New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Trials of 2020 complicate race for 5th District seat
The two enduring stories of 2020 — the coronavirus crisis and protests calling for police reform — may not have replaced the economy as the top election issue in Connecticut’s 5th District, but the stories have overshadowed voters’ views of the American dream.
U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, a rising star in the Democratic party, and GOP challenger David X. Sullivan, a retired federal prosecutor from
New Fairfield who’s running on a law-and-order platform, each say families here are tired of being stifled by the COVID-19 crisis, and tired of police being scapegoated in the name of social justice.
As such, the candidates say, voters want the security they enjoyed before the coronavirus turned Connecticut upside down, and before protests over the public death of a Black man in police custody and calls for police reform turned into a zero-sum debate.
“Obviously (the priority) is the safety and welfare of our citizens and reopening the economy along with our schools and bringing us back to a state of normality,” Sullivan told Hearst Connecticut Media last week, when asked what he would do first about the coronavirus crisis if elected on Nov. 3.
Hayes agreed that there are multiple priorities, but one imperative.
“We need to get people healthy,” Hayes said. “A lot of things have happened as a result of COVID that we need to attend to, but none of those things matter if we are not testing and tracing and getting a vaccine ready to distribute.”
Hayes, who made the cover of Rolling Stone one month after she was sworn in as the first Black woman to represent Connecticut in Congress, is favored by leading forecasters to win a second two-year term in what is considered the state’s only competitive race for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Sullivan, who has raised one-fifth of Hayes’ contributions, and has 38,000 fewer registered Republicans in his district than Democrats, hopes to bridge the gap early next month, when the first of four virtual debates kicks off on Oct. 5 from Western Connecticut State University in Danbury.
A minor party candidate who is not raising money or campaigning conventionally, has been given a seat at three of the four debates. Newtown’s Bruce Walczak, a relocation consultant who was elected to a term on Newtown’s Police Commission, is running on the Independent Party line because two-party politics has polarized Washington, D.C., and divided America.
“You’re not going to find me taking the traditional position, ‘Here is my position on this issue and I have my feet dug in and I won’t compromise,’” Walczak said. “Rather, I believe we ought to be looking all the alternatives.”
At stake for Republicans is a chance to break into Connecticut’s all-Democratic congressional delegation and take back a seat the GOP lost in 2006 to nowSen. Chris Murphy. Republicans
thought they had that chance in the 2018 midterm elections, when a scandal over a botched harassment complaint forced three-term Democrat Elizabeth Esty to give up her reelection bid.
But out of Waterbury came Hayes, the 2016 national Teacher of the Year, who increasingly got on donors’ radar after trouncing an establishment Democrat in the primary. Hayes went on to take 60 percent of the vote in November.
“This is about working with people and saying, ‘Help me understand what you’re saying, and I will make sure that informs my decision-making,’” Hayes said last week. “I have stepped out of my comfort zone and I have been intentional about doing that (because) you can’t have a conversation with only a small group people and hope to serve a district as diverse Connecticut Five.”
Sullivan, an assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut for 30 years before his retirement last summer, said voters he’s talked to in the 41 cities and towns of the 5th District still want the same things from lawmakers — a strong economy, a safe community and good schools. But they will vote for the candidate who can deliver them from the trials of 2020.
“They’re going to vote for the person who can lead us out of this pandemic and bring us an economy that is flourishing again,” Sullivan said.