“So many Democrats just assume we’re going to win,” she said. “They underestimate how hard it’s going to be.” And it might be a serious tactical mistake, she added, to nominate any candidate who seems to be at war with capitalism itself or entertains the idea of a guaranteed minimum income.

“We have become the party that is anti-business,” she told me. “We need to be the party of work.”

She acknowledged that “the system we have today is totally broken.” She cited grotesque income inequality. She noted that too many Americans have no economic security and no prospects for achieving it.

“But I fall in the camp of: Let’s fix it,” she said. “Let’s embrace business to come to the table. Someone needs to make the case that it’s in the best interest of businesses and wealthy people to be better corporate citizens. Pay for health care. Help people get their college degree. Pay for job training.”

Along those lines, she recently proposed that companies doing business in Rhode Island be taxed up to $1,500 annually for every employee who is enrolled in Medicaid because he or she can’t get health insurance through a company-sponsored plan. “I hope that they’re embarrassed,” she said.

But, she added, “Where I think we are at risk is if all we do is beat up and crap on businesses.”

That’s an exaggeration of where the party is, but I take her point. And I’m fascinated by her unflashy example and the questions it raises about how we currently accord importance to politicians and how much that really relates to their impact.

Journalists obsess over the most camera-ready emissaries and provocative assertions, and we often outsource our judgment to social media. To go viral is to be relevant. “In the future,” the Politico media columnist Jack Shafer wrote a few days ago, “your news source of choice will contain only stories about Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” Shafer forgot Beto O’Rourke, which is funny, because he once wrote an excellent broadside about how political reporters can’t forget him.

When I checked social media during Raimondo’s re-election campaign, I mostly saw people bashing her, and she wasn’t bothering to engage with that hate. I assumed she was in trouble.