Rhode Island venture capitalist Gina Raimondo decided to run for public office five years ago because her state's fiscal problems, notably its out of control pension system, were threatening government services, even the Providence Public Library where her Italian immigrant grandfather had learned English.

And now she's the state's governor-elect, the first woman to win the job and the first Democrat in more than 20 years.

She was elected state treasurer in 2010 after campaigning on a promise to reform the severely underfunded pension system in order to save other government assets as well as the pension system itself.

"You can't be a progressive and be opposed to pension reform," she told voters, according to The New York Times. "You can't have well-funded and flourishing public schools and public buses and an underfunded pension system. It's just not possible. So by asking people to go without a cost-of-living increase in retirement, then you can have better bus service, good streets, safe parks, Head Start and universal pre-K."

Opponents tried to find the kind of horror stories about outsourced manufacturing jobs and shuttered factories that would haunt the campaigns of venture capitalists named Romney and Foley but could only find investments in good companies with insufficient capital and established firms needing investment help.

One of the latter helped by Ms. Raimondo's firm was the Narragansett Brewing Co., which, reported The Daily Beast, "makes a lager that is to Rhode Island what chianti is to Tuscany."

As treasurer, working with a Republican turned independent governor and a Democratic legislature, Ms. Raimondo set out to keep her campaign promise to begin fixing a pension fund that would soon take 20 cents of every dollar of Rhode Island tax revenue. Overcoming the furious opposition of the public employee and teachers' unions, she convinced the legislature to raise the retirement age from 62 to 67 and suspend cost of living raises for retired state workers until the system is on a better footing. She put all state workers into a hybrid pension plan in which the state guarantees part of each pension and a 401(k)-style plan makes up the rest.

The fact that she took office as a number of the state's cities and towns were facing bankruptcy, also largely tied to underfunded pension plans, helped rally support for the Raimondo reforms, even among some younger state employees. "I do think that enabled what we did here," she said.

It also enabled the state treasurer to run for governor when Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an independent, announced he would not run again. She won a three-way race for the Democratic nomination when the state's public sector unions split their support between her two opponents.

Ms. Raimondo concentrated her campaign for governor on turning around the state's still ailing economy, getting its citizens back to work, spending more on public works and reviving manufacturing. "Nothing else matters if we can't get the economy going," she said as she ignored traditional, Democratic social issues because "nothing else mattered."

Rhode Island had a three-way race for governor and the apparent defection of public unions to the third-party candidate Robert Healey gave him 21 percent of the vote, allowing Ms. Raimondo's election with 41 percent to 36 percent for Republican Allan Fung, who ran as a traditional Republican, pledging lower taxes and spending.

In September, after Ms. Raimondo won the Democratic nomination, The Washington Post predicted her victory would "stiffen the spines of Democrats in other states where taxpayers and the services they count on have been given short shrift in favor of public-sector unions." But the spine stiffening didn't seem to reach Connecticut, where Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has obtained some concessions from state workers, but not enough to assure the long-term health of the pension system.

Interestingly, Ms. Raimondo is a bit like both of the men who ran for governor of Connecticut, but with important differences. She was a venture capitalist, but unlike Tom Foley, she didn't try to start at the top when she ran for public office. Like Gov. Malloy, she's a Democrat. Unlike Gov. Malloy and too many Democrats, she refused to be beholden to the public sector unions. And unlike both of them, she never ruled out reopening negotiations with the unions during the next four years to further the interests of her state.