No Republican candidate for Stamford mayor speaks volumes
Republicans from all over the state gathered in Stamford late Thursday for their annual Prescott Bush dinner, named for a U.S. senator, a father and grandfather of presidents, who might well have been a Clinton-style, pro-business Democrat in today’s politics.
Stamford makes sense for the GOP, since it’s the Connecticut city with the largest number of registered Republicans, ahead of neighboring Greenwich and far ahead of everyplace else.
And despite a more than 2-to-1 edge for Democrats over the GOP, Stamford had a Republican wearing the sash at Government Center one mayor ago, until 2013.
So it should trouble Stamford Republicans that they have no name on the ballot for mayor in Tuesday’s elections — especially since the nominated Democrat, state Rep. Caroline Simmons, vanquished incumbent Mayor David Martin in a primary.
It was a winnable seat for a challenger.
They’re not losing any sleep at the GOP, however, because they have Bobby Valentine, a local Republican for most of the last 20 years until this past April, when he dropped out of the party to run for mayor as an unaffiliated candidate.
In another, less notable quirk, Simmons appears twice on the ballot above Valentine — once as a Democrat and once under the banner of the Independent Party, which endorsed her. That raised the hackles of the Valentine campaign, since he wants the right to claim the independent mantle — with a small i — and the Bobby V camp charges that Simmons collected the IP nod just to confuse voters.
Candidates seek crossendorsements all the time, so even if she did deploy some hardball strategy against a baseball man, what of it? She’s clearly a moderate Democrat of the sort who would viably accept the Independent Party ballot line.
Far more insidious is the story behind the Republican party in the second largest Connecticut city offering no name in a race that was — and is — up for grabs.
Oh, the Stamford Republicans did nominate a candidate in July, a retired local police detective and topnotch jazz drummer named Joe Corsello. With no money, no campaign manager, no lawn signs and no website, Corsello dropped out on Sept. 8, less than a week before the Democratic primary.
This surprised absolutely no one. I started hearing Corsello was going to back out weeks earlier.
Was the fix in? Did the party draft a political tomato can with the expressed intent of him dropping out? I have no evidence of that, despite talking to a lot of people back when it happened, and since.
But it stinks. It stinks even if there was no deal, because in the end, Valentine gets to claim he’s unaffiliated, without having to worry about a Republican on the ballot taking votes that might otherwise go to him.
And it stinks because Republicans in deep-blue Connecticut need to step up their game. If you’re a moderate Democrat, you know the only way to balance out the far-left — with ideas like a 2 percentage point tax increase on wealthy families, which would backfire — is for the Republicans to mount some heft.
It’s the same on both sides of the aisle. Balance isn’t a bad thing and that means strong parties, plural, in a two-party system.
And finally, the situation in Stamford stinks because, even if there was no deal, the Republicans with Corsello — as nice a guy as you’ll ever meet — didn’t even put up the honorable fight of the loyal opposition — let alone a fight to win. Corsello crisscrossed the city for two months, going to events, but with little or no help from anyone.
“Bobby had about $375,000 in his campaign,” Corsello told me a couple of days after he dropped out. “The more I thought about it, I just thought it would be a better move for me to bow out. … I’ve got four sons, everybody was so proud of me . ... I was going to be in it for the long haul.”
The math shows that Corsello dropping out does help Valentine.
Barry Michelson, the Stamford Republican candidate for mayor in 2017, won 6,500 votes in a bad loss to Martin. Let’s say Corsello would have gotten less than half of that, but still, say, 3,000 votes, almost all from Republicans — a reasonable guess in a race with 13,000 registered Republicans.
That would mean Valentine would have to win 75 percent or more of the unaffiliated votes to beat Simmons.
Dan Miller, Valentine’s campaign manager, rejects that math, saying Corsello would have gotten almost no votes from anyone, and that Valentine will win thousands of votes from Democrats. He and Fritz Blau, the GOP town chairman, deny there was any deal for Corsello to drop out.
Simmons herself had lunch with Corsello on a scorching hot Thursday in late August at the Capitol Grille downtown, with a Simmons supporter (each candidate paid a share of the bill) and, she said, he told her he was “probably going to drop out.”
Corsello called me a few minutes after I got off the phone with Miller and denied that he told Simmons that.
“Why would I say that to her? That would be ridiculous,” he said.
Corsello knew Valentine from way back. One of his sons once managed one of Valentine’s restaurants. “I used to love the Mets,” he said, referring to one of the three Major League Baseball teams Valentine managed. “He’s a hometown hero.”
With the election just a few days away, this story still matters, not because it shows a crooked deal. It doesn’t. Rather, in a race where a few word choices by Valentine have come to matter, it shows the complex mechanics of local politics; of all politics.
I asked Michelson, the 2017 GOP candidate and now a member of the Stamford Republican Town Committee, how he felt about the party having no name on the ballot.
“Am I bothered by it? Sure,” he told me. “I’d like to see a Republican run, but we’d like to see the Democratic Party stronghold as a Republican, cracked . ... you’ve got to be realistic.”
He added, “Maybe this is the way to bring more accountability into government.”