeated amid accusations of corruption.
She returned stateside in 2001 and was hired by then-Secretary of State Matt Brown, where she worked for four years before becoming executive director of HousingWorksRI and then running for secretary of state.
She's lives in North Kingstown and has three daughters, ages 12, 16 and 18.
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Does Gorbea consider herself a progressive?
"What is a progressive?" she said when asked while taking a break from campaigning to grab an octopus salad at L'Artisan cafe. "I am someone who believes firmly that government should work for people, which in the eyes of some people that is progressive. I believe in change. I believe change is good."
What's fair to say is she is running to the left of the other candidates polling double digits.
In the same ad where she said she was often underestimated, Gorbea proposed "raising taxes on big corporations," with a 1-percentage-point hike in the corporate tax rate to raise $39 million per year.
The idea drew immediate pushback from rivals McKee and Helena Buonanno Foulkes, who said it would hurt the state's ability to attract companies.
Foulkes in particular seized on the fact that some household Rhode Island brand names – Del's, Big Blue Bug Solutions and Gregg's restaurants – would be hit by what she termed the "Nellie tax" and may not fit everyone's idea of big corporations.
One of the businesses Gorbea visits on her walk through Wayland Square, The Salted Slate restaurant, is incorporated as a Domestic Profit Corporation, according to filings with the secretary of state's office, and might have to pay more under a corporate tax rate hike.
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Asked whether such a tax increase might cause collateral damage to small businesses, Gorbea said the idea was more a statement of values on where she would go for money "if I am faced with a need for more government funds."
"We are right now still dealing with the federal funding from the pandemic, and it looks like a surplus in the budget," she said. "This is not a tax proposal for January 2023. This is a statement to voters on what are your values coming into this office. My values are that those at the very top, the big corporations in this country and Rhode Island, have gotten away with paying way less in taxes than regular small business."
She said she might also support a personal income tax increase.
"In order for our economy to grow and thrive, we need to rebalance on taxes," she said.
As you might expect from the former leader of a housing nonprofit in a year of exploding home prices, Gorbea is running on making it easier to find a place to live.
If elected, she says, she will build 17,500 new housing units over five years, although exactly how she would make this happen is a little fuzzy.
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She avoids directly taking on the most controversial question in housing policy – whether the state should force local communities to allow more new homes and new residents within their borders.
"We absolutely have to change the way cities and towns are operating in this world of housing," she said. "You are not seeing a top-down mandate, because I don't want to start that. I want to start by talking with the municipalities and figuring out the real barriers to get more housing built, more dense housing built, more sustainable housing built."
Gorbea criticized McKee's decision in February to lift Rhode Island's COVID-prevention indoor mask mandate and his decision to allow schools to de-mask in March. She never said what her threshold for masking would be or when, if at all, she would have let students take masks off. "I felt very strongly that the masking was helping," she said. "I think making sure you had the science and the data to know when to lift the masks was absolutely critical."
She's released a climate plan that seeks to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and would, among other things, redirect federal aid into climate initiatives, fund the state's Transit Master Plan and reorganize the Department of Transportation to be less highway-centric.
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On schools, she supports making high-quality education a constitutional right, expanding tuition-free CCRI, providing universal free pre-kindergarten and free school breakfast and lunch.
As McKee has clung to a narrow lead in the polls, some observers have speculated that Gorbea and Foulkes splitting the center-left, anti-incumbent vote opens a path for him to win without being very popular.
She calls McKee's first year-plus in office "government by inertia" devoid of big policy ideas and unable to attract or maintain top staffers, as evidenced by the number of officials now in temporary or acting roles.
What has Gorbea done as secretary of state?
Since taking office in 2014, Gorbea has begun automatically charging lobbyists who fail to file reports on time, leading to an increase in fines.
She's moved the state archives – although she didn't get the new building she wanted – and overhauled the websites with databases for things like lobbying, elections and open meetings.
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Her biggest political fight as secretary of state has been to increase the ways and times people can vote, specifically by introducing early in-person voting and eliminating some of the restrictions on voting by mail.
After years of disappointment, the COVID pandemic effectively ushered in most of the changes Gorbea had been pushing, and the General Assembly has since made them permanent.
Gorbea's family not 'well-connected'
Later in the "underestimated," ad, Gorbea notes that she doesn't "come from a well-connected family," raising eyebrows from some politicos with questions about her background.
Gorbea's father, Roberto, is an engineer who, after serving in the U.S. Army, became CEO of Lord Electric Company, an electrical and construction company with contracts working on the island's electrical grid. Since leaving Lord Electric, he's also managed a real estate investment company, according to his LinkedIn page, and was a board member of a bank that failed in 2010, according to FDIC documents.
He's donated to a handful of U.S. political campaigns since the 1990s, mostly Republicans, according to Federal Elections Commission filings.
Gorbea has visited, hosted or held fundraisers with the last three governors of Puerto Rico.
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But those connections are in Puerto Rico, not Rhode Island. Gorbea said her family did not get her the job in the Rosselló administration in the late 1990s – she dropped a resumé unsolicited with a staffer at a conference – and her family doesn't have nearly the clout her main opponents for governor have.
"I don't have Nancy Pelosi doing a fundraiser for me," Gorbea said in reference to Foulkes, whose mother was a close friend of the U.S. House speaker and whose uncle was a U.S. senator. "And the current governor comes from a longtime family in Cumberland that has had business ties in the community."
"I got to Rhode Island regardless of my father; my parents are living in Puerto Rico and I moved up here as an adult not knowing anyone and building my own professional career and my community leadership from scratch," she said. "I came here as a faculty spouse ... That is very different from someone who grows up here and whose family knows people."
panderson@providencejournal.com
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On Twitter: @PatrickAnderso_
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI governor candidate Nellie Gorbea says she is underestimated in race
