After Jan. 6, state GOP losing voters
Several Fairfield County communities see decline in number of party members
WASHINGTON — In January, Lisa Purdy, of Fairfield, decided she’d had enough of being a registered Republican.
Purdy joined 5,302 Connecticut Republicans who unaffiliated from the party from Jan. 6 to Feb. 16 — the greatest number of exits taking place in Greenwich, Glastonbury, Milford, Fairfield and Stamford, voter registration data from the Connecticut Secretary of the State’s Office shows.
In interviews, some Republican voters who left said they’d had enough of
the party’s support for former President Donald Trump. Others were fed up with politics altogether.
By comparison, Democrats have gradually swelled their ranks since 2016 to climbing to 856,559 on Jan. 6. Between Jan. 6 and Feb. 16, 0.2 percent of Democratic voters, 1,957 people, left their party — less than half the number of Republican exits. Where Democratic voters did leave, the largest numbers changed their registrations in cities like Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury and Norwalk.
Local Republican leaders agreed the Connecticut GOP needs to change its message in order to win people back.
“Clearly we need to be a party that’s growing rather than losing members,” said Sue Hatfield, chair of the Connecticut Republican Party, who elected last week to serve in the role until June. “Getting those voters back, what people want to see I believe is that we are moving our party forward ... I believe if we get back to our core values of less government, lower taxes and are able to just connect with the voters of what is happening in Connecticut that is making Connecticut more affordable that they will hear our platform and be open to that.”
Connecticut is not the only state where Republicans have changed their registrations en masse. At least 140,000 Republicans in 25 states left the party in January, including thousands in Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado and Arizona, according to news reports.
Over the past four years, GOP party registrations in Connecticut have held mostly steady at about 465,000 and then bumped up over 480,000 around the 2020 election. But about 1 percent of the 484,505 Republican voters who were registered on Jan. 6 — the day hundreds of Trump supporters mobbed the U.S. Capitol — left over the next six weeks.
Connecticut’s largest segment of voters are unaffiliated and only 2,062 unaffiliated voters re-registered with another party in the same time frame.
Voters who left the Connecticut Republican party in January and February primarily cited three reasons in interviews: they wanted to wash their hands of Trump and his false election claims, they feared backlash from having an “R” associated with their name or they thought both parties were becoming too polarizing.
“It really doesn’t boil down to any of the candidates. I just felt there became a real viciousness on both sides regarding party allegiance,” said Purdy, 51, who runs a local insurance company. She said she didn’t like the political pressure to be uniformly committed to one party’s candidates.
Many people Hearst Connecticut Media interviewed declined to be named not wanting to draw attention to their personal politics. One man, who switched from Republican to unaffiliated, said he won’t talk about politics with friends of family anymore and he’d never dream of putting up a yard sign.
“It seemed that cancel culture was going after to anybody that was registered as Republican or conservative so I took that label off of my name because I didn’t want it attached,” he said.
One local business owner who declined to be named called party affiliation “the last front of discrimination.”
“When you hear about people judging others based on their party affiliation, it’s something someone who has a business might think about,” he said.
“We are disillusioned and disappointed with Donald Trump,” one woman said, after changing her and her husband’s registrations. “We are Democrats now.”
Few Republican voters seem to be making the leap directly from the GOP to the Democratic Party, with most landing in the middle as unaffiliated or independent voters.
Chair Nancy DiNardo said the Connecticut Democratic Party is not actively recruiting these voters exiting the GOP to the Democratic party.
“We are aware obviously of a shift in political registration,” she said. “I don’t think that’s really an opening for us to lobby them to to become Democrats. I think their frustration may be with politics in general — not that we wouldn’t welcome them.”
Smaller numbers of Democrats left their party too and DiNardo speculated some were Trump supporters and some were also frustrated with politics at large.
In addition, some amount of party switching happens in Connecticut around every election because one is required to be affiliated with a party to vote in that party’s primary.
Chip Bennett, 63, a Glastonbury town councilor, was a Republican starting at age 18, until he decided to become an independent in December, he said. He decided to change his registration after over 120 Republicans signed onto a lawsuit in December brought by the Texas attorney general that challenged President Joe Biden’s electoral victory in other states.
“This was just a bridge too far,” said Bennett. “I thought that’s not really a party that believes in a democratic republic… you could see the writing on the wall with Stop the Steal through November and December.”
That Texas lawsuit challenging the election results was tossed out by the U.S. Supreme Court, but on Jan. 6, Trump held a final “Stop the Steal” rally, repeated misinformation about the election and urged his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol, where lawmakers were voting to certify the election results. Hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the building in a violent attack that forced legislators into lockdown, caused the deaths of five people and the injury of dozens of Capitol Police officers. Over 250 people have now been arrested as law enforcement continues to investigate the event.
House Democrats and 10 Republicans subsequently voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection on Jan. 13, making Trump the first president ever to be impeached twice. On Feb. 13, the Senate voted to acquit Trump of the charge. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to convict, but 67 yes votes are needed for a conviction.
George Norman, chair of the Republican Town Committee in suburban Glastonbury — a town that lost 2 percent of its registered Republicans in January and February — said Trump has hurt down ballot candidates in some areas of Connecticut. It’s time for the party to move on if it’s going to be successful in statewide elections again, he said.
“Regardless of one’s opinion of Donald Trump, it is a drag on certain parts of the state of Connecticut, Glastonbury being one of those towns . ... There are pockets of Connecticut where Donald has been a help,” Norman said. “But the fact of the matter is we haven’t carried a state election in over a decade now so it would seem by observation that that’s not enough... The key will be can be draw back the historical base of the Republican party in Connecticut… the suburbs while not alienating some of the folks who have come to the party.”
Asked specifically if the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s actions were contributing to Republicans leaving the party, Hatfield, the party chair, said only “we need to move forward.”
Not only are suburban towns like Greenwich, Fairfield, Milford and Glastonbury seeing Republicans leave the party, new voters have moved to the state from New York City during the pandemic and many have registered as Democrats, Quigley noted.
Local Republican leaders are noting theses trends as they prepare their party and their candidates for municipal elections in 2021 and statewide races a year later. They’re hoping that fewer registered Republicans will not mean fewer votes for Republican candidates later on.
In 2020, Republicans lost seats in the state House and state Senate and did not claim any Congressional seats in Connecticut.
Alex Plitsas, Fairfield Republican Town Committee chair, said both Democrats and Republicans will vie to bolster their ranks and win support from unaffiliated voters over the next year. The key, locally, is the candidates, he said, noting that Republican state legislators from Fairfield out performed Trump in their elections.
“My job is to continue to put forward the people who will who do the best job for the town and community,” he said.