Nominee: ‘Mob rule’ a risk in suburbs of 5th District

Sullivan echoes Trump’s law and order message

Taking a page from the Trump playbook, Republican David X. Sullivan is warning voters in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District that the social unrest sparked by the killing of George Floyd could quickly spill into lawlessness in the state’s affluent suburbs.

“I’m concerned about Avon, Farmington and Simsbury becoming as violent as Portland, NewYork and Chicago,” Sullivan said. “Look what’s going on in this country with mob rule. ... I think the republic is in danger now.”

Sullivan is campaigning to unseat freshman Democrat Jahana Hayes, but he says the election is about much more than his own political future.

“It’s a war against socialism,” Sullivan told about two dozen people at a political forum at the Waterbury Police Athletic League gymnasium Monday night. “I truly

believe this election is going to determine the direction of this country for a very long time.”

Sullivan, a 61-year-old father of five, dashed through his resume — a 30-year career as a federal prosecutor, teaching stints at Yale and the University of New Haven and regular appearances as a lecturer at the International Law Enforcement Academy in Roswell, New Mexico — before offering an abridged version of his political stump speech.

“I’m a rule of law candidate,” Sullivan declared. “I’m a Reagan Republican.”

Gesturing toward a knot of police officers standing at the back of the gym, he added, “For the men down there in blue, I believe in law enforcement. I believe in reasonable taxation. I believe in diversity of thought.”

Sullivan’s law-and- order message echoes that of President Trump, who is running for reelection on a promise to protect the suburbs from what he has characterized as violent protests in Democratic-led cities.

The strategy seems calibrated to appeal to voters such as Deborah Cronin, a 75-year-old real estate agent from Waterbury who came to hear Sullivan and other candidates. Although she’s a lifelong Democrat, she strongly supports Trump. “He’s crude, but nobody owns him, and that’s what I like about him,” she said.

Cronin has become increasingly concerned about the protests against police brutality that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. She’s seen images of looted cities, and she worries that outside forces are stirring up civil unrest. She mentions that her own home in a historic section of the city now has cameras and security lights.

“I don’t want to blame it on George Floyd,” Cronin said. “I do think with all that violence, somebody is instigating it. I don’t know how to explain it. ... I hate all that violence.”

Fanning anxiety about urban violence isn’t a newpolitical tactic, said Bilal Sekou, an associate professor of politics and government at the University of Hartford. Richard Nixon pioneered the approach at the 1968 Republican National Convention, when he appealed to suburban voters uneasy about the uprisings following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Raising the prospect that others will invade the neighborhood and upset the suburban lifestyle plays on people’s fears,” Sekou said.

“This is a moment of challenge for our entire society. For people in the suburbs who are seeing the protests in the cities and — in the rare instances when they turn violent — it creates anxiety. Politicians like Trumpare trying to capitalize on that fear instead of trying to come up with constructive solution” to the societal problems driving the unrest.

Denouncing Black Lives Matter

Republicans, led by Trump, have portrayed the Black Lives Matter movement as a Marxist organization determined to eliminate the police. In a tweet earlier this year, Trump called a Black Lives Matter sign painted on New York’s Fifth Avenue “a symbol of hate”

Running in the 5th District, which stretches from the wellheeled Farmington Valley suburbs to the rural hill towns of Litchfield County to the old industrial centers of New Britain, Meriden and Danbury, Sullivan has not explicitly denounced Black Lives Matter. Nor has he called out Antifa, a loosely-knit militant anarchist group that Trump says is trying to burn the country down.

Instead, Sullivan talks of “mob rule” and a radical socialist agenda.

In July, when protesters beheaded the statute of Christopher Columbus in Waterbury, Sullivan drove from his home in New Fairfield to the small pocket park on Grand Street, where the statute has stood since 1984. “I believe in civility,” he said. “I don’t think you can torch the Earth and expect people on the other side to work with you.”

Republicans say Sullivan’s background as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office make him the right candidate to connect with voters worried about social upheaval. “I don’t think you could find anyone more qualified,” said Republican Emily Harrison, a 30-year-old fundraising consultant who serves on the Southbury Board of Selectman, who also praised Sullivan’s fiscal conservatism. “I’m a daughter of a retired law enforcement officer, and it’s important we have people who have an understanding of the Constitution and are dedicated to uphold those values.”

Sullivan’s campaign has produced an online ad featuring televised images of street clashes and a vehicle engulfed in flames, along with an audio clip of Hayes stating that “all the riots are not violent.” Hayes has said she misspoke, conflating the word “riot” with“protests.”

He has cast Hayes as a leftist standard bearer who walk sin lockstep with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Jahana Hayes votes with AOC 95% of the time, and she is very much aligned with the Squad,” Sullivan said, referring to a group of progressive women who won seats in Congress two years ago. “She may come home and talk like a moderate, but she’s voting with the social progressives in Washington.”

Hayes firmly rejects such characterizations. The only African American member of Connecticut’ s congressional delegation — and the first Black woman to represent the state in the U.S. House — she said Sullivan is taking a page from the Trump playbook. “That became very apparent very early. I’m not taking the bait,” said Hayes, a former teacher. “My opponent is further dividing people, and that’s not what we need.”

Hayes, whose husband, Milford Hayes, is a Waterbury detective, said she supports the police even as she condemns police brutality. “The idea that we can have police accountability so Black people live [is] not a binary choice,” Hayes said. “You can support policing and still say, ‘I amagainst the overuse of force.’ The two things are not mutually exclusive.”

A focus on public safety

Unlike some of her fellow Democrats, Hayes has refrained from overtly supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. “I never embrace hash tags,” she said. “I don’t know all the nuances of the Black Lives Matter movement. I know my life matters.”

TheRepublican critique of Black Lives Matter may find a less than receptive audience in Connecticut’s suburbs, some voters said. Over the summer, large crowds of demonstrators lined Route 44 in Avon to protest against police brutality and in support of racial justice. Just last week, a similar crowd marched in Simsbury.

Lori Fernand, the chairwoman of the Democratic Town Committee in Simsbury, isn’t worried about violent protests breaking out in town. “I’m also not afraid of violence in Hartford, New Haven or Danbury,” she said. “The Republicans are just looking to scare people. It’s deplorable that that’s what our politics has come to.”

The death of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who died in May after a white police officer knelt on his neck, has spawned conversations about systemic racism in suburban towns that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. “The people in this district, in these small towns and majority white towns are [asking], ’How do we begin to make meaningful change?’ [They] want to do better,” Hayes said. “I’ve never seen it like this where people are looking inward and asking questions about schools and housing and funding.”

Lizbeth Piel, a Hayes supporter from rural Sharon, predicted efforts to portray Hayes as a socialist whowants to defund the police will backfire. “The Republicans have been bullies, and these accusations are definitely racist,” said Piel, who hosted a postcard-writing campaign event for Hayes early in the week. “The suburban voter and the rural voter is seeing how she’s defending education and working with farmers and small business people. That’s what people in the suburbs and small towns care about.”

Republicans say their focus on public safety is to ensure that urban residents are protected. J.R. Romano, the chairman of the Republican Party in Connecticut, said white suburban voters who want rein in or eliminate the police won’t bear the cost of a spike in crime. “Communities like [the Farmington Valley suburbs] can hide behind locked doors,” Romano said. “They don’t have to worry. The people who will suffer are the people in Waterbury, Meriden and New Britain.”

Romano accused Hayes of “pandering ... to the hardcore leftists who are wealthy and can afford to hide.”

At the candidate’s forum in Waterbury, Martin Spring was eager to hear Sullivan’s views on a host of issues. The 64-year-old retired mechanic and Civil War reenactor bemoaned the divisiveness of the country. “My main concern is the disparity with people today,” Spring said.“It seems like everyone is going in a different direction, like we have another Civil War or something. People have got to learn to come together. With Black Lives Matter and things like that, they’ve got to understand: We’re all Americans, and the best thing for us to do is put our differences aside and work together.”